Lucifer's Lottery (32 page)

When she’d rushed outside, the dizziness—and her terror—quadrupled.
That smell!
Like an electric motor overrunning, and then the simple
feel
of the lake and its surroundings. Nothing looked wrong, but it all
felt
wrong. It reminded her of a bad trip way back in her acid days.

Oh, my God almighty
, she groaned to herself. Her slim legs propelled her quickly to the end of the dock. A crisp, cloudless twilight pressed down, a slice of moon radiating. The immense lake sat still, rippleless—surreal in some distinctly unpleasant way. The sudden silence, too, struck her as unpleasant. Summer evenings on the lake brought an absolute ruckus of cricket choruses and night bird songs, but now?

Nothing but proverbial pin-drop silence.

Impossible
, Dorris knew.

The wheelchair sitting at the dock-end reminded her of the day’s only rental customer.
That young man who can’t walk
. . . So she’d called him on the emergency walkie-talkie—she
had
to know if the lake’s abrupt strangeness was only in her mind—something she almost hoped was true—but his own observations confirmed her own.

What is going ON?

It had been over a half hour ago that she’d called him in. Had he had some medical problem? Surely his arms were strong enough to row the boat back in less time than that. She stood tense and straining on the dock, her eyes pressed
into the binoculars, but even in the strong moonlight, she couldn’t see him.

Please, please, son! Get yer ass back here
. . .

Was it the first true premonition of her life? As her stomach twitched, and that stiff, ozonelike smell sharpened, Dorris
knew
that something was going to happen.

When she scanned along the lake’s coast, she noticed that the usual folks that always fished at night were packing up and hightailing it out. Clearly, they sensed the same inexplicable thing that Dorris did, yet she couldn’t imagine what that
thing
was. Then—

There!
she thought. Her implants jounced when she shot to her tiptoes; in the binoculars’ hourglass viewing field, she could make out the tiny form of the paralyzed man rowing through a pool of moonlight.

The loudest sound she’d ever heard erupted next, not an explosion, not the earsplitting sound that accompanied a massive lightning bolt, but something more like timber splitting or a colossal tree cracking as it was felled. The sound urged Dorris to scream louder than she ever had in her life but even
that
couldn’t be heard over the monstrous
cracking
. . .

Then came a single, concussive
BOOM!

Had a bomb actually been dropped on the lake? The notion was absurd, but what else could it be? A
terrorist
attack? Here, of all places? Not that Dorris could think deductively at the moment; terror and confusion obfuscated all rational thought. In the vicious boom’s wake came some sort of displacement of air that slammed her in the stomach, lifted her out of her flip-flops, and flung her down the dock, screaming all the way. She landed hard on her back. All the wind blurted out of her lungs, and when the back of her head smacked the dock, she blacked out at once.

It must’ve been a dream—a nightmare—that dropped
into her mind during the brief period of unconsciousness: a nightmare of sounds . . .

The sounds were screams, screams of human slaughter en masse—indeed, screams from another world. A deafening waterfall of relentless human and
un
human agony as though millions of people in a thousand different cities were being butchered in place all at the same time, a sound, a living
blare
that raged and raged and raged through some incomprehensible rent in the sky . . .

Silence, then.

Though it seemed like hours, it was only a minute or two that passed before Dorris regained consciousness. Memories dripped slowly back into her awareness yet her daze kept them from making sense. She rolled over, tried to rise to hands and knees but then collapsed back down, heaving. She reeled as if seasick, and now, as she blinked back more and more consciousness, she noticed not only the dead-calm silence but also a deep earthy odor just short of a stench that now replaced the previous ozone smell. An odor like low, low tide . . .

Several more attempts proved to her that she couldn’t yet stand.
But I can crawl
, she thought, determined, and crawl she did, on her palms and knees, back down the dock.

That man
, she kept thinking.
The handicapped man
. Was he still out on the lake when that awful sound had struck?

At the end of the dock, the wheelchair still sat, and so did the walkie-talkie. She reached for it, but then her hand fell away limp as she looked outward at the same time.

Dorris’s soul seemed to flatten like a ping-pong ball under a hammer blow . . .

