Once Upon a Time in Hell Read online

  ONCE UPON A TIME IN HELL

  BOOK TWO OF THE HEAVEN’S GATE TRILOGY

  First published 2014 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN (epub): 978-1-84997-498-1

  ISBN (mobi): 978-1-84997-499-8

  Copyright © 2013 Guy Adams

  Cover art by Dominic Saponaro

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  Part One

  AT THE END OF THE RAINBOW

  Chapter One

  A LONG RIDE FROM HELL

  1.

  MY NAME'S PATRICK Irish and I'm a liar.

  If you're the sort of reader that requires reassurance that what you're reading is true then it's best you're aware of my pedigree. Of course, if you are that sort of reader then God help you, because all writers are liars. It's what we do. Even when we're trying to tell the truth, which I'm doing now.

  My career of falsehoods is, perhaps, a little more outrageous than others. I started out with good intentions, something the philosophically-inclined amongst you would be quick to point out is a surefire way of reaching Hell (in that, it has clearly proven successful). I wrote all manner of tales, offered ghosts and ghouls, murderers and spies, monsters and explorers. They weren't terribly good.

  Then I found my milieu (forgive me, a posh word, we writers love them). I became the world-renowned Roderick Quartershaft, explorer, adventurer and figment of a desperate imagination. It is more than possible that you've read some of my stories (according to my gleefully rich publisher there are few in the English-speaking world that haven't and he has the house to prove it). It is equally possible that you read those stories believing them to be real. The Volcanoes of Hades? The Rat-Men of Sumatra? The Cradle of Life (that outlandish basin in Antarctica that is alleged to contain a jungle so dense and populated as to rival anything along the banks of the Amazon)? Thrilling places, filled from root to canopy with fantastical beasts, wild natives and creatures from myth and history. All dreamed up in a whisky-haze from the comfort of my study in London. I hope admitting as much doesn't lose my publisher that house of his, he's a scurrilous old rogue but he's done well by me over the years. Perhaps those stories will continue to be enjoyed. Perhaps their provenance doesn't matter. Perhaps.

  Roderick Quartershaft is dead, that's the important thing. He died on a journey the like of which he had never before imagined. And that it is saying something. In the company of the English inventor Lord Forset and his daughter, Elisabeth; The Order of Ruth, a small brother hood of monks and Billy Herbert, engineer and driver of the wondrous Forset Land Carriage (a train with no track by any other name), Quartershaft faced the like of which his pen had never dreamed. I think that's what killed him, either that or his drinking (which lingers, though I'm trying, dear Lord I am). By the time our party arrived at its destination, this camp, he had expired due to a surfeit of lies. I am the man left behind.

  So it falls to me, Patrick Irish, the liar, to tell you some of what came next. To tell you about Wormwood, that impossible town that appeared out of nowhere containing a doorway to the afterlife. To tell you, in fact, what may be the most important and unbelievable story you will ever hear.

  It's up to you how much of it you choose to believe, though some of it will now be a matter of history and therefore, one might think, undeniable. Undeniable, that is, if you choose to believe historians any more than you do authors. Which you shouldn't as they're all liars too.

  2.

  THE CAMP THAT grew in that open plain that might have been Oklahoma, or Oregon, or Ohio (we all traveled our own journeys and yet somehow shared a destination), had grown large by the time Wormwood appeared.

  Families, adventurers, outlaws and clerics, our population came from all walks of life, all gathered to wait for the impossible.

  Wormwood, it was said, would appear as if from nowhere. It would exist for one full day then vanish again. During that time it would offer a door to what comes after. Be it Heaven or Hell—the difference between them could be said to be subjective—you could walk into the after life and take a look.

  I was reminded of the hucksters that littered the midways of America's fairgrounds.

  Sharp-suited and silver-tongued, they promised glimpses of the impossible, a peek at the freakish. Wormwood had a huckster of its own, he called himself Alonzo but we'll come to him later.

  First, let me paint you a picture of that camp because, beyond all the fantasies and horror, this is still a story about the only thing that really matters: people.

  During our journey, the passengers on the Forset Land Carriage had assumed, with some arrogance, that we were on a singular quest. A moment's thought should have dispelled that notion, we were composed of three distinct parties: the late Quartershaft, the Forsets and the Order of Ruth, all of whom had heard about Wormwood through their own means before pooling their information and agreeing to travel together (here you can once more see the guiding hand of my publisher, a man that knew a possible best seller when he was presented with the chance of funding it). If we had all heard of Wormwood why then should we expect others had not? In a world filled with millions upon millions of people, knowledge shared by a few hundred is still tantamount to a secret.

  We had narrowly escaped death at the hands of a tribe of Indians, a bizarre, hybrid people with limbs of iron and hearts of coal-fire and hissing pistons. Emerging from a narrow pass through the mountains into this open space, we found we were faced with a burgeoning gathering of folk. In fact, it occurs to me now that, while waiting for one town to appear another was all but built. Some had been there so long as to construct rough homes, others slept beneath canvas or the stars. Perhaps we should have given the settlement a name. If pressed for a suggestion I would likely have offered 'Hope' but then, I had become a sentimental fool on my 'road to Damascus'.

