and rain. Clean.
Eliot set his backpack on his lap. He wanted Lady Dawn close, just in case.
There were people outside. Some sat in marble pavilions talking, painting, or lounging in hammocks. Others gathered about great barbecues, or tossed Frisbees or collected flowers. Couples walked hand in hand.
“All these people. .,” Eliot said.
“Dead,” Kino told him.
They rode past orchards of cherry trees in full bloom that filled the air with feather white blooms, and over terraced hills with row after row of trellises heavy with bloodred and amber grapes.
How could this be? If this was where the dead really came, shouldn’t there be
Eliot wanted to ask. But he didn’t, not wanting to appear stupid.
The Cadillac picked up speed.
Kino touched a button on his door, and Eliot’s window slid up.
He turned onto an unpaved branch off the road. The sky was iron gray.
The car accelerated around curves until this road became a single dirt track. The trees became stunted and small, then there were just grass and tumbleweeds, and then just bare rocky dirt. There were no more people here-and definitely no one tossing Frisbees.
Eliot spied a drop-off in the distance.
Kino pressed his foot all the way to the floor, and the Cadillac leaped ahead, leaving plumes of dust behind.
“What’s going on?” Eliot asked.
“Now I will show you the part of the Underworld that belongs to the Infernals,” Kino replied, the bitterness thick in his voice, and his eyes glued straight ahead.
Eliot swallowed. That didn’t sound good.
The door locks thumped down.
Kino drove and said nothing.
Eliot looked to Fiona, and she gave a slight shake of her head. He wanted to get out, but how? They must be going over a hundred miles an hour-rocketing past jagged boulders-straight toward where the land dropped away.
The Cadillac fishtailed to the left, skating along a cliff-continuing at breakneck speed along its edge.
Eliot slid into Fiona. Neither of them seemed to notice or care; both their faces pressed to the window.
The land plunged more than a mile straight down. A river of molten metal carved through jagged spires of black volcanic rock. In the distance, a desert plain stretched to the horizon. Airplanes, meteors, and flaming debris fell from the sky. Tiny figures swarmed, crowds of people among the rocks and on dunes. They ran, and it looked like they were fighting. Winged creatures circled overhead. One swooped and plucked up a double clawful of people.
Eliot wanted to look away. He couldn’t.
“This is what the other family does to the dead,” Kino told them. “They torture. Turn souls into wandering insane things. Take a long listen. Remember this next time you hear one of your Infernal relatives and their lies. . and choose wisely.”
Kino rolled down the electric windows.
There was the rumble of distant thunder and volcanoes, and carried on the hot winds were the screams of thousands of lost souls.
Eliot couldn’t stand the din. It made him want to scream along with them.
He turned to ask Fiona what she thought, but she was pale and stared straight ahead.
Kino flicked on the Cadillac’s headlights. The road they sped along was just a track now through a wilderness of dead twisted trees and whirlwinds of volcanic ash. There was no sun, no stars. . just darkness.
The Cadillac slowed.
Along the cliff’s edge, a fence had been erected. It was giant femurs and rib bones, from dinosaurs, maybe. Concertina wire and long curved talons topped it, pointed away from their side to keep things in Hell from climbing over.
“Why are we slowing?” Eliot asked cautiously.
“The gate is ahead,” Kino said without further explanation.
It was the end of the line-literally, as the road curved toward and off the cliff’s edge.
Eliot realized one of his hands grasped the leather handle on the back of Kino’s seat. He let go.
Mist and smoke parted, revealing a gate the size of their house in San Francisco. It was an interlocked mass of metal and bone and clockwork mechanisms. A half-dozen combination dials sat at eye level. The mass looked utterly impregnable, and like it hadn’t been opened in hundreds of years. . if ever.
“Why would you need a gate here?” Fiona said. “Who in their right mind would want to use it?”
“You would be surprised.” Kino pulled up alongside the structure. “Heroes have come looking for lost loves. There are always fools. And the dead are restless.” He removed his sunglasses, revealing dark, perhaps sad, but otherwise ordinary eyes. “No one living, not even I, understands what moves them.”
The car door locks popped open.
Kino faced them. “This is the Gate of Perdition, where the world of light meets that of darkness. The lands of our family and theirs. When they tell you of the wonders and pleasures of Hell, remember what you’ve seen here.
“Now,” he told them, “get out.”
Three heartbeats passed as Eliot and Fiona sat stunned.
“No way,” Eliot said.
“I want you to see and hear for yourself firsthand. . unless you’re too scared?”
“I’m not scared,” Fiona said. She opened her door and clambered out.
Of course Eliot wasn’t scared; his sister was crazy, though, to leave the car.
He sat there a moment, feeling like a total loser and coward. Okay-fine. Eliot couldn’t let her go by herself. He opened his door, too.
The only thing that ever felt like this was when he had to open the door to the basement incinerator at Oakwood Apartments. The air was so dry here, it hurt to breathe. He steeled himself, then stepped out.
Kino remained in the car. “Touch the other side,” he said. “Feel damnation and the absence of all hope.”
“I’m not touching anything,” Fiona told him.
Eliot hesitated-but only for a moment. What harm could it do to touch some dirt?
He knelt and wiggled his hand through a gap under the fence.
The earth felt older than anything he had ever touched before. Like it had been dust before the beginning of time. . totally without life. More dead than dead could ever be.
But it was
It felt to Eliot more like an empty page: blank, yes, but perhaps the beginning of something. If only the right person would come along, with the right pen. . they could fill that page up with anything they wanted.
He left the earth where it was and pulled his hand out.
Kino watched him and Fiona. He put his sunglasses back on, and the windows of the Cadillac eased up and sealed with a
Eliot was glad this little demonstration was over.
He and Fiona moved toward the back doors.
The Cadillac’s engine revved; the car jumped, fishtailed, and sprayed them with dust.
Uncle Kino sped off.
Fiona couldn’t believe it. “He ditched us!” she cried.
She picked up a rock and chucked it after Kino’s Cadillac. It was a futile gesture. The red taillights winked in the distance, obscured by dust and smoke, then swallowed by shadows.
It was very dark. The only light was from a smoldering river of lava in the valley below.