She used a mooring post to steady herself as she slowly rose back to her feet. The low-tide odor hung everywhere, dense as steam. But that was not what made her eyes feel stripped of their lids. That was not what wiped her cognizance clean as chalk marks off slate.

It was the lake.

Dorris stood paralyzed, staring.

Lake Misquamicus was
empty
. What stretched all about her now was a shallow crater lined by glistening black silt, limp waterweeds, and scores of remnant fish flapping helpless in mud. Every single one of the lake’s six billion gallons was gone.

Gerold could not conceive of a way to assess what he’d experienced, save to say that it was not like waking up. He wasn’t even sure if he’d lost consciousness.
I was in the boat, I was rowing back to the dock
. . . Then—

There’d been an horrendous
cracking
noise, then a
boom
.

And now he was
here
.

Madness
, he thought now. He was still in the boat, and when he looked over the side he saw that he was still on the lake, only the lake . . .

Madness, madness, madness
. . .

The lake was somewhere else now.

One moment he’d been looking at the glittering twilight over Lake Misquamicus, but now he was looking at a sky the color of deoxygenated blood. And the sickle moon was now radiant black, not radiant white.

Screaming never occurred to him when he squinted out in every direction. The water in which the rowboat floated was surrounded by endless black walls pocked with towers like castle ramparts, and along those ramparts men, or things
like
men, prowled about. Men—soldiers—in strange, horned helmets, wielding pikes and swords. Larger figures could be seen interspersed, plodding, drab things with barely any faces . . .

What the fuck is this?

All at once, the horned soldiers on the ramparts began to cheer. Several more were lowering a boat into the water.

Gerold could do little more than stare out.

A drone invaded his ears; then he saw a line of liquid green light hovering toward him—

Sssssssssssssssss-ONK!

Now Gerold
did
scream.

The line of green light dilated to a wavering circle—a hole in the sky—and from that hole two hands that were clearly
not
human reached out, grabbed his arms, and pulled him in.

He was dropped into something like a black cave; then he sensed that the cave was moving off very quickly, soaring up into the alien air. In moments, all he could see was the bloodred sky.

“Don’t panic,” said a figure with its back to him. Gerold crawled forward, dragging his dead legs behind. He wasn’t sure what his impulse was. To see? To confront the figure that had pulled him out of the boat and into this . . . this
place?

Or to jump back out?

“I can’t believe it,” the figure said. “The coordinates were right—we made it!” And then the figure turned to face Gerold.

Gerold screamed again, loud and hard. “You’re a monster!”

The figure let out a snide chuckle. “Actually, I’m a Troll, thank you very much.” His voice sounded like any normal man’s, but everything else?

Gerold screamed a third time.

This . . .
Troll
stood hunched over, shirtless, with greenish brown skin stretched over hillocks of muscles. He wore pants that looked like burlap and boots that were stitched up the middle. Each wide hand possessed only three fingers and a thumb and had nails like a bear’s. And his head . . .

“Man, your head’s all fucked up!” Gerold bellowed in ceaseless horror. “It looks squashed.”

“That’s ’cos when I was in jail, they put me in a Head-Bender. Don’t worry about it.” Now the figure took a candle off the side of the interior wall and touched it to each fingertip of a severed hand. “Hand of Glory,” the Troll informed. “Got no time to explain, just that it keeps the outer Observation Egress of the Nectoport invisible.”

Gerold shuddered where he sat.

“Yeah”—the Troll glanced out the large circle before him in which the red sky soared—“we’re safe now, er, at least for the time being.”

“WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING!” Gerold shouted.

The Troll sat down on an outcropping in the wall. “Look, man, I know you’re confused and scared and a million other things. My name’s Krilid, and yours is Gerold, right?”

Gerold nodded, teeth chattering. Suddenly he was aware of stifling heat.

“You’re in Hell,” Krilid said.

Gerold gaped.

“I don’t have time to answer all your questions—we gotta be somewhere else, like,
real
soon. But I’ll give you the short version—”

“I’m in
HHHHHHH
—Hell?” Gerold managed.