  We were better suited to a comfortable wait than some of our fellow travellers, having sleeping accommodation, a kitchen and stores that extended beyond the simple ingredients most were forced to subsist on. At night, the entire camp would be lit by cooking fires, the air filled with the rich steam of many meals. Often I would walk a winding path amongst them, a trek timed by a decent cigar. The variety on offer never ceased to amaze me. Londoners think they are well-versed in diversity and yet, in truth, we rarely stray from our defined groups. Here was a microcosm of the very Heaven we aspired to enter—rich and poor, black or white, young or old, the camp was as rich a mixture as the stews they placed on their fires.

  I took to documenting the journeys of some of them. I would like to say that I wanted to mark them down for posterity but perhaps I simply wanted to capture stories, either way I'm not sure it matters. There was the negro nurse, Hope Lane, and her charge 'Soldier Joe', a war veteran who had spent the last few years as an unwilling performer for Obeisance Hicks, a travelling preacher. 'Soldier Joe' suffered from stigmata, making him a superb cash draw for Hicks' crowds.

  Hicks was now dead, his tame messiah a free man if only he could be unshackled from the chains his own disabilities wrought on him.

  And what of the blind shootist Henry Jones? The skin between his nose and hairline was utterly smooth. God, in his perverse wisdom, having decided not to grant the man eyes. Jones had somehow
prospered with a gun despite this obvious handicap. From the whispered reports I heard, he had been feared in every town across the country, a wild and dangerous outlaw. But no more it would seem. His hands ruined by frostbite, he had lost the majority of his companions.

  Knee High, a dwarf, was the only other surviving member of his gang, one-time performers in Dr Bliss' Karny of Delights (I cannot be blamed for the spelling, not all men were born to wield a pen). The Geek, a savage man who would eat nothing unless it was alive, Toby the Snake Boy and, most painfully for Jones, Harmonium, his wife, had all been lost en r oute to Wormwood.

  And of course, perhaps most importantly in the events that were to trigger history, there was Elwyn Wallace, travelling with an aged gunslinger who—according to both Wallace's report and those who slept alongside them—appeared to contain fire in his belly. While sleeping, the old man's mouth, nostrils and even eyes glowed with the light of those internal flames. Elwyn had been travelling to the West coast to take a position in a bank, a simple ambition that he would never attain. Nobody knew the old man's name, nor seemed to consider the fact strange.

  According to Elwyn, whenever he thought about asking the voice died in his throat and he had long-since given up trying. I could go on, naturally, this place was filled with characters and stories. But there's no need. As well as being liars, writers have one other defining characteristic: they are insufferable know-it-alls. Out of a crowd of characters they can point to a distinct handful and warn you to mind them well. Why? Because they know how the story is to turn out and they already know the key players in what is to come.

  3.

  AND THEN, THE town appeared.

  I am tempted to say that there are not words to successfully capture what happened, but that would be an admission of literary mediocrity too far. If I must be a liar and a know-it-all let me at least take consolation from the fact that I pursued those sins with literary skill.

  I hadn't given a great deal of thought as to how the town would manifest itself amongst us. Indeed, when Quartershaft had been behind the wheels of this ageing body of mine, he had considered the whole thing a fool's errand. Once we had completed our journey, that cynicism had gone. I'm not altogether aware of the moment it departed. There was no defining realisation, no sudden conviction. It was something that occurred in hindsight. I was sat in one of the chairs we'd positioned outside the Land Transport, looking around at the crowds aware—with some amusement—that I was as certain of Wormwood as everyone else.

  As to the specifics of its appearance, I couldn't predict it. Would it simply arrive, empty space one minute then a town the next? Would it fall from the sky? Or perhaps push itself up from within the earth itself? (Those last two rather depended on the province of the afterlife I now realize; was it a celestial Heaven or a subterranean Hell?) In actual fact the process was gentle, a gradual shift in the reality of the plain ahead of us.

  It began in the sky, the clouds building as if for a storm, a thick, curdling of cumulous and cirrus that piled high into the clear blue. Then came rain, thick and heavy, purple-tinged, that pounded down on the dust, leaving marks that made it seem as if a stampede of invisible animals had passed.

  Then the air seemed to coalesce. I was reminded of the heat mirages I had seen on my journey west, the way the vista in front of you would gain weight, distort as if through a weak lens, as if the air was so affected by the sun it had begin to fry. After ten minutes or so, that distortion began to take tangible shape. A straight line here or there, the hint of a rooftop, a railing, the boardwalk, a doorway.

  Small towns over here had fascinated me, the way they were so functionally built from timber. I was used to the weighty permanence of stone or tile, here everything was erected with hammer, saw and nail. It made the towns seem like toys to me, full-size replicas of doll's houses.

