Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades by Jeffrey Thomas Page A

over his ears, like Ulysses’ sailors, blocking their ears with wax to keep out the call of the sirens. But then he opened his eyes and glared up at Eridan, who was watching him with a little smile, as if he possessed some secret, satisfying knowledge.
    "You did this on purpose, you bastard!" Petty sobbed. "You knew she was out here!"
    "I’m not the Creator," the Demon told him mildly. "Only He weaves, Mr. Petty."
    "You let her go! I order you!"
    "I can’t, sir. She’s been Damned. She should have followed her wise and pious parents to church. She should have embraced her Father."
    "I’m an Angel! I’m an Angel!" Petty blubbered. "You fucks can’t do this to me!"
    "This is Hades," Captain Eridan said simply. "Do you wish to leave it?"
    "Yes," Petty cried. He fell to his knees, palms still clamped to his ears. "Yes!"
    "Daaaad! Help me!"  he heard, regardless of his efforts to blot out the sounds.
    Thank God that Eridan started up the motor then. The sound of it helped drown out the screams. The lines were cast off, all the crew clambered aboard, and the boat turned its nose away from the island of congealing blood.
    "Your daughter is very beautiful, sir," Eridan told him casually, as he piloted them away and the voices dwindled in their wake. He looked down at Petty, still humped forward as if bowing on the deck in supplication. "Very beautiful."

Sweet Oblivion

    M ost breeds of Demons didn’t require food as sustenance—but the Buddhas, as the Damned workers had dubbed them, were ravenous beings. They had been designed that way, in the factory city of Tartarus where most of the Demons in this region of Hades were mass produced.
    The Buddhas were vast, dinosaur-like travesties of humanity, nine feet tall and wider around. Patrick thought that they made sumo wrestlers look as if they might be the Buddhas’ infant offspring. Their flagrantly naked bulks were an awful canary yellow in color. These elephantine entities had heads as small as a mortal baby’s, however, with eyes crushed shut and sulky pouts. Their heads reminded Patrick of human fetuses who are born with acrania—absence of that section of the skull which contains the brain.
    To be born without a brain, Patrick mused. Such blissful oblivion. He had never thought he would envy such a tragic fate, until he had awoken from death to find himself sentenced to eternal damnation.
    He had been twenty-two when he died. He estimated he would have been forty-four by now. He had stopped berating himself, long ago, for not having been religious in life, not bowing before the Creator. Though he had never met any of his friends or loved ones in the infinity of Hades, he doubted that any of them would pass the Creator’s harsh criteria to make it through the pearly gates, the golden arches, or whatever the gateway to paradise looked like.
    Patrick, Eleanor, and Wally worked close together, wading through the knee-deep (occasionally, waist-deep) bog in which they seeded, grew and harvested the food for the Buddhas. Eleanor had been in Hades the longest; she had died in 1870, when she was twenty-eight. She and Patrick had taken Wally under their wings. Although he had been much older than they, physically, when he died—sixty-seven—he had only been in Hades for a single month. He huffed and panted as he slogged through the marshy plants, cutting free the fleshy globes the Buddhas craved with his curved knife and storing them in the waterproofed leather bag he wore slung onto his back. He paused often to wheeze, to hold his chest with one blistered hand, to squint up at the blazing sky—a ceiling of churning lava. The three of them wore straw hats like Vietnamese farmers laboring in a rice paddy, to protect their flesh from being burned by that intense glow. Of course, they were immortal; their skin would have regenerated even if it had been immersed in lava. This was why Patrick often teased Wally when he saw him clutching at his heart.
    "You’re not going to die,