Through the Gates of Hell

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Chapter Eleven

There was a flash of light, and immediately Maggie felt a blast of icy wind sting her face. She had to close her eyes and turn away from the sudden, unexpected blast of cold air, shielding her face with her hand. The wispy cloud of her breath was whipped away in the wind, and she blinked a few times until her eyes adjusted to the harsh grayish light.

Robert and the others were standing around a few yards away, and all of them were looking around in awe. Slowly, Maggie looked up and followed their gaze at this new place they had suddenly traveled to. Whatever she thought she might see on the other side of the glowing doorway, this was not it.

They were standing in a strange outdoor corridor perhaps twenty feet wide. It went ahead of them for maybe thirty or forty yards in a roughly straight line, but it seemed crooked and uneven in places. To either side of the corridor were tall, irregular walls that reach up at least thirty feet high, lined with strange seams and cracks that were now caked with ice and snow. The ground under their feet was paved with flat gray stones in what appeared to be a random pattern, and the spaces between the stones were packed with snow as well. Maggie tilted her head back and looked upward. The sky was a dark silvery gray, but she couldn’t tell if there were clouds in the sky or if it was naturally that color.

“This ain’t like any Hell I ever heard of,” she said to break the silence. “Ain’t Hell supposed to be full of fire and smoke?”

Eleanor did not turn to face her as she responded. “Hell is not a place that we can understand, Maggie. It is a place of damned souls, but we are not damned. We are intruders here. We cannot perceive this place as it really is.”

“It’s cold as Hell,” Robert quipped, although there was no humor in his voice. “I’ll give it that.”

Maggie looked around and hesitantly holstered her pistols, since for the moment they seemed like they weren’t in danger. She flexed her fingers, glad that she had gloves on, even though they weren’t much protection from the cold.

Robert walked over and put his hand on her shoulder. “Thank you, Maggie. Thank you for coming. I wasn’t sure if ...”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I couldn’t go back. I don’t think I really had a choice.”

Robert nodded in understanding, as if there was nothing more to be said. Maggie smiled weakly and returned her gaze to the strangely jagged path lined out in front of them, and the irregular gray stones under their feet. Their surroundings looked peculiar, but at least they appeared to be natural. She could understand simple things like snow and stones, and she focused on that rather than all the other impossible things she had experienced in the last few hours.

There was packed snow and ice all over, but it didn’t seem to be snowing at the moment. It was certainly cold enough. Maggie guessed the temperature was close to ten or fifteen degrees, cold enough to chill them but not so cold that they couldn’t deal with it, for a short time anyway.

All of them were at least wearing long-sleeved shirts, but Maggie was the only one wearing a coat. Robert had a vest on over his shirt, and Eleanor was wearing her black dress, but Maggie didn’t think either of them would be very warm if they had to stay in this weather very long. All Walt had on was baggy trousers and a tattered gray shirt, but the cold didn’t seem to be affecting him. He barely seemed to notice the change in temperature at all.

Robert looked at the others. “Is everyone ready? If we’re going to do this, let’s do it.”

“Which way should we go?” Maggie asked. “It looks like it splits up ahead.”

“Let’s take a look and see. Maybe we’ll find a clue or something.”

Eleanor clutched her cross tightly against her chest. Her face was flush with sweat despite the cold. “Have faith, Maggie,” she said. “God will show us the path. He will not lead us astray.”

Walt grunted and spat on the ground. “Yeah, well I don’t reckon God is here right now. You said this is Hell, right? Well then, there ain’t no God in this place.”

Eleanor gave him one of her crooked, wild-eyed smiles. “God will not abandon us, Walter. You will see. Even here, He is always with us and He will guide our path.”

Maggie looked back and forth between Walt and Eleanor, and thought to herself, not for the first time, that both of them were completely crazy.

Robert walked ahead with his shotgun in his arms. “Come on. Let’s get moving before we freeze to death.”

The corridor was easily wide enough for them to all walk side by side, but Walt elected to walk a pace behind them. Eleanor walked in between Robert and Maggie, holding up the lantern as before, even though there was plenty of light to see by. However, Maggie was glad she did so.