  I had no doubt that such an attitude was doing a disservice to the hard work of those who had built such homes (I had been know to get confused trying to open a window let alone construct one). Culturally though it was something I had yet to get used to. That said, it somehow made the construction of a town something I was able to relate to. I had no real concept of the use of brick and slate, but I could look at those American conurbations and see them for the man hours they represented, the long days of sweat and splinters. Watching Wormwood materialise was an entirely different experience, an entire town dreamed into life in a matter of an hour or so.

  We began to walk the half mile or so towards it, crowds of the expectant moving across the plain in a way that could hardly fail to bring biblical imagery to mind. As we drew closer, we could hear the town gaining weight, a creaking and groaning of wood as the dream of it became solid and was forced to settle.

  A ring of people formed around it, nobody quite daring to cross over the threshold and set foot within its streets.

  I had become separated from the rest of my party, rubbing shoulders with strangers as I tried to get a better view.

  Wormwood was immaculate, real in everything except an affectation of age. The structures were clean, roofs unstained from winter rain. The signage (Milton's Supplies, 'Best Value in Town') wore fresh paint, un-faded from the sun. It was an illustrator's impression of a town, an impossible perfection as yet unspoiled from having to exist in the real world.

  A bright pulse of light burst from the town's centre. Nobody could recognise its source, from all angles it was obscured, flowing from a building just around the corner from everywhere you could possibly be. The crowd panicked slightly, everyone taking a few steps back, one particularly nervous old maid knocking my notebook from my hands as she made to run for the safety of the camp.

  There was nothing to fear. The light faded and all was quiet.

  A murmur of fresh excitement worked its way through the gathered hopefuls as a figure appeared at the end of one of the town's streets. He began to walk towards us. I would later dis cover that this same man had appeared to walk towards every portion of the crowd, a simple miracle by comparison to the manifestation of an entire town but further, delicious proof of his unearthly provenance.

  He was terribly familiar. A blond-haired fellow in a smart suit and waistcoat. The last time I had met him I had been drunk (this was not saying a great deal, I had been drunk a lot of the time). He was the man who had first approached me with regards the myth of Wormwood.

  He had presented himself as an enthusiastic follower of my work, a devotee of Quartershaft's ad ventures, with a brilliant idea as to where his next could take place. I began to feel like a character in one of my own fictions (which, now I come to think about, is exactly what I've always been), manipulated to this very spot by the hand of a divine author.

  "Welcome!" he shouted, his voice carrying perfectly, either through a natural gift as an orator or, more likely, a magical quality of amplification. "My name is Alonzo. And I'm here to welcome you to Wormwood.

  "You've been through terrible ordeals to get here," there was a general murmur of consensus on this, "and some of you have travelled thousands of miles to reach this point. Well, what can I say? What has come before is nothing. This is where your adventure really begins."

  Which, naturally could only be true, we stood at the threshold of Heaven (or Hell), it would be a terrible anti-climax were the real world—however outlandish it had proven itself to be over the last few days—found to rival its wonders.

  That factual point aside, I grew cold at his words. This is not a case of dramatic exaggeration (though I admit I am only too capable of such trickery) rather a genuine sense of unease.

  There was something, a quality to the words, that struck me as not altogether positive. He had an air of the showman, yes, and his speech could have been taken in that context, the theatrical host promising fresh wonders in store. Somehow, however, the words also struck me as a warning.

  "Never before," he continued, "have we seen such a response to our arrival. Never have so many undertaken a pilgrimage to our door." He bo
wed his head as if saddened. "And to think, of all those who perished en route." He smiled. "But then, they made their way to us all the quicker. Death is a road like any other, after all. A painful one at times, certainly, but I hope you'd agree the destination is worth the journey.

  "Because there are so many of you, we will need to organise ourselves a little differently.

  For now I must ask you to wait a little while longer..." There was a predictable uproar at this to which he raised mollifying hands. "Please don't worry, time is ours to control, you will all get to walk our streets. Just not all at the same time. We will need to take you a party at a time."

  Again this caused dissent but he held up his arms for quiet and got it. After all, as argumentative as the crowd certainly was, it takes a greater confidence than was to be found here to pick a fight with an emissary from God. "Patience. You have waited this long, another hour won't hurt."

  And with that, he turned on his heels and walked away again, leaving several hundred people utterly bemused. A couple made to follow before finding that they were unable to pass from the plain into the streets of the town itself. It was as if there were an invisible barrier lying at a defined point between one world and the next. Those attempting to cross it ended up falling back into the dust, embarrassed and angered even further.

  The air was filled with questions: "But it's only supposed to be here for twenty-four hours anyway! We're wasting the precious time we have!"

  "Since when did Heaven get so small it couldn't accommodate a crowd of a few hundred people?"

  "Maybe they're not going to let us in after all..." They were all good questions and many like them passed through my own head. For the most part, though, I was unsurprised. The dominant feeling I had was that of being part of some one else's plan. I had been manipulated to this place and now the plan continued to unfold.