Page 116 of Monsters in Love: Lost in the Underworld

“I know.” She takes a deep breath and nods. “Let’s find them so we can get back.”

The doorknob is warm, but doesn’t burn me when I take it and when I open the front door, heat washes over me as the taste of ash fills my mouth and brimstone assaults my nose.

There is nothing but silence beyond that door and when I blink past the brightness…

“Welcome to hell,” Julia says quietly, staring out at it. Her voice is more solid than it was before. “But be careful, your magic won’t work here.”

“Well, that sucks.”

The house sits in the middle of a cloud of unmoving red dust. It extends up into the sky and I am not sure where it ends.

A strange and stagnant calm hangs over this place that is a near mirror of the world above. Red sky, red dirt, black bark and spindly trees with gray leaves and shriveled apples.

The fruit is rotten.

The ones that have fallen to the gray green grass crawl with insects, split open and twitching as though they’re alive beneath the carapaces that move them.

Dark shadows shift among the trees.

“Those are the demons we must avoid. They will take you back to the living world. Or worse, they could mistake you for an errant soul and try to place you in your particular hell.”

“Okay.” I take a deep breath and the air tastes foul, but, “I’m not complaining, but… I expected hell to be a little more… hellish?”

“It is,” she says, descending the stairs and looking back at me again. Her eyes glow red like embers now. “Once your part of it finds you, hell makes itself known.”

I follow her down and squeeze her hand tighter. I don’t know how this place works and the last thing I want to do is get separated from her.

“How do we find Dylan and Jonas?”

“Where would they have gone if this was the living world?”

“Maybe to the cars?” I look toward the lot, but what I can see of it is empty.

“Where are those?” She asks, and I remember that my grandmothers only bought their farm seventy years ago. It feels like they’ve been here forever.

“If they exist here,” I say, “they’ll be on the other side of the cornfield.”

“Then we’ll go there first.”

The grass crunches like it’s made of glass as we walk through the orchard, past the rotting apples.

Enormous scarab beetles and carpenter bees buzz around us, getting too close for comfort, but once we’re out of the trees, they go back to the shade of those boughs.

In the long gray grass of the field between Julia’s home and my grandmothers’ farm, I pause, feeling smaller than I ever have in my life. The high walls of dust and dirt seem infinitely higher.

If that dust was moving, I’d think we were at the center of an impossibly large cyclone.

“You said once my part of hell finds me… does everyone have an individual hell?”

“No. Like is tortured with like, that sort of thing.”

Right… “My grandmothers said Dante almost had it right.”

“He was obsessed with circles.” She shakes her head and her hair turns transparent when it gets too far away from her face. “But he told a lot of the story right.”

“So this is limbo?”

“Essentially,” she says looking around us in ways that make me wonder what else she sees. “They will pass the sins that do not call to them until they find the one that does. Gluttony and Avarice didn’t call to me… I saw them and felt no tug.”

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