Letters From Hades by Jeffrey Thomas Page B

left to my name. Finally, toward the end of the day, I found a job in a factory several blocks away. The building is only two stories high but covers a lot of ground, and it has a tremendous solitary smoke stack. Its tarred roof is covered in little shacks and tents like a dog’s hide covered in fleas, but a lot of the inhabitants of this miniature rooftop shanty town work for the company.
    All I really do is stand at something like a conveyor belt that has white marks on it like the increments of a ruler. Spaced here and there along the belt, though, are red marks. And they’re not evenly spaced, oddly enough. Several red marks will be fairly close together, then I might not see another one for ten minutes. I’m not sure how long this belt is, how far it extends through the mechanical guts of the place. In any case, every time one of these red marks comes along and lines up with a red mark etched on the border of its track, I have to throw a lever. And that’s it. But it’s an important task, my group leader has impressed upon me; if I daydream and miss just one red mark, one lever throw, I’m sacked.
    Not only do I not know what I’m achieving by throwing my lever, I don’t even know what this plant produces. I’ve asked several of my coworkers, but they seem recalcitrant about it. One simply answered, "Shh." Another, "Who cares?" Someone said, "I think we make dolls; there are eyes on my belt, little eyes…they might be glass, or maybe they’re not." Still another laborer whispered to me, "We keep the Creator running." But someone told me this laborer has lost his mind.
    At least I’ve found out what the dust in the street is, which is so frequently swept up from between the cobbles and flagstones. I’m watching it rain outside my window even now: a brightly glowing downpour of lava from the sea of magma over the city. It’s pattering against the outer sill of my window, even forming little rivulets and small pools, but they quickly go cool and fade to a gray ash. Orange fluid trickles between the cobblestones like a glowing web, runs in the gutters, pours into sewer grates. I’m so glad I’ve found a place to stay, lucked out and got a job. I pity the people who sleep in the choked little alleys, or camp out in tents and other inadequate shelters. In fact, I can hear someone outside screaming horribly even now.
    On Day 47, I think it was, I was walking home from work when I saw two Demons burst out of a tenement dragging a man by the arms. Both Demons were female; one with a short banged Louise Brooks cut which I thought was both weirdly becoming and sort of absurd, and the other with her hair pulled back in a single thick braid. Both glanced at me, but the one with the braid held my gaze longer.
    I recognized her as Chara. And I knew she recognized me.
    But they dragged the weeping, babbling man away, and I approached a cluster of timid neighbors who were watching the incident. "What did he do?" I asked them.
    "Nothing, probably," someone replied. "Sometimes they just pick people at random for the torture plants."
    "Why?"
    This person looked at me in awe. "Because it’s Hell, that’s why!"
    A wailing made me turn my attention back to the man’s house, and I saw a woman clinging to the doorframe, sobbing violently.
    "That’s his wife," another person said to me.
    "Did they die together?"
    "No…they met here in Hell."
    This has set me wondering again why I haven’t met anyone I know here…not just family, like my father who died several years ago, but grandparents, uncles and aunts, my wife’s deceased grandparents, and so on. When my wife ultimately dies, and assuming she doesn’t go to Heaven (which I doubt, because she was an agnostic like me, though maybe her new boyfriend is a church-goer who can save her soul), will I ever run into her? Hell is vast. I think it might even be infinite. And even if I did meet her eventually, she might be an elderly woman who died of a stroke. An Alzheimer’s