[excerpt from Poets in Hell]

Words

by Chris Morris

Words, words, words.

— William Shakespeare, Hamlet

In the beginning was the Logos, the Word. In the beginning come always the words. Words are the mortar of the mind.

“Look, you!” J the Yahwist, first author of the Old Testament, exhorted empty air, waving her hands about her on a blasted heath encircled by dark and cold.

As in ancient times, this command brings light out of darkness, souls out of nowhere. All the heath fills with them, the detritus of the damned, singing and keening and rhyming aloud at the top of their lungs, each trying to outshout the other: the prolix, the wordy damned of perdition. Here are the teeming illiterati, the poor poets of pride and ignorance, angry and bleating like sheep at the altar, romancers of death, hoping for slaughter, dreaming of surcease.

J would give them peace if she could, but she couldn’t: peace was oblivion, oblivion was escape, and escape was unattainable in hell. Death could be had, and cheap, but never lasted long: no sinning soul could win its way to heaven’s grace.

J’s god reigned as a jealous god, tempestuous; unfair, equivocal. As her skin glowed caramel, neither white nor yellow, brown or black, so her eyes were inconclusively hazel, flecking every color in creation. Like her god on high, set up from eternity before the earth was made, she belonged nowhere in damnation, not to this New Hell nor any other. She was only visiting here. Or so she thought; so she hoped.

“Look, you,” J called a second time aloud, and a thousand heads turned her way; a thousand mouths clamped shut as she began to tell her tale to their minds’ eyes.

Invariably, these words are her signal to infernity that she is ready to begin. Inevitably, those words summon not only story, but the Deceiver, a lord of hell himself.

Sensing joy, incensed by pleasure, now comes Satan, white- winged and glorious, amid his host of fallen angels, circling to land, streaming intolerance and wrath on all the fools below, who howl the more.

At times like these, J misses Solomon. That wise warrior-king (her fellow writer of words worth hearing) would enjoin even such rabble as this to vie with the lords of hell themselves, if she’d but ask him.

Of course, she won’t: In hell, every plan goes wrong and every good miscarries.

Down swept Satan and his five stalwarts, surrounding J in a buffet of wings, smelling like salvation. Bodies for gasping on hot nights under starshine; ruination in infernity was their allure: not boys or girls, but more than either. Encounters with great Satan’s cohort had brought not only Eve, but J, to heel before. She tried to close her nostrils to their perfume, avert her eyes from their magnificence. Each of the six carried a sack.

In those sacks might be the prizes most desired by the thousands gathered here. But as J watched with covetous eyes, all six sacks disappeared. Her heart sank.

She had to know:

“Infernal Majesty,” spake J, “have you heard my plea and brought them? All these faithless self-aggrandizers seek only what I hope you have in your sacks, and more beggars await behind them. They will pay any price, commit any sin, no matter how foul, to get what they came for.”

“Get salvation?” scoffed Samael, the angel of death, most beautiful and deadly of Satan’s warriors cast down by an angry god. “Not for them. Not ever. Torture, yes, as suits their passions. Punishment, always, befitting their crimes. But you know that, J, yet you ask this favor for such rabble? You seek to aid these pustules of soul, these walking pots of stupidity mixed with arrogance, these insatiable nobodies who lust for fame? What do they want, all these self-anointed bards who seek to win our poetical contests? Don’t they know the winners already are decided?”

“What do they want?” J repeated, aghast that Samael did not know. “Not their soul’s salvation, mighty Samael; neither forgiveness nor manumission. Words. Words immortal. Words of joy, words of grief, words of power, words of penance, words of passion. Words beyond their ken. Words to fill their mouths. Words to dis- guise. Words to make an idiot sound wise. Words they don’t already know. Words they’ll never understand. And a pronunciation guide, so none will hear how ignorant they are when they speak the words of others.”

“I’ll give them words of death,” offered Samael. “Words of pestilence to rival Erra, plague god of Babylon. Words to rot them in their boots. Words of contrit–”

“Silence, Samael.” His Infernal Majesty, the greatest fallen angel, raised a hand which Leonardo would have envied. “I brought the words you wanted, J. Those pretenders” — he motioned to the throng — “will use these words to great mischief, to cheat and con- spire, to control the outcome of their poetry competitions, until no prize awarded signifies anything but greed sated and dross claimed grand. After all, ’twas I who urged the poets to revile heaven, and enticed the fools in hell to war against all that glows Above and gloats down on us, below.”

With that, Satan reached behind his glimmery wings and brought forth first a white sack, then a purple sack and a blue sack; then a red sack, a green sack and a brown sack, and deposited them in a pile before J. Lastly, the devil brought forth a black-furred, fanged and clawed thing with leathery wings, who with lashing tail hopped atop the sacks to guard them, jaws fluttering a kill-bite and growling.

“Michael, my familiar, will guard you as you distribute the words these poseurs crave, these who will defame any more articulate than they. Thus hell will be well served, once they start falling upon each other in envy and in rage. And I bring helpers for you. Your turn now, J: ‘Look, you.’”

Hearing those words – her own, from former times – J finds no choice but to peer where Satan points, across the slope to the heath. And what she sees brings tears to eyes that had witnessed the bush burn and waters part and a woman turn to a pillar of salt: She spies a man trudging up the hill toward them, broad-shouldered, but not Solomon. This man wears a sour expression, yet stares through eyes like a dog’s, in a young face with lips born for fondling words.