When she had been alone in the final chamber of the mine, she had been irrationally angry at Eleanor for taking the lantern with her. But she realized that Eleanor had taken it deliberately, because they still had need of it. In a strange way, Maggie felt comforted by the lantern, as if its familiar light might illuminate things that this world’s own natural light might obscure. They could not seen the sun, as the entire sky seemed a uniform cloudy gray, making it all the more ominous and unnatural, but Maggie had to assume it would eventually grow dark outside, so the lantern was still extremely important.

She took out her revolver again and held it tightly in her hand as she peered down the corridor. She almost wondered if this was meant to be a street or avenue of some kind, but it felt more like walking down the bottom of a steep canyon. The sharp gray stones rose up on both sides, with uneven shelves and sharp points and long twisting cracks without any kind of logical pattern. When she looked closer, she saw oddly shaped red things like crystals or light bulbs at different heights and at seemingly random intervals, and in other places there were dark lines etched in the stone that might have been very large writing, half-covered in clumps of snow and ice.

Their surroundings seemed bizarre and random, but Maggie couldn’t help but feel that there was some kind of logic to this place, although that logic could not have been human. Every slab of stone under their feet, every carved edge of the walls, every aspect of the architecture, it all spoke of an unnatural intelligence beyond the comprehension of human beings. No matter where she looked, it seemed like the very substance of this place was designed to twist the mind and subvert her thoughts. Maggie didn’t want to stay there even one second longer than was necessary.

It was all clearly made by someone, but that someone was either not human or hopelessly insane. Maggie wasn’t convinced this place was literally Hell, like Eleanor believed it was, but it was not Earth, that was for sure. Some people liked to fantasize that men lived on the Moon or on the planet Mars, but Maggie had always felt that was just a silly fantasy. But now, standing on this world that did not look like anything she could recognize, she wasn’t so sure. Could they really have walked through that glowing magical doorway and emerged onto another planet, another world?

She said none of this out loud. None of them spoke at all as they made their way down the disturbing inhuman passageway. The wind howled and blew drifts of snow into the surrounding walls’ many nooks and corners. Maggie shivered a bit and switched her gun to her left hand so she could flex the fingers on her right and try to keep them from getting stiff.

They reached the intersection and stood in the middle of four diverging passages. Each direction looked pretty much the same as the others. The only sound was the eerie moan of the wind. There was no sign that anyone or anything had visited this place in a very long time.

“Damn, it’s cold,” Robert said. “We won’t last long in this weather.” He rubbed his hands together and carefully held his shotgun, making sure to touch as little of the bare metal as possible, which soon might be too cold for him to touch at all.

He looked to Eleanor and Walt. “How are you both holding up?”

“I’m okay,” Eleanor said, her breath billowing out. “It’s cold out here, but the Lord will keep me warm enough for now.”

Robert smiled at that, and said, “Walt, what about you?”

Walt was looking off into the distance. The wind ruffled his gray whiskers and he merely grunted and said, “I’ll be okay for now. But I reckon once the sun goes down, it’s gonna get colder.”

“Right,” Robert said. “By all means, let’s keep going, then.”

“So, which way?” Maggie asked.

Robert had a calculating look on his face, like he was thinking hard to try and solve a riddle. Finally he just shook his head. “I don’t know. They all look the same.”

“We must not get lost,” Eleanor pointed out. “If we can’t find our way back here, we might not be able to return home.”

“Good point,” Robert said.

“We should keep goin’ straight, then,” Walt said. “Less chance of gettin’ lost.”

They were all in agreement. Cautiously, they made their way forward, wincing each time the wind howled down the passage, the cold seeming to leech the heat right out of their bodies. But so far, Robert and the others did not seem to be suffering too much from the cold, but Maggie didn’t know how long they could hold out. She was dressed in warmer clothes, and she was already shivering. But unlike the others, she didn’t have some source of inner strength that kept them warm, if not physically then mentally. Eleanor had her faith, of course. Even in the cold, she seemed flush with heat and energy. Robert had his duty and his devotion to justice, and his overwhelming desire to find and rescue the kidnapped people. He would fight the cold for as long as possible. And as for Walt, Maggie wasn’t sure exactly what kept him going, whether it was greed or madness or desire for vengeance, but it seemed like nothing short of a full blizzard or avalanche would slow him down now.

As they made their way down the passage, they came upon a doorway set into the wall on their left. It was clearly meant to be a doorway as far as they could tell, but it was at least nine feet high, over all of their heads, and it doorway itself was slightly diagonal, like it was leaning to the side. After several moments checking it out, none of them could figure out a way to open it. It was like a solid slab of rock had been swung into place to block the entrance.

