Page 18 of Haunted Heart
The ones that have fallen to the gray-green grass writhe 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; the air tastes foul. “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?” I ask.
“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 the 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 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 fair bit of the story right.”
“Is this limbo?”
“Essentially.” She looks 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.”
“What did call to you?”
She glances at me sidelong, a faint smile touching her lips. “Wrath.”
The “of course” goes unsaid.
“How much time have you spent here?” I grip her hand tighter.
“The entirety of the four months before he burned my body.” She grimaces. “I managed not to fall for any of Hell’s traps… because I knew they were lies.”
“What kind of traps are they?”
She stops, turning to me and caressing my cheek. “There shouldn’t be any for you here. Hell punishes the deserving. Your balance sheet hasn’t been tallied yet.”
I lean into her palm. Even here, her newly physical presence is soothing. But movement catches my attention, and I turn away from her, searching for what my periphery had shown me.
