Letters From Hades Read Online Free PDF Page B

of me, and ran into a wall of heat, so that I had to veer madly in another direction. I heard people crying out in fear, here and there, distantly. I heard that bird-like screeching again, and at one point a dark hulking thing like a boar or a bear but apparently with a head like a denuded cattle skull went crashing ahead of me through the foliage.
    At last, and purely through luck (although I may have unconsciously been following the lead of that horned beast), I emerged from the forest onto a vast, open plain. There was actually a ragged drop of about ten feet, as if the wasteland before me were a depression, a crater. In fact, I nearly pitched over this small cliff before I caught myself. The skull-headed shaggy beast had just leapt down onto the plain and splayed in a scrambling heap; I heard a distinct crack as one of its ankle bones snapped. Somehow, though, it desperately righted itself and loped away at a rapid speed. It has occurred to me now—though at the time I was too stunned by this vista—that the animal was of a species (perhaps even a very primitive form of Demon) specifically provided for those lesser-damned peoples such as the hominids, aborigines and the like, to be used for their hides and meat. Handily, their heads are already fleshless and ready for decorative purposes. Thank G** for small favors.
    So shocking was the contrast between the crowded forest and this yawning space that I stood frozen like a deer. It was an almost electric shock, like leaping off a high quarry cliff into icy water. I gaped, my body tensed as if I might turn and flee back into the fire head-long, struggling to assimilate the vision that stretched before me.
    The plain seemed to extend forever. But it did not. For at its far side loomed an immense volcano, from the broken top of which rose an atomic mushroom cloud of boiling black smoke and poisonous gases. I wondered if I had discovered the source of the sky’s constant obfuscation. No lava ran down the sides of the titanic cone, but strewn across the plain I saw glowing hot embers and small fires. The embers were the white-hot fragments of lava bombs, cast like meteors from the eruption which had set the forest alight. A deafening howling as if from a hurricane issued from the volcano’s pit. It was like having pencils jammed into my ears (and I knew from experience, after having nodded off in one of my university classes in which the instructor was insistent on driving his point home to me). But there was another howling blended into the volcanic exhaust. I realized this was the source of the wailing that even as far away as the university could be heard sometimes mixed in with the wind, depending on its direction. It came from the plain, which from its apparently circular shape might actually be a huge volcanic caldera itself.
    Hundreds…thousands…of human heads covered the plain before me, which itself had the cracked scaly look of a dried lake bed, with only the occasional scrubby bush sprouting from it. Heads like row upon row of lettuce grown in a bone-dry field. I would have thought they were ranked trophies from a mass beheading, had they not been screaming and sobbing.
    It was obvious that these people had been buried to their necks. And from the proximity of the volcano, I assumed it was in lava—now cooled—that they had been buried. Perhaps years ago. Perhaps generations ago. Imagine the people entombed at Pompeii, only still alive.
    The heat rose behind me, roared against my back in a feral wind. I heard heavy branches cracking as they fell. The inferno wanted to push me off the ledge. Though I had seen the animal land on solid ground, only too solid, I was irrationally afraid that I would be swallowed up like these others if I leaped. But when I glanced over my shoulder, saw the flames, I knew I must. Yes, I could survive those flames, regenerate. Still, I did not want them touching my ectoplasmic flesh. Sometimes I thought that regeneration hurt even