John Milton ascended the hill in silence.

As she waited with Satan and Samael and Michael, the drooling familiar, and four other bating-winged angels of hell’s highest echelon, J was struck cold, frightened that she had doomed these many souls on the heath to a fate worse than their greed alone had bought them:

For Satan was correct. Those words, in the mouths of illiterati claiming to be poets, would be like arms to soldiers, ropes to hang- men: they would trigger the worst offenses locked inside each and every soul she saw.

Which was why Satan’s cadre stayed so quiet today: they’d already won. The most frightful thing about these fallen angels, lords of the newer hells, was their clear sight, undimmed by wants and dreams or even hopes.

Satan’s third of all the armies once in heaven had lost everything, but gained the kingdom of the damned. J wondered whether they found solace in the Deep, in the cold and the dark, in hearts that had looked upon the face of the Almighty, then fallen from grace. Fallen forever, ending here, where time itself is uncertain, and Paradise glares down unforgiving from its ruddy vault.

Before them stood the first thousand greedy souls who’d crowded onto the heath at J’s command, and a multitude behind them. Vanity beyond measure lured them toward celebrity: these insolent souls shunned excellence for an easier game, one they could win by fraud. These knew no muses, heard no songs, couldn’t com- pose an original line or rhyme or couplet on pain of being chopped asunder.

This was J’s mistake: She had invited all these pretenders here, for easy snaring by the Prince of Darkness. Now J felt the trap close upon her own ankles, the grip of horror squeeze her chest. In that crowd thronged no prophets worth heeding, no anointed souls to save mankind for another day. And up the hill came Milton (who’d once made this devil his hero), his cadre of assistants close behind.

She’d known the Son of the Morning meant to abuse as many doomed souls as he could, so the auditors from Above (Erra and his Sibitti, seven travesties, sons of heaven and earth and most deadly personified weapons) would return on high, proclaiming their job done, hell duly made more hellish.

Guilt wracked J, bringing fresh tears to her eyes. So she blinked twice before she realized who made up the group trailing Milton as he climbed: Enheduanna, the black-tressed Sumerian priestess, humanity’s first poetess and Sargon of Akkad’s daughter; Helen of Sparta, about whom too much had been written and done; and beside her, Lord Byron, dragging his right leg and accompanied by Boat- swain, his big black dog. Then came Sappho, her hand on Homer’s arm to guide the blind bard’s steps. Behind them, scourges slapping on their leather palms, marched Satan’s daughter Sin, and Hekate, Judge of Erebos.

“O Lord,” whispered J as softly as she could, “let my words not bring death and suffering and madness to these benighted souls.”

But not softly enough. As Milton crested the hilltop, with flaring-nosed Enheduanna close behind and humming, Satan said to J, “Poetess, do you call upon me for aid? Or upon some other?”

And like the thousand assembled, J was well and duly caught: she must either admit she called upon the Almighty of her youth and living days, or lie and beg yet another boon from Satan. All these centuries, all these millennia, J had told only the truth. The maw of entrapment bit her and chewed her and swallowed her up, spitting out before the Father of Lies a chastened creature in her stead. She couldn’t leave these precious sacks of words, meant to power the dreams of disheartened souls, in the hands of just anyone. It was she who’d convened these poor poets — to help them, give them hope.

So she said, dropping her eyes in shame, “I call upon you, Infernal Majesty, and you alone.”

At her words, somewhere in J’s soul a door slammed shut, a bolt-hole closed, and hope with all its sweet songs left her, locked outside any refuge her heart could reach.

Straight up to her came John Milton, with his cherub’s face and a skill as great as her own, this towering intellect in a boy’s body. And behind him stumbled Byron, determined to drag himself through hell and back a hundred times, if he could but taste true glory; and Homer, who had done more than any to shape man’s destiny; and Helen, shamefaced and bloody; and Sappho, who’d met every tick of life with a hungry heart.

The devil’s bat-cat hissed and bushed its tail and pronked aside, so each soul in Milton’s entourage could take a sack from the pile: Milton took the white sack with its words of purest inspiration; Enheduanna took the purple sack containing words of leader- ship and honor; Byron took the green sack holding words exhorting purpose; Sappho took the blue sack, full of words to set hearts flying; Homer, with Sappho’s aid, took the red sack with its words of blood and courage; Helen took the brown sack which held saddest words for woe and for regretting. Behind them, the snaky sorceress Sin and lithe Hekate, goddess of the crossroads, beat their palms with the scourges of time.

As he hefted his white sack, with a little bow, Milton said to J, “I am so honored to meet you, who started all our hearts churning and rhymes burning. I hate to think it’s at sight of me you weep, great one. You have the words, poetess. So good of you to help the ungifted. But, as I said once in my meager poem, Paradise Lost, ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n./ What matter where, if I be still the same. . .’ Cheer up! We’ll take words to the wordless, syllables given special value by our august convocation. What more, in hell, could the dumb souls of the illiterati crave?”

And so this they did, with the fallen angels smirking behind their wings at one and all: Satan’s plan for humanity’s ignominy, set in motion by the grandest poets in perdition, would now play out aright.