“Only Hell’s probably not what you imagined.” Krilid picked Gerold up by his armpits, and held him up to the circular opening so he could look down.

Gerold screamed yet again.

“Hell’s a big city, the biggest in history. It’s bigger than all the cities in the Living World all put together.”

Gerold felt frozen as he looked down out of the opening. There was a city down there, all right—a leaning, shrieking, smoke-gusting city without end—

“It’s called the Mephistopolis, and this thing you’re in is
called a Nectoport, the most sophisticated mode of transportation in the Abyss. We bootlegged the technology. It can travel great distances in seconds by using occult mathematics to collapse values of space.”

“I-I-I-I . . .
WHAT?
” Gerold blabbered.

“I understand. Just listen, though, and make of it what you will, okay? Clairvoyants in Heaven foresaw your coming here; that’s how I was able to pick you up. I’m a Troll in Hell but I work for God, and a Fallen Angel named—well, forget all that, no time. I pulled you out of your boat for a reason . . .”

“A reason,” Gerold droned.

“I’m on a mission, and I’m hoping you’ll go along with it.”

Gerold’s head spun and spun. This couldn’t be happening. It had to be a nightmare but then he somehow knew it
wasn’t
. Whatever this thing, this Troll, this . . .
guy
named Krilid meant, Gerold found incontemplatable.

The opening continued to soar through the scarlet sky.

“You were gonna kill yourself, right?” Krilid asked, keeping one eye out the opening. “ ’Cos you can’t walk?”

“How do you know that?” Gerold snapped.

“Same way I knew you’d be in the Reservoir. It was
foreseen
. And let me tell you, it’s a good thing you
didn’t
kill yourself ’cos if you had, you’d be here.”

Gerold stared agog. “I already AM here!”

“Yeah, but not as a member of the Human Damned. You’re still alive, man. You’re a member of the Living World, but you’re in Hell. Why? Because of a fluke.”

Gerold pushed his hair out of his face. “Yeah, I’ll say.”

“If you had really killed yourself, you’d be damned here for all eternity. Period. No exceptions.”

“Then how
did
I get here?” Gerold finally regained enough of his senses to ask.

“I told you, a fluke, an accident, but we foresaw that
accident and used it to our advantage,” the Troll said. Now he picked up a long musket-style rifle and began swabbing the barrel out. He chuckled. “You happened to be on that lake at the
same exact moment
that Lucifer’s smartest occultists pulled a Spatial Merge—”

Gerold winced. “A
what?
”

“It’s pretty cool,” Krilid said. “There’s no fresh water in Hell, so Satan figured he’d steal some—six billion gallons’ worth—from the Living World.”

Six billion gallons
, came the grim thought. “That’s how much water was in Lake Misquamicus . . .”

“Um-hmm. And now all that water is here, in the Vandermast Reservoir. It was built especially for this operation. Satan wants to build an oasis or some shit, so he activated a massive Spatial Merge to bring all that water here—”

“All that water,” Gerold croaked, “and
me
with it.”

“Yep, and, depending on your frame of mind”—Krilid raised a scarlike brow—“you can look at your situation as a bad thing . . . or a
good
thing.”

Even in the midst of all this impossibility and all this horror, Gerold laughed. “How can being in
Hell
be a good thing?”

Krilid raised a Monocular with a bloodshot eyeball where the lens should be. “Just . . . be patient, and you’ll see.”

Gerold was about to crawl forward again, to look back out, but suddenly, the Nectoport’s oval opening flashed blinding white, and inertia shoved him back. Immediately there came the sense of
bending
, of his body somehow elongating; the strange walls of the compartment he sat in elongated as well.

Krilid tremored slightly, like one sitting on a trolley over bad tracks. He said, “We’re going to the Pol Pot District now, collapsing space.” And, next, the white flash ceased, to be replaced again by more bloodred sky. “Take a look now.”

Gerold dragged himself forward and looked out.

They hovered maybe a half a mile up, through wisps of soot-colored clouds. The clouds
stunk
, and when he craned his neck over the Egress’s rim, the entire city below stunk as well.