room, another floor. Anchor gripped his knees against his chest and closed his eyes. He had the sensation of passing through pockets of air separated by parting membranes. Down and down he fell, like a cannonball dropped into a house of cards.
Deep underground he thumped heavily against a final solid surface and came to a stop.
Anchor groaned and opened his eyes.
He had fallen through twenty or more separate dwellings. Directly above him numerous layers of ragged holes formed a shaft of sorts, terminating in a distant circle of red sky overhead, where the end of the rope disappeared from sight. Each of the many levels of ruptured floorboards had already begun to bleed. Drips fell from the broken edges and cascaded down from room to room, spattering the floor around him. From overhead came the sound of moaning.
He sat up.
He was in an elegant drawing room with tall sash windows and antique Pandemerian furniture. Two identical elderly women stood looking at him, their faces white with either powder or shock. Each looked like a mirror image of the other in their hummingbird-blue high-necked frocks. Knots of tightly bunched grey hair sat upon their heads like little skulls.
“Ladies,” Anchor said.
The twins looked at each other, then cupped their hands over their breasts and looked back at the intruder. “Are you the plumber?” said one of them.
“I don't think he's the plumber, Clarice,” the other woman replied. “Just look at him!”
Anchor stood, brushed dust and fragments of debris from his arms, and then stepped out from underneath the shaft to avoid the cascading droplets of blood. The two women took a step back from him.
The big man grinned. “No need to fear John Anchor, ladies. I've no quarrel with you.” He took a look around. “So this is Hell, eh?”
Cospinol had told him how the souls grew rooms around themselves like snails grew shells. This chamber must be one such place, a living, sensate extension of the spirits within. He nodded at the windows. Behind the glass lay a plain brick wall. “Your neighbours like their privacy, eh?”
One of the ladies said, “Neighbours? Don't be absurd. We don't have any
Her twin piped up, “No doubt he hit his head in the fall, Marjory.”
They shriveled their lips at him.
Anchor shrugged. He had no interest in undermining their delusion.
One twin glared disapprovingly at the hole in the ceiling. “Someone will have to repair that, you know.”
“My apologies, ladies,” Anchor said. “I'll go and fix it now.” With that he leapt up and grabbed the bloody edge of the hole and pulled himself up.
A large bed occupied most of this next room. Propped against pillows lay an enormous woman with masses of black and white hair extruding all about her head like the tendrils of some creeping fungus. Indeed the whole room evinced decay, for tongues of patterned wallpaper hung from the walls, and black mold spattered the skirting. A smell of vinegar lingered.
“I've been hurt,” she said. “Someone hit me on the head while I was sleeping.”
“Sorry, madam.” Anchor got to his feet. “That was me. I fell through your soul. The pain will go away after a while.”
“Have you seen Dory?” she said.
Anchor shook his head. “No, madam.” He jumped up and grabbed the floor joists of the room above.
“Dory said she'd come by, but I haven't seen her in ages,” the woman persisted. “I don't know what's become of her.”
Grunting, Anchor heaved himself up onto the next level. He looked down to see the twins still standing under the hole. He gave them a wave.
“Don't you go rummaging through the attic,” shrilled one of them. “Our costumes are up there, and they mustn't be unpacked. They're very fragile.”
“Who's that?” said the woman in the bed. “Dory? Is that you?”
So many potted plants filled the third room that it looked like a garden. Walls of naked brick supported trellises covered with green vines. Some old chests of drawers and wooden tables stood around the edges, but pots of yellow, pink, and red blooms adorned every flat surface and even the floor itself. At first Anchor thought the room was empty but then he spotted a young man curled up in the corner. In one hand he held a pair of shears, and he appeared to be unconscious.
Anchor walked over and crouched to feel for a pulse. Then he shook his head. These people were all dead, of course; if they had a pulse, it would be because they remembered having one and not because blood still flowed through their veins. Nevertheless he propped the young man up and gave him a gentle shake. “You all right, lad?”
The young man opened his eyes and peered at Anchor. “I must have fallen,” he said. “Where am I?”
“You don't know where you are?”
“No.”
“Good. Then I've done you a service.”
Anchor left him alone and went back to the edge of the open shaft. He looked up to see that some of the holes above him had already begun to close as the consciousnesses within began to reassert their influences upon their environments. Down below, the twins' room was sliding away at a walking pace, underneath the bedridden woman's chambers. Those two spinsters had evidently decided to move.
“John!”
Alice Harper's head had appeared at the uppermost entrance to the shaft. Now she was looking down at him. “Are you all right?”
“This is a very strange place,” he called back.
“Stranger than you realize,” she said. “I need to talk to you.”
He clambered up through the remaining chambers with barely a glance at the occupants within, then swung himself up out into open air. A fierce gale slammed into him. Harper waited on a nearby stone shelf, from where she could see far across the Maze. Her red hair whipped about her pale face.
From up here Anchor could see that they were standing upon the summit of a strange conglomerate of souls. It looked as if an entire Pandemerian street had been compacted together into a rude lump. But this mass of dwellings altered shape continuously, as facades stretched and compressed against neighbouring stonework. It was crawling across the surface of Hell, devouring walls under its shifting foundations. In its wake it left a shallow trench of subterranean rooms now ripped open and exposed to the flooded labyrinth surface, as streams of blood rushed into these open wounds and gurgled down through any spaces revealed amidst those smashed quarters.
Harper turned her head away from the force of the wind. “Can you hear them?” she said.
“Hear who?”
“The voices in the wind.”
Anchor listened. After a moment he heard what sounded like human voices-very faint-amidst the howling air, as though the wind had carried the cries across a great distance. He could not make out what they were saying, nor even catch enough of their words to recognize the language.
Harper reached into her tool belt and took out a black circular lens. “Non Morai,” she explained. “See for yourself.”
Anchor peered through the lens, and into what looked like another world entirely. Seen through the dark glass disc, the crimson landscape appeared green. Winged creatures filled the skies, batlike figures with gaunt faces and red grins. They swarmed around paler yellow lights, like wisps of glowing lace, and they appeared to be herding these lights towards the surface of Hell.
He yanked the lens away, and the scene returned to normal-naught but an empty red sky. Yet when he raised the glass disc again, the winged figures and their gossamer charges reappeared, wheeling in their thousands against the verdant heavens.
“I spotted them shortly after we left the portal,” Harper said. “They're steering souls here, to this particular part of Hell.”
