Alma Katsu - The Descent

As if reading my thoughts through my expression, the demon flashed a look of anger. “I didn’t ask to be released, you know. I was perfectly happy when Adair found me. I was at peace. I wasn’t harming anyone. But Adair insisted that my time was over. It didn’t matter that I begged him to spare me; he took my life and sent me here.”

Shocked, I couldn’t speak for a moment, and when I could, the best I could say was, “I’m sure he didn’t mean it. He didn’t know where he was sending you or what would happen to you.”

Dona seemed unconvinced. His tail switched. “Adair always was like that, you know,” Dona whispered. “A bastard. Never thinking of us as having wishes and desires of our own. Never thinking of us as anything but servants to him.” The demon made a sound halfway between a bellow and a moan. “I wish for God to damn him, as we have been damned. Damn him to hell.”

It didn’t seem a good idea to let Dona get carried away by bitterness at that moment; I needed his help. I laid a hand on his blackened arm. “Dona, I may be crossing a line . . . I know we were never close in life, but I need your help. I am throwing myself on your mercy.”

He cocked his large head, waiting.

I drew in a deep breath, preparing to be rebuffed. “You see, I came here looking for Jonathan. You remember Jonathan, don’t you?”

He snorted derisively at this and rolled his eyes. “Of course I remember him. Anyone would remember Jonathan. He is impossible to forget.”

“Have you seen him here, Dona? I heard he was being kept by the queen of the underworld.”

At this, Dona shied back, like an animal that had been bitten and startled by some ghastly insect, his ears twitching in irritation. “Oh, why do you ask me this? There’s nothing you can do for him. He is here with the queen and she will not give him up to you. Trust me on this—I am part of her retinue, you know. We demons serve the queen of the underworld. That appears to be our reward, for putting up with Adair in life. I suppose he would say that it is the price we must pay for having lived so long.” He snorted again, in disgust this time.

I looked into his golden eyes. “I’m not afraid of her,” I lied.

“You should be.”

“Dona, can you take me to him?”

“It is hopeless.”

“I just want to see him and speak with him. Please, Dona. I’ve come this far—don’t make me go away empty-handed.”

He looked from my hand, still on his arm, to my face. “All right, I will show you where he’s being kept. After that, you’re on your own, do you understand me? You can expect no more help from me.” And with that, he turned—hooves thumping heavily on the hard-packed ground—and began to lumber down the passage, leading the way.

Somewhere along the twisty path that Dona led me on, we stopped being in a place that looked like Adair’s fortress. Without my quite noticing how or when it happened, I suddenly realized that our surroundings had changed. The walls were gone. The ceiling overhead had disappeared. The world around us had shifted, broken apart and fallen away, and we were now in a place that was like the underworlds of folklore, the ones depicted by Dante and Milton, a dark, foreboding world that reeked of sorrow and regret.

We trudged through what appeared to be a cavern, though it was hard to tell as we walked through darkness with only the path in front of us lit, as though we were being followed by a spotlight. It could have been moonlight, I suppose, only there was no moon visible overhead. I heard rustlings and what sounded like whispers in the shadows to either side of the trail, but could see nothing. The tidy packed-earth floor of the passage had given way to a dirt path set on a deceptively gradual decline. I had the rather morbid sense that damned souls were hovering in the darkness just beyond sight or hearing. I could feel their gazes, desperately hungry, following us as though they wanted something we had.

“Tell me, Dona, where are we? What is this place?” I asked, growing uneasy at the changes to our surroundings. All of a sudden, I was unsure whether I could trust him.

He didn’t so much as look over his shoulder to address me, but kept loping along. “Have no fears; you are safe with me,” he said rather rotely.

“I feel as though we’re being watched.”

“We are,” he acknowledged. “The souls are curious about you. They’ve never seen a live soul in the underworld before. They’re drawn to your living energy.”

I thought of the place we’d just left, with its hall of doors that led to pieces of my past. Fez and St. Andrew had been filled with souls and yet they hadn’t paid me the slightest attention. This place was different. Walking through this open space with souls hovering just out of reach, I finally felt that I was in the underworld, the place of our terrors and nightmares, and I felt vulnerable.

“What is this place, Dona? Are we in hell?”

