Hell's Detective

Chapter Thirty-five- Skeletons and Slaves

Sand.

It was everywhere, forming an uneven terrain of pointed mountains like waves in a wild sea. There were probably more mountains beyond those and even more again. Sand was in the air, too, being whipped back and forth like a rag doll in the whistling wind.

All in all, there was a lot of sand.

As Ingleseid stepped out of the elevator, his feet sank down a good half a meter.  The heat seared into him, went straight through his clothes and attacked his skin.

They made their way across the dunes, left the lonely elevator behind. The sand clawed at their ankles and tried to drag them down like quicksand, but they kept going. On and on until the elevator was just a speck on the horizon.

It was getting hotter. Slowly, not enough to notice at first. They were in an oven and someone was raising the temperature.

He glanced at Holly. Her face was drenched with sweat, her breathing laboured. Samael didn't seem to be affected at all. The sun got higher and higher as they walked. It was burning in the middle of the sky when they found the people.

There were hundreds of them, thousands. Barely clothed, chained together, bits of their skin