The more that Maggie looked around, the more she believed that this was truly another world. It didn’t look like a place that any human had a hand in making. She couldn’t quite explain why everything seemed wrong to her, but it had to do with all the random angles. Objects that she was familiar with – books, tools, weapons, or whatever – were usually made with straight lines or in recognizable geometric shapes, and even buildings and streets usually followed that kind of pattern. In every town she’d ever visited in her travels, the streets were straight and even, and the buildings were common and familiar shapes like squares and rectangles. She figured that was because it was easier to build things in those shapes, but the fact was that buildings were almost always made that way, and their doors and windows and roof tiles and everything else were always squares and rectangles as well.

But not here. Not in this place. In this place, everything was made at odd angles and in messed up shapes. The passageway they followed was like a jagged line, turning at sharp angles for no apparent reason, the stones that paved the ground were all weird shapes with too many sides, and fit together in a complex pattern that she couldn’t figure out. The walls and doorways were in uneven shapes that didn’t seem to have any reasonable purpose or function. The whole place seemed to defy some fundamental law of nature, like a plain square box that magically had seven flat sides.

Finally, they abandoned the doorway, since they didn’t want to waste any time and it didn’t seem like the door had been opened in ages. So far, they had not seen a single hint that anyone, human or otherwise, had ever been here. Maggie wondered how long they would keep searching before they gave up and were forced to return.

They came to another intersection. This time the path forked in two directions, one curving sharply to the left and the other veering to the right, and they could see farther down that the passage on the right crossed another corridor and split in several directions.

“Damn,” Robert muttered, looking down each passage. “This place like is a maze.”

Walt sighed loudly and said, “I ain’t seen no sign anyone’s ever been here before. We could walk around all day and not find ‘em.”

As if in response, the wind picked up and sent a frigid blast down the corridor, rippling their clothes and hair and chilling them to the bone.

Eleanor, ignoring the cold, stepped in front of them. She gazed down the passage to their right and held up the lantern, unmoving for a few moments, and then turned to the rest of the group.

“I think we should go this way,” she said. “I feel very strongly that what we seek is that way.”

Robert glanced at both Maggie and Walt, as if for confirmation, and then nodded. “That’s good enough for me. Lead the way, Sister.”

Farther ahead down the next passage was another doorway, sealed like the previous one. The heavy stone door was covered in weird black jagged letters, like runes from some ancient culture. Maggie didn’t want to look at them too closely, and thankfully neither did the others. Eleanor barely even glanced at the door as she led them to the end of the passage to the next intersection.

“Over there!” Eleanor said suddenly, pointing down the passage to their right.

Maggie had no idea what she was pointing at, the passage seemed no different than the others, bordered by uneven walls with disturbing shapes, caked in places with ice and snow. When neither Robert or Walt reacted either, Eleanor hurried past them and ran ahead, forcing everyone else to follow her. She ran about halfway down the meandering passage until she stopped in her tracks.

Wedged tightly in one of the wall’s crooked alcoves was a body. Maggie didn’t know how Eleanor had even seen it. It was a man dressed in dirty boots, blue denim pants, and a gray shirt. He was dead, frozen to death, his body covered in a thin layer of frost. His arms were wrapped around himself and his knees were up against his chest in a pathetic, futile attempt to hold off the bitter cold.

Maggie felt sick to think what the man had gone through. He must have escaped somehow and come this way trying to find shelter, but had gotten lost in this maze and finally collapsed here, terrified and alone, getting weaker and weaker until the cold had finally finished him off. Maggie could not help but wonder if the same fate was in the future for her.

“Walt?” Robert asked when no one spoke. “Is this Jake Hodges?”

“Yeah,” Walt muttered. He seemed like he wanted to say something else, but decided against it. He put his hands on his hips and turned away in disgust.

Eleanor knelt down and began to pray for the man who had died. Maggie turned to Robert and said, “We must be going the right way then, aren’t we? This man must have been taken that way, and ran back here hoping to find that … that doorway or whatever it is.”

“Right,” Robert said, nodding. “We’re still on the right track. Eleanor, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but are you finished? We need to keep moving.”

She stood up and made the sign of the cross. “Yes, I’ve commended his soul to Heaven. We may continue.”