He grimaced. “Hell—what kind of question is that? There is neither heaven nor hell. There is only the underworld.”

“But it must be a different part of the underworld. This is so unlike the parts I’ve seen already,” I protested.

“Tell me what have you seen, then,” he replied. So I told him all of it, how the entirety of old Fez had unfurled before me as I’d walked down the boulevard on Savva’s arm, how I’d been taken back to St. Andrew of 1823 or thereabouts, exactly as I’d known it as a child, how I’d been transported to Luke’s hospital room—all of these scenes set just beyond the doors inside Adair’s fortress, or so it had seemed. How I’d seen old acquaintances but seemed to be invisible to everyone else.

Dona dismissed my account with a toss of his head. “It sounds as though you were brought back to a specific place in time to see those acquaintances. You were given a nice visit; don’t be ungrateful.”

I wasn’t about to give up, though. “But how is that possible?” I asked, dogged. “That time has passed. How can we step back into it as though nothing has happened?”

“How should I know?” he snapped suddenly. “Does it look as though I have any authority here? No one tells me anything. I can’t explain how it works; I only know that such things happen. That’s the way things work around here, and you’ll soon find out as much for yourself.” Then he glanced slyly over his shoulder at me; he had his own questions he wanted answered. “So, you knew Savva in life. Is that so?”

I flushed. “Yes. It was a miracle that we met that day. It was in Fez—”

But Dona cut me off, snorting with disgust through his broad, wet snout. His horns gleamed wickedly in the wan light from overhead. “Then you know what a selfish, spoiled whelp he was. I abhorred him. He was nothing but trouble, and an impossible liar. He would say or do anything for attention. I don’t know what Adair saw in him, to make him one of us . . .”

One of us? That was hardly a designation one could be proud of. We were all flawed, as was Savva. He was the same as the rest of us. Not that Dona was wrong in his estimate of Savva, not exactly. Savva was difficult at the best of times, and no one knew that better than I, but I couldn’t stand to hear him spoken of that way. “You’re not being fair to him. It’s not his fault. He has problems, Dona, real problems.”

“Don’t make excuses for him. That’s your problem, Lanny, you have a weakness for weak men.” He seemed pleased with himself.

“You can spare me your psychoanalysis,” I told him.

Dona continued, undeterred. “So, Savva is here in the underworld, is he? How does he like being a demon?”

“He’s not a demon—yet,” I said. “Though he told me that he is growing a tail.”

“He’s still in human form! He’s been here how long, and he’s still a human? Some people—the least deserving ones, have you ever noticed?—get all the breaks. I was put in demon form practically from the moment I arrived here. The queen took one look at me and said, ‘Oh yes, you’ll do nicely,’ and snapped her fingers, and that was that.” Dona practically shook with rage. His tail switched hotly from side to side. “I think she chose me because I was so handsome.”

Though immodest, Dona had been handsome: tall and regal, with that famous Northern Italian beauty. A former street urchin who had been taken in by an artist, made his model and his muse—only for Dona to repay the artist by turning him in to the papal authorities for being a sodomite, in order to save his own worthless neck.

He lifted one shoulder in an insouciant half shrug. “And now it’s all gone, taken away from me. I suppose that is my punishment in the hereafter, because in life I was so proud of my looks. Now I am a hideous beast, so ugly that the spirits run away from me in fear. Let’s see how Savva likes it when people run from him, when those boyish looks are gone. When those golden curls fall away and horns burst out of his skull. It hurts like hell, you know: the horns, the tail, the feet turning into hooves. Savva’s good fortune is not going to last much longer.”

“Do all of Adair’s former companions turn into demons?” I tried not to betray my worry that this, too, would be my fate.

“The queen is punishing us for having been with Adair in life—as though we had anything to say about that decision. She’s very jealous, you know,” he said, lost in his own bitter thoughts, failing to explain what she was jealous of. . . . But before I could ask him, the terrain changed suddenly before us and the path simply disappeared. Dona and I both tumbled down the long slope toward the black gully below. Once I’d started tumbling, gravity took over. I rolled faster and faster; I couldn’t stop myself. The bruising and bumping descent seemed to go on forever. Finally, my body rolled to a halt. I tilted my head back and looked up, but could see nothing; the top of the slope was shrouded in blackness.