Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades by Jeffrey Thomas Page B

Wally, don’t worry."
    "I should be so lucky," Wally grumbled, wiping his knife’s blade clean of sap against his pants leg. "I should be so lucky to really  die."
    "Then we wouldn’t have your charming company," Eleanor teased him in her good-natured British accent, flicking some water at his face. "Would we, my love?"
    " He’s  your love," Wally jerked his knife toward Patrick, "not me."
    "You are  too young for me, Wally," Eleanor admitted.
    All three of them turned their heads abruptly, and fearfully, when they heard the bellowing roar of one of the Buddhas roll across the swampy farmland. All three were relieved to see that one titanic yellow guard was lumbering slowly, terribly in another direction, perhaps to berate some other knot of workers, instead of coming their way. Wally wagged his head. "They invented this fruit just to give us something to do. Something hard and awful to do. And they invented them  just to eat the fruit." By "they," he meant the Creator.
    Patrick lifted another of the bright red, rubbery globes out of the water and slipped it into his own heavy sack. "Come on, Wally." He shooed a blood-drinking insect (or miniature Demon, depending on how you looked at it) that had jabbed him in the back of the neck…then patted the older man on the shoulder. "It will drive you mad to dwell on the whys and wherefores."
    They had sloshed their way to an outcropping of rock like an island jutting out of the flat landscape. They could climb up on it and rest for a few minutes, on its far side where they wouldn’t be spotted, but not for too long or they’d be missed. It would give them a chance to dry off a little in the heat of the molten sky, and to pluck leeches off each other. They’d throw the leeches back into the mire instead of killing them, just in case those creatures could be considered Demons, too.
    It was Patrick who climbed onto the outcropping first, gratefully slinging his sack off his shoulder as he did so. It was Patrick, then, who first spotted the cat.
    The cat clearly had heard them coming; it was wary but not surprised. It was tensed, ready to hiss, ready to claw, ready to leap away. But leap away where? Into the water? Most cats hated water. How had it ever gotten to this isolated rock in the first place?
    "Oh my!" Eleanor exclaimed. "Oh!"
    "It’s a cat," Wally observed, dragging his old, dripping bones onto the barren oasis. "An ugly one," he added. "So what?"
    The cat had indeed seen better days. It looked like it might have become tangled in a tattered, filthy curtain. Or could that have been a burial shroud? Scraps of it were twined around its limbs and tail, a loop of it even obscuring one eye. And in one battered ear it wore three earrings. It had been someone’s pet, obviously, at one time. Or something more important. But it looked a long way from having been anything to anyone, in its present condition.
    "It’s impossible," Patrick said to Wally, as tensed and unmoving as the cat.
    "Why?"
    Eleanor answered for him. "There are no cats in Hades. No animals can come here."
    "What do you mean? These bloodsuckers…and mosquitoes…"
    "There are infernal  animals. But no animals from the mortal world can come here upon death, Wally. According to the Creator, animals don’t have souls. They don’t go to Heaven or Hell. They simply cease to be."
    "Sweet oblivion," Patrick muttered.
    "Then this is an infernal animal, then," said Wally. "Like the leeches. Look at it. Looks infernal to me."
    The cat hissed at last. Patrick smiled. "It doesn’t like you, whatever it is, Wally."
    "There are no cats in Hades," Eleanor insisted. "I’ve been here well over a century. I’ve covered a lot of ground in that time. I’ve never seen a cat, a dog, any earthly beast."
    "There." Patrick pointed. "Look."
    Behind the cat, and lower on the opposite face of the rock, there was a deep crack or fissure. Its edges looked black, as though charred. Wally climbed over next to Patrick carefully,