Hell by Robert Olen Butler Read Free Book Online

Hatcher’s shoulder all this while, goes suddenly cold. “You just put your lips together and blow.”
    The two men find they can move. They cross the room and go out the door. They head down the dark hall, not saying a word. But all around them now, sounds are coming from behind the passing apartment doors. Moaning sounds. Keening sounds. Classic gnashing-of-teeth sounds. And then, from behind the last door this side of the stairwell, comes the pittering of a computer keyboard. Hatcher slows and stops. Bogey goes on around the corner. The neighborhood is full of writers. Hatcher has the impulse to open this door. He does.
    The room is black except for the radiance from a computer monitor. In profile, a man’s head hangs in the light, the darkness shrouding the rest of him. It’s not even clear there is a rest of him—as if he were like Anne, arrived in Hell from a beheading—though the sound of furious typing clatters from the dark where his hands and keyboard would be. He is a bald man with the fringe of his hair cut very short and with a faintly aquiline nose. He does not take his eyes from the computer screen.
    Hatcher understands that the man is a writer, and he seems vaguely familiar for some reason or other, though maybe not for his writing exactly—from tabloids and gossip columns, perhaps—maybe there was a woman involved somehow—but Hatcher can’t place him.
    “I don’t know who you are,” Hatcher says.
    “Neither do I,” the man says. The head floats closer to the screen, the eyes narrowing. “Though I yearn to.”
    The typing, fast already, begins to accelerate, faster and faster until the individual keystrokes blur together into a low moan. “I’m in here somewhere,” the man says.
    Hatcher watches for a moment, thinking to go but once again is unable to move. Then, even as the typing moans louder, the writer turns his face to Hatcher and says, “Back out of the room now and gently close the door.”
    Hatcher backs out of the room and gently closes the door. He steps into the stairway landing, and Bogey is gone. He listens for the man’s footsteps below, but hears nothing. “Bogey?” he calls. There’s no answer. Even the corridor behind him is quiet. They’re all suffering in silence now, and it’s time to move on.

    He calls again, in the dark outside the alley door of Beatrice’s tenement, but this time for Virgil. Anything Dante knew about Hell, Virgil knows it too. Hatcher tries to stop overtly thinking about the matter any further: he focuses on the distant din of Grand Peachtree Parkway. This back-alley episode seems to be finished, and maybe Virgil is gone. But he found Hatcher out there in the street. He’s of that realm too. “Virgil,” he calls again. “Publius Vergilius Maro!” Hatcher cries. But still there is no answer. Except from the invisible rats of Hell. All around him he hears the stirring of their feet, the clatter of their scrabbling claws like the sound of computer keyboards, a million keyboards, all the writers in Hell typing frantically away.
    Hatcher hurries off in the direction of the Parkway.
    When he emerges from the alley, he makes note of the place. The whistle crap was simply to torture Bogey. Hatcher might want to try to find Beatrice again. Of course it’s possible for anything suddenly to change in Hell. But for the most part, change is gradual, and the quotidian details—from backed-up toilets to confusing street names—stay torturously the same. So. Directly opposite, in the Parkway median, full of construction rubble and gouged earth, some concrete blocks mount narrowly upward to a twisted tangle of rebar—all of it vaguely in the taunting shape of a tree. There are no trees in Hell. To his left is a run of bookstores, the nearest with its name on a tattered standing sandwich board: Hell’s Belles Lettres. To his right is a shop with a red neon sign jutting over the sidewalk, bloodily illuminating the area, spewing sparks: BURGERS. He