Letters From Hades by Jeffrey Thomas Read Free Book Online Page A

luminosity even having been buried all this time. I don’t know what the slime is or where it was collected, but I’m grateful for it. When I returned to the woman I was now able to close the door and see well enough to write. Sitting down on the floor beside her, I opened this book across my lap. The woman respectfully did not ask me questions as she watched me write, but against her will let out the occasional moan as her body gradually fleshed itself out like an embryo growing at a remarkable rate.

    Day 36.

    T he woman’s name is Caroline, and she used to live in Caldera, though her building is entirely buried she says. She was thirty-nine when she was killed in a shooting spree at an abortion clinic. She’d been accompanying her sister, who was the one having the abortion; she has no idea whether her sister was killed as well. She believes that the killer probably went to Heaven because he had devout faith whereas she did not. I gaped at her when she said this, but she shrugged her lengthening shoulders and said, "Hey, I don’t make the rules."
    In the building where we took refuge I have found a bottle of homemade wine that is still good (rather, still preserved; it’s as syrupy and sickly sweet as cough medicine), a few strips of dried meat of some kind, tough and salty, and several stray crabs that had worked their way in here as we did; I killed them and experimented with their taste, finding them edible as well. Again, we don’t need to eat to survive (we’re beyond survival), but our bogus bodies crave it.
    In my explorations I also found spare clothes for myself, and folded them into my book bag. And in one of the rooms that had a window, I saw bones stabbing up from the floor of black ash. Ribs, the top of a skull. I knew it wasn’t the skeleton of a human, because a human here would regenerate from even the most atrocious mayhem. And then I realized I was also seeing several long bones segmented like finger bones. They were the struts of a baboon Demon’s wings.
    I rushed back to Caroline, bundled in her blanket but able to crawl up onto the bed now, to tell her what I’d seen. She stared at me a moment as though I were thick, then said, "The Demons can die. They can be killed. They aren’t immortal like we are."
    "No one told me that!"
    "They don’t advertise it in school. But we’re immortal because we’re souls. Demons don’t have souls."
    Now it was my turn to stare at her. "Why don’t we all just band together, then? Fight them? We have the advantage!"
    "The Creator can make more and more of them to replace those lost!" she hissed in a whisper, as though the Creator Himself would burst into the room in outrage at my suggestion. "And there are the Angels, too, don’t forget…and they are  immortal."
    I just wagged my head in awe. The creatures of myth could die, rot, be picked clean by crabs…but here I was, an undistinguished human, and as eternal as Apollo.

    Day 37.

    W hile we slept together on the bed, discreetly back to back, Caroline woke abruptly from a terrible nightmare. (We didn’t need sleep to survive, either, but our bodies craved that also.) I sat up, raised the lantern from the floor, and asked her what was wrong.
    "I have two daughters," she sobbed, turning toward me, her face—fully healed—like the theatrical mask of tragedy in the starkly shadowed lantern glow. "My two babies…I don’t know if they’re still alive or not. I don’t know how old they might be now, if they are alive…"
    "It isn’t fair," I muttered, almost to myself.
    "Fairness is a human invention," she said bitterly.
    I rested the lantern on a wobbly bedside table made of that purple wood, and I held her. She held me back, her tears wet against my neck. A few minutes later, her mouth was wet against my neck. I shifted my body closer to hers. She was still naked under her blanket, her body almost entirely reformed. I grew hard, pressed up against her.
    We made love. And while we did, we both