“What’s the use?” Walt grunted. “We came here to find these folks and now two of ‘em are already dead. Girl’s probably dead too.”

“We don’t know that,” Robert said.

“This man was still alive when they brought him here,” Maggie said. “He wasn’t killed by whatever kidnapped him, he died of the cold. If he had managed to find the doorway, he might have made it back to the mine and survived.”

“And if he was alive,” Robert said, “then Hannah might be alive too.”

“We must keep going,” Eleanor said, looking at each of them with an intent look on her face. “We have no choice. I believe that we are carrying out God’s will. It is our destiny to face what lies ahead, no matter the cost.”

“Well, I didn’t come all this way for nothing,” Robert said, holding up his shotgun. “If Hannah is still alive, I’m not giving up until we find her and bring her home.”

“Me neither,” Maggie said.

Walt shrugged, still facing away from them. “Yeah, okay. If that’s what you all want.”

Robert frowned at the comment, but didn’t respond to it. He flexed his fingers and adjusted his hat. “Lead the way, Eleanor,” he said.

Eleanor took the lead, taking them down the long winding passage, holding the lantern high despite the fact that her hand must have been numb holding onto its metal handle. She was fearless, even more dedicated and determined than Robert was, and marched down the passage until they came to another junction. Eleanor turned a sharp left, barely even slowing her pace, as if she already knew the way.

Maybe she does, Maggie thought to herself. Maybe God really is speaking to her.

The passageway suddenly opened up into a large circular courtyard fifty yards in diameter. All around, the walls still towered over them, seeming to lean inward, as if the entire area was closing in like a huge mouth about to swallow them up. But what drew the attention of Maggie and the others was the shattered, broken object that took up much of the space of the courtyard. It was a statue, or at least it used to be. Now it was a jumbled, weather-worn pile of stone. If Maggie had to guess, the statue at one time must have been as tall as the walls around them, but now the rubble spread across an area forty feet long. It must have been a figure, perhaps one of the builders of this alien city? It was impossible to tell. The broken chunks were covered in ice, obscuring their carved details.

Maggie was rendered speechless at the sight of the collapsed statue, and just stared at it in wonder. This statue had not fallen down recently, that was clear. She knew a little about ancient ruins in places like Arabia and Egypt, but she had a feeling like this statue and this entire mazelike alien city were far older than she could really comprehend. The weight of ages seemed to lean against her, making her whole like seem tiny and insignificant.

At the other end of the courtyard was a doorway, but this one was not sealed shut. It was open to reveal a pitch black entranceway leading into what appeared to be an irregular domed structure. The doorway was arched and rounded on one side, like three-fourths of a circle, and lined in dark red swirls etched into the stone.

“We must go through there,” Eleanor said as the wind whipped around her, causing swirls and eddies of snow and ice to spin around them like miniature tornadoes.

“It’ll be good to get out of the cold, at least,” Robert said.

They walked around the destroyed statue and approached the doorway. It was too dark to see anything inside, and to Maggie it felt like they were entering a featureless black void. But Robert was right about getting out of the cold. As soon as they crossed the threshold into the entrance, they immediately felt a sense of relief that they were out of the blowing wind.

Eleanor’s lantern shone ahead, illuminating a dark gray floor and the outline of high walls, but the interior was not entirely dark. There were spots of light from high above them, which Maggie realized were just holes in the ceiling. As their eyes adjusted to the gloom, more features became visible, strange bulges in the walls, like pipes or tubes, and unidentifiable objects suspected in places from the ceiling.

As they slowly walked deeper into the structure, they began to notice a dull red glow coming from seams in the walls, like strips of hot metal. The interior seemed to be simultaneously both vast and huge, and also frighteningly narrow and claustrophobic. Maggie thought she could hear a low hum coming from all around them, but she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just the wind outside. The long dark shadows seemed to writhe against the light of the lantern. The whole chamber seemed to throb and pulse like the heartbeat of a living thing. Maggie could almost hear the structure thrumming in her ears, and she caught herself glancing around, sensing ghostlike figures at the edge of her vision. The doorway they had entered from seemed far away, even though they had barely walked a few yards inside.

“I don’t … I don’t like this place,” she said, her voice unsteady. Her pistol trembled in her grip and swung in all directions, aiming at shadows.

Robert had his shotgun firm against his shoulder. “I can feel it too. There’s something here.”

