A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck Page A

We just clung to each other as only the
lonely and lost damned can understand. We planned our entering the
stacks very carefully. We did not want to lose each other, so we
fell for several days, working out a plan to stay together. We
discovered that by holding hands like a couple of crabs locked in
combat, we could begin to rotate. By pulling and pushing we could
engineer a spin, turning like a maple seedpod. By escalating the
rotating rhythm, like when you try to rise higher and higher in a
child’s playground swing by pumping your legs, we were able to spin
faster and faster.
    She had had a good deal of trouble entering
the stacks from a free fall – as she tended not to have the mass
needed to crash hard enough into the side and wrap an appendage
over the railing. She’d succeeded only twice in even coming close
to breaking her fall and she had last been killed when I found her
on her 783rd try. I thought of Rachel. How many times had she
tried?
    The plan was to spin fast enough that when I
let go, she would have enough horizontal momentum to shoot over the
railing and into the stacks before she crashed. If she failed, I
would catch her and tie us together and we would try again the next
day. When she finally succeeded, I would try to crash as quickly as
possible and race up to meet her.
    “It might take me a year to climb back up to
you,” I said.
    “I’ll wait a hundred years if I have to,” she
said, smiling mischievously, and kissed me hard on the mouth.
    We made love twice, before making our
attempt. We had both fallen so often and so long that we were like
creatures of the air, and it seemed as natural as in a bed. For a
day I glimpsed what heaven must be like.
    We started spinning, ready to make our
attempt at the stacks. I’d never gone so fast in my life. The
library was spinning around me so quickly I thought I could not
hold on any longer, but we did and we continued to pump our arms
back and forth, generating more and more angular momentum. I’m not
sure whether I released her or she was torn from my grasp by the
centripetal force, but we flew apart. It worked too well. She flew
away from me like a bullet. I hit the railing with such force I
nearly lost consciousness, but luckily only broke my hip and back.
To my delight as I slid away from the railing into another free
fall I saw she had made it onto the stacks – first try! She was not
killed either and she managed a smile from the floor of the hall as
I slipped into unconsciousness.
    I awoke the next morning and immediately
tried crashing into the side. It was foolish to hurry and not to
prepare better, and I only managed to lose an arm and
consciousness. The next day I thought through my plan more
carefully before executing it. I almost made it back into the
stacks on the first try, but lost a bit of balance on my approach,
and when I fell away could not hook my legs over the railing. I
wasn’t killed, so I tried again a little later in the afternoon,
but was in so much pain from the morning’s attempt, it was
hopeless. I was getting anxious by this point; I figured I was
falling about 2,880 miles a day, 62,000 flights of stairs, and
every day I wasted I was adding about three months of climbing. The
next day I was highly motivated and gave it all I had. I careened
feet-first into the stacks. My legs caught on the bar and tore from
their sockets, but it slowed me enough to be able to backflip so I
could hook my arms on the next floor’s railing and hold on. With a
Herculean effort of will, I pulled my remaining torso over the
rail.
    “I’m coming, Wand,” I said, beaming brightly
as I died.
    The next day I barreled up the stairs. I
flew. I bound up two steps at a time. I was relentless. After the
first month, even though I knew I had not climbed nearly high
enough, I shouted her name on every floor. My every thought was of
finding her, and I would run long after the lights went out, until
I passed out in that strange hour before dawn when