Insomniac rust smears his callused palm. There is no lock upon the gate, no handle. Niko simply pushes and it moves. No creak of hinge or metal groan. Hell’s gate opens inward.
Niko looks up at the flickering neon glow above the archway. Red-edged against it that carven figure perches smirking, pointed chin on taloned fist and exulting in its outspread wings. Horned and smiling.
Niko shifts the case to his left hand and puts his shoulder to the gate and plants his heels and puts his weight into it and the iron gate shudders wide enough to admit a man. In patches of red light the ground across the threshold looks just like the ground out here, flat and baked and cracked. What difference had he expected?
Behind him now the snarling grows to yowls. Niko slides into the opening and his hiking shoe descends upon the undisputed floor of Hell.
Niko dodges as the massive gate slams shut. He tries not to think of the dull boom of its certain closure as omenous, or apocalyptic, or containing any note of doom.
VIII.
WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT
IT’S DARK OUT there. The crashing echo of the gate’s decisive closure is all that fills the silent void surrounding Niko. Somehow the closing of the grated gate has cut off the intermittent neon light and all is starless and bible black. Before him might be a wall or a crevasse or an endless plain for all Niko can see. For all he knows horned cartoon demons leer and taunt with pitchforks just beyond his reach.
The air is sweatshop hot.
Niko takes a tentative step forward. He can sense the wall behind him, feel its mass and presence. Horrible as the wall is, he feels a strange security knowing it is there, the only certain solid thing between himself and utter isolation in a world that’s never known a sunrise, never felt a drop of rain. Endless uncarved marble the boundary between damnation and mere mortality.
Niko turns his hand before his face as if motion might make visible what is not seen when still. He shuts his eyes then opens them and cannot tell if they are open or shut. He stands there feeling foolish and observed and tells himself he’s merely acclimating, waiting for his eyes to adjust and his kinesthetic sense to absorb the notion that his universe might as well end at his skin.
The sudden churning fear. Jesus on a snipehunt Niko what the fuck are you doing down here?
He breathes in deep and summons up an image of a weightless feather in a mason jar.
All right. Okay.
He rubs gooseflesh beneath his coatsleeved arms despite the fact that there’s no wind, no sound, no light, no sense of here or there.
Niko spent a night once in a sensory deprivation tank. A large plastic coffin sealed away from light and sound, holding amniotic saltwater on which he lay suspended and unfeeling. It was easy to believe he was the only thing in the universe, that he was himself a universe and beyond his reach lay untenanted infinity. He had lain still and waited. For what he did not know but that was the sense of it. Waiting. A sense of imminence, of always arriving. Floating soulless in the briny dark.
Then the hatch yanked open and light slammed in and there was Gus’s drunken silhouette to deliver him slapped into the world and saying Hey was that a trip or what?
Like a disembarking argonaut Niko climbed out from the tank, wet and blinking at the alien world where he had beached, beckoning oblivion abandoned.
And there was Jemma naked on the sauna bench and keeping watch outside his little world, a faint worry crease between her eyebrows as she looked at him emerging, a curling paperback book-marked by her thigh, and Niko had smiled remembering why he’d come back to the world and why he always would.
Now in sultry darkness with his back against the wall to end all walls he blinks and catlike shakes his head. It had been so real. Jemma had been sitting right there in front of him on the redwood bench, turbaned in a bluestriped towel, paperback dampened by
Niko looks up at the flickering neon glow above the archway. Red-edged against it that carven figure perches smirking, pointed chin on taloned fist and exulting in its outspread wings. Horned and smiling.
Niko shifts the case to his left hand and puts his shoulder to the gate and plants his heels and puts his weight into it and the iron gate shudders wide enough to admit a man. In patches of red light the ground across the threshold looks just like the ground out here, flat and baked and cracked. What difference had he expected?
Behind him now the snarling grows to yowls. Niko slides into the opening and his hiking shoe descends upon the undisputed floor of Hell.
Niko dodges as the massive gate slams shut. He tries not to think of the dull boom of its certain closure as omenous, or apocalyptic, or containing any note of doom.
VIII.
WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT
IT’S DARK OUT there. The crashing echo of the gate’s decisive closure is all that fills the silent void surrounding Niko. Somehow the closing of the grated gate has cut off the intermittent neon light and all is starless and bible black. Before him might be a wall or a crevasse or an endless plain for all Niko can see. For all he knows horned cartoon demons leer and taunt with pitchforks just beyond his reach.
The air is sweatshop hot.
Niko takes a tentative step forward. He can sense the wall behind him, feel its mass and presence. Horrible as the wall is, he feels a strange security knowing it is there, the only certain solid thing between himself and utter isolation in a world that’s never known a sunrise, never felt a drop of rain. Endless uncarved marble the boundary between damnation and mere mortality.
Niko turns his hand before his face as if motion might make visible what is not seen when still. He shuts his eyes then opens them and cannot tell if they are open or shut. He stands there feeling foolish and observed and tells himself he’s merely acclimating, waiting for his eyes to adjust and his kinesthetic sense to absorb the notion that his universe might as well end at his skin.
The sudden churning fear. Jesus on a snipehunt Niko what the fuck are you doing down here?
He breathes in deep and summons up an image of a weightless feather in a mason jar.
All right. Okay.
He rubs gooseflesh beneath his coatsleeved arms despite the fact that there’s no wind, no sound, no light, no sense of here or there.
Niko spent a night once in a sensory deprivation tank. A large plastic coffin sealed away from light and sound, holding amniotic saltwater on which he lay suspended and unfeeling. It was easy to believe he was the only thing in the universe, that he was himself a universe and beyond his reach lay untenanted infinity. He had lain still and waited. For what he did not know but that was the sense of it. Waiting. A sense of imminence, of always arriving. Floating soulless in the briny dark.
Then the hatch yanked open and light slammed in and there was Gus’s drunken silhouette to deliver him slapped into the world and saying Hey was that a trip or what?
Like a disembarking argonaut Niko climbed out from the tank, wet and blinking at the alien world where he had beached, beckoning oblivion abandoned.
And there was Jemma naked on the sauna bench and keeping watch outside his little world, a faint worry crease between her eyebrows as she looked at him emerging, a curling paperback book-marked by her thigh, and Niko had smiled remembering why he’d come back to the world and why he always would.
Now in sultry darkness with his back against the wall to end all walls he blinks and catlike shakes his head. It had been so real. Jemma had been sitting right there in front of him on the redwood bench, turbaned in a bluestriped towel, paperback dampened by
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