summit of the pile I was climbing, and give Pappy G. a good clear shot of me. My body was fast approaching collapse, the muscles of my calves spasming so painfully I cried out, my hands and arms a mass of gashes from slitting my cooked flesh on the shards of glass and the raw edges of tin cans as I sought a handhold.
My mind was now made up. Once I reached the top of this hillock I would give up the chase and, keeping my back to Gatmuss so that he couldn't see the despair upon my face and take some pleasure from it, I would await his bullet. With the decision made I felt curiously unencumbered and climbed easily up to my chosen death site.
Now all I had to do was —
Wait! What was that hanging in the air in the trench between this summit and the next? It looked to my weary eyes like two beautiful shanks of raw meat, with — could I believe what I was seeing? — cans of beer attached to each piece of meat.
I had heard stories of people who, lost in great deserts, seemed to see the very image of what they wanted most at that moment: a glittering pool of refreshing water, most likely, surrounded by date palms lush with ripe fruit. These mirages are the first sign that the wanderer is losing his grip on reality, I knew, because the faster he chases this phantom pool with its shady bower of fruit-laden trees, the faster it recedes from him.
Was I now completely crazy? I had to know. Forsaking the spot where I had intended to perish, I slid down the incline towards the place where the steak and beer hung, moving just a little on a creaking rope that disappeared into the darkness high above us. The closer I got, the more certain I became that this was not, as I'd feared, an illusion, but the real thing; a suspicion that was confirmed moments later when my salivating mouth closed round a nice lean portion of the steak. It was better than good, it was exceptional, the meat melting in my mouth. I opened the chilly can of beer, and raised it to my lipless mouth, which had dealt well with the challenge of biting into the steak and now had their hurts soothed by a bathing of cold beer.
I was silently thanking whatever kindly soul had left these refreshments to be found by a lost traveler when I heard a bellowing from Pappy G., and from the corner of my eye I saw him at the very spot I'd chosen to die.
'Leave some of that for me, boy!' he yelled, and having seemingly forgotten the enmity between us, so moved was he by the sight of the steak and beer, he came down the steep slope in great strides. As he did so he yelled:
'If you touch that other steak and beer, boy, I will kill you three times over, I swear!'
In truth, I had no intention of eating into the other steak. I'd eaten all I could. I was happy to nibble at my steak bone, which still had a hook around it, the hook attached to one of the two ropes that hung so closely together that I'd assumed they were one.
Now, however, with my stomach filled, I could afford to be inquisitive. This wasn't a single rope holding both beer cans. There was a second rope, much darker than the bright yellow of the food provider, which hung innocently beside the others. Nothing I saw hung from it. My gaze followed it down past my shoulder, hand, leg, knee, and foot, only to find that it disappeared into the mass of garbage on which I stood.
I bent over at my hips, my fire-stiffened torso almost touching my legs, and went on searching for the continuation of the rope amongst the trash.
'You drop a bone, did you, idiot?' Pappy Gatmuss said, his words accompanied by a shower of spittle, gristle, and beer. 'Don't you take too much longer down there, you hear me? Just because you ordered me a steak and beer doesn't mean… Oh wait! Ha! You stay right where you are, boy. I'm not going to put my cold gun in your ear to blow off your head. I'm going to put it in your rear and blow off your…'
'It's a trap,' I said quietly.
' What'ya talkin' about?'
'The food. It's bait. Somebody's trying to catch — '
Before I could speak the syllable that would finish my sentence, my prophecy was proved.
The second rope, the dark stranger that had lingered so close to its bright yellow companion that had been almost invisible, was suddenly jerked eight or ten feet into the air, pulling the two dark ropes taut and hauling into view two nets, which were large enough and spread widely enough that whoever was fishing from Above was knowledgeable enough about the Underworld to know about the presence here of the remnants of the Demonation.
Seeing the immensity of the nets, I took some comfort from the fact that even if I'd comprehended the trap in which we were standing more quickly, we would never have been able to get beyond the perimeter of the net before those in the World Above — The Fishermen as I had already mentally dubbed them — sensed some motion on their bait-lines and scooped up their catch.
The holes in the net were large enough for one of my legs to be somewhat uncomfortably hanging out, dangling above the chaos below. But such discomfort meant little when I had the pleasure of seeing the net beneath Gatmuss also tightening around him, and lifting him up as I was being lifted. There was one difference. While Gatmuss was cursing and struggling, attempting and failing to tear a hole in the net, I was feeling curiously calm. After all, I reasoned, how much worse could my life in the World Above be than the life I was leaving in the World Below, where I had known very little comfort, and no love, and had no future for myself beyond the kind of bitter, joyless lives that Momma and Pappy G. lived?
We were being lifted at quite a speed now, and I could see the landscape of my young life laid out below. The house, with Momma standing on the doorstep — a diminutive figure, far beyond the range of my loudest cries, even if I'd cared to try, which I didn't. And there, spreading in all directions as far as my eyes could see, was the dismal spectacle of the wastelands, the peaks of trash that had seemed so immense when I'd been in their shadows, now inconsequential, even when they rose to mountainous heights as they defined the perimeter of the Ninth Circle. Beyond the Circle there was nothing. Only a void, an immense emptiness, neither black nor white, but an unfathomable grey.
'Jakabok! Are you listening to me?'
Gatmuss was haranguing me from his net, where, thanks in part to his own struggles, his huge frame was squashed up in what looked like a very uncomfortable position. His knees were pressed up against his face, while his arms stuck out of the net at odd angles.
'Yes, I'm listening,' I said.
'Is this something you set up? Something to make me look stupid?'
'You don't need any help to do that,' I told him. 'And no, of course I didn't set this up. What an asinine question.'
'What's asinine?'
'I'm not going to start trying to educate you now. It's a lost cause. You were born a brute and you'll die a brute, ignorant of anything but your own appetites.'
'You think you're very clever, don't you, boy? With your fancy words and your fancy manners. Well, they don't impress me. I got a machete and a gun. And once we're out of this stupid thing I'm going to come after you so fast you won't have time to count your fingers before I cut them off. Or your toes. Or your nose.'
'I could scarcely count my nose, you imbecile. I only have one.'
'There you go again, sounding like you're so high and mighty. You're nothing, boy. You wait! You wait until I find my gun. Oh, the things I can do with that gun! I could shoot off what's left of your babymaker, clean as a whistle!'
And so he went on, an endless outpouring of contempt and complaint, spiced with threats. In short, he hated me because when I'd been born Momma lost all interest in him. In past times, he said, when for some reason or another Momma's attention had been distracted, he'd had a foolproof way of getting it back, but now he was afraid of using that trick again because he'd been happy to have a daughter, but another accidental son would only be a waste of breaths and beatings. One mistake was enough, more than enough, he said, and ranted about my general stupidity.
Meanwhile, we continued our ascent, which having begun a little jerkily was now smooth and speedy. We passed through a layer of clouded darkness into the Eighth Circle, emerging from a ragged crater in its rocky desolation. I had never strayed more than half a mile from my parents' house, and had only the vaguest notion of how life was lived in other circles. I would have liked time to study the Eighth. But we were now traveling too fast for me to gain anything more than a fleeting impression of it: the Damned in their thousands, their naked backs bent to the labor of hauling some vast faceless edifice across the uneven terrain. Then I was temporarily blinded once again, this time by the darkness of the Eighth's sky, only to emerge moments later spluttering and spitting,
