CH 20 - Questions and Theories

“Flying ships...” Logan looked at her, as if for confirmation. Karen nodded back.

“I ... did not see that one coming,” Logan admitted. “And I definitely don’t remember reading about flying ships in Dante’s Inferno.”

“No, of course not.” Alan rose to his feet. “Well then, if it is still your intention to meet the others, I should return and prepare them first. Otherwise, arriving armed as you are, would only frighten them and achieve no good purpose. Please allow me that courtesy.”

“Ok,” Logan replied. “You do that. Come back tomorrow and you can show me the way and introduce me to your friends.”

“Agreed.” Alan held up the small crystal in his hand. “May I leave this here to charge?”

“Yes?” Logan replied cautiously.

They both watched as Alan walked over tho the orange glowing crystal cluster and place his own smaller crystal among them. Moments later it too began to glow a bright orange. With a gentle tug, he pulled a different small crystal loose that continued to glow with the same bright, orange light.

“For the walk back,” Alan explained.

Logan just watched in stunned silence. In the last minutes, he had learned of flying ships, Circle hopping through Hell, wandering neighbors, and detachable crystals. Information overload made his head spin.

Alan paused just before walking off into the darkness and turned to Logan. The crystal in his hand cast eerie shadows across his face.

“Regarding your stated intention to escape out of Hell. Allow me to leave you with this thought for our next conversation. What if I told you Hell was not supposed to exist?”

Logan looked around and chuckled. “Friend, I hate to break it to you...”

Alan smiled. “Yes, yes. And yet, consider that this place we see around us, this Christian Hell, was not once mentioned in Christian teachings during the first four hundred years of being an established religion. It is later mentioned in the various versions of the Bible, of course, but every one of those examples is a mistaken translation of one of four words, none of which accurately translates to a fiery domain of eternal punishment.”

Alan stared at him and smiled in the orange glow of the crystal. “In other words, my friend, about two thousand years ago, the church fathers made it all up.” He tapped the side of his head and winked. “Think about it.”

Karen stood beside Logan and watched as the strange, little man turned a corner and slipped away into darkness. Logan startled her by suddenly leaping into motion to strap his armor on and pocket a handful of pebbles off of the ground.

“Where are you going?”

“To follow,” he answered.

Karen shivered and seemed to shrink in on herself. “You’re going to leave me here alone? You don’t have to go. He seems nice enough. Besides...” She offered a smile of unspoken, wicked promise. “I’m sure we could find more interesting things to do right here.”

“Perhaps his people are no threat and perhaps not.” Logan buckled his blades around his waist. “I’m not taking any chances. If they are a danger, I intend to have the advantage of surprise.”

He walked over to the crystal cluster and bent down for a closer look. Carefully, he tugged at the smaller crystals. Sure enough, one came loose in his hands, glowing a bright orange. “Cool.”

He looked back at Karen, staring at him wide-eyed. “Hey,” he grinned at her and winked. “Remember that you are Karen, the Slayer. You got this and I will be back before you know it.”

She threw her arms around him and planted a kiss on his lips. “Just be careful, ok?”

Logan moved off into unexplored darkness as quickly as stealth would allow and tried not to think about how many things could go wrong with this spur-of-the-moment plan. Cave exploration came with serious risks, especially in a rush. The ground was not level or smooth. He climbed, crawled, and squeezed through the random flow of stone and sediment where serious injury could happen at a moment’s notice.

Side passages emerged out of the shadow. The faint sound of movement ahead kept him oriented but getting hopelessly lost was a real, and terrifying, danger. He laid pebbled out in an arrow shape at every new passage to help map the way back home.

It was a great relief to finally catch up to the orange nimbus of Alan’s borrowed light crystal. Logan smothered his own light as much as he could and still be able to see where to put his feet. From that point, the greatest danger was destroying what little trust they had managed to build with this new neighbor.

If Alan discovered him sneaking along behind, the man would have every justification to think the worst. It might start the exact conflict Logan hoped to avoid. Alan was careful, looking back over his shoulder as if worried about the very thing Logan was attempting to do.

Logan felt guilty about it, like he was the bad guy in this scenario but not, he realized, as guilty as he would have felt only a few weeks ago. Life in Hell was changing him in more ways than one. The fight for survival was reshaping him, body and mind. Back into the mindset of the soldier he had been on the was-torn battlefields of Afghanistan. Weeks of hunting had melted the flab of easy living off of his body until nothing but lean, hard muscle remained. Of greater concern was the changes he could not see or understand.

What did I do to Karen?

Logan thought back on all the women he had been with in his life. There had been more than a few. Ever since hitting his growth spurt at seventeen, Logan had never had many problems attracting female attention. He knew his way around a woman’s body, but this had been something entirely new.

Never before had he fucked a woman into unconsciousness! Much less, what had happened immediately after. Something he could only define as ... a transformation.

Logan had watched it happen while he kept a worried watch on Karen as she lay sleeping. Over the course of a few hours, her body had begun to change. Karen’s complexion and hair had lost that pale wash of color so common amongst the few damned souls he had seen. The circles under her eyes had vanished. By the time she had woken, Logan could almost swear she looked...

Almost alive, he realized, nearly stumbling on the rough tunnel floor in shock.

And, of course, he had abandoned her almost immediately after she had woken, to stalk a man who had offered them no threat. With all that was happening, should he have stayed to look after her?

No, he decided. It was a calculated risk, but he could not afford the luxury of assuming strangers were not a threat. All Logan could do was tackle one problem at a time and have faith in the strength of his females to take care of themselves. Both Karen and Beauty were strong in their own right. He had to trust in that, and in them.

Alan led him on a merry chase through twisting passages before eventually stepping out into a second, large cavern. A fissure in the ceiling allowed a slim ray of daylight in. Two clusters of crystal, both smaller than the one in Logan’s cavern, glowed a pale beige. Between the two and the light spilling in through the ceiling from outside, there was enough illumination to drive the blackness back and see a large, blocky shape against the far cavern wall.

Logan looked but could not believe what he was seeing. He remembered a vacation to Greece during his second deployment and a visit to the ancient ruins of the Parthenon, still standing after countless centuries, with its many columns of marble and peaked roof. Here, buried in this cavern below the blasted landscape of Hell, he was seeing it again.

Couldn’t be the Parthenon, he realized. This building is smaller and not nearly as ruined.

Three, low steps led up to a platform that wrapped around the building, lined with thick, tapered columns of what did appear to be marble. The columns supported a triangular roof decorated with a band of elaborate carvings Logan could not identify from so far away. The entire structure was canted at a slight angle, perhaps from a long-ago earthquake.

Even more strange, he could only see about twenty feet and one open doorway of what should have been a long, rectangular building. If it was a replica of the Parthenon, then it should have been more than a hundred feet long. Yet, only that small front section was visible. The rest of the structure looked to vanish into the raw bedrock of the cavern wall, almost like the fake building fronts Hollywood built on studio lots for filming Western movies.