“I don’t see nothin’,” Walt grunted, but his pickaxe was raised and his eyes betrayed his own panic.

Eleanor was whispering to herself, her arm raised high to shine the light from the lantern as widely as possible. It almost seemed like the light was shining brighter, illuminating the darkest corners of the chamber, although the more it revealed, the worse the sensation of panic became. Maggie wanted it to become dark again so she couldn’t see.

Something emerged from the darkness. Maggie was certain that there had been a solid wall there just moments before, but now the darkness seemed to pull away like a curtain being drawn, revealing what lay behind. Crawling fingers of shadow squirmed at them and then pulled back. Maggie raised her gun immediately and pulled the trigger.

It was not a living being, but in this insane world Maggie couldn’t even be sure of that. It was a metal thing, a mechanical device of some kind, but it moved like a giant spider, with four hinged legs and a shining metal body with a large glowing orb in the center like a single demonic eye. Maggie’s bullet struck the thing right in the center of that eye, but the bullet clanged off and ricocheted, and then the machine lunged at her.

Before she could fire a second time, Robert was shouting for her to get down, and he suddenly grabbed her and pulled her to the ground. The air above them hissed and sizzled, and Maggie smelled something burning. She caught a glimpse of something at the far end of the chamber, something like a tall gray column or pillar. A glowing red orb was on top of it, similar to the one on the metal thing. Suddenly the eye flashed and a red beam shot out, scorching the wall.

Maggie could do nothing about that. She rolled onto her side and drew her other pistol, firing instead at the terrifying machine rushing in their direction. This time she aimed for the body, and when that failed, she targeted its legs. Two more of the metal things scampered out from the shadows and she shot at them too.

Robert got to his feet and blasted his shotgun at the pillar, breaking off chunks of stone. The red eye swung in his direction and fired another beam of red light. Robert cried out in pain, falling to one knee, but he kept shooting despite the pain.

Walt howled like a madman, slamming his pickaxe into more of the mechanical creatures as they swarmed from the wall like gleaming steel insects. His axe seemed to do more damage than Maggie’s guns, smashing their thin metal legs and punching through their metal bodies. He batted them aside almost effortlessly, leaving them smashed and broken in his wake.

Eleanor was calling out once more, swinging her metal cross at any machines that got too close to her. The pillar fired a beam at her but it went over her shoulder, just barely missing her. Robert kept shooting at it, and suddenly the pillar seemed to wobble on its foundation, breaking off more chunks of stone. As Eleanor’s voice reached its crescendo, the pillar broke in half, spewing fire, and fell over, breaking into pieces.

Maggie’s pistol clicked empty, and she got to her feet as the last of the metal things tried to attack her. She kicked it away, hurting her foot in the process, and then Walt rushed over to bury his pickaxe right in the gleaming eye. Sparks flew and the machine sputtered and died.

Walt backed away, panting for breath, his eyes wild. He looked completely deranged, and Maggie involuntarily stepped away from him, fearing me might turn his pickaxe on her. He bared his teeth and sucked in breaths, then closed his eyes tightly as if struggling to control himself. With a growl, he yanked out his pickaxe and stomped away, cursing and swearing.

Robert was hurt. He was still down on one knee, leaning forward with his shotgun propped up beside him and his free hand holding gingerly onto his side, his face twisted in pain.

Maggie rushed over to him and called for Eleanor. Walt came over too, although he didn’t seem inclined to help anyone.

“I’m … I’m okay,” Robert said through a grimace. He held out his arm for Maggie to help him to his feet, but she knelt down beside him instead and put her hand on his shoulder.

“You’re not okay,” she said, concerned. “Obviously, you’re not okay. That thing fired something at you, I saw it.”

“It’s all right,” he insisted. “It burned me, that’s all.” Maggie pried Robert’s hand away from his side to reveal that his shirt was burned straight through, and the skin underneath was crispy and red, as if he had leaned against a hot stove. But it wasn’t a terrible injury, and after a few moments he seemed to recover enough to stand.

Maggie helped him to his feet and said, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“It’s just a burn. It hurts, but I’ll be okay.”

Eleanor wiped her brow and came over to look. “Robert, if you think it’s necessary, I could pray for you again, like I did before.”

Robert forced a smile. “Thank you, Eleanor, but no. I’ll be fine. I think you should save whatever healing powers you have until we really need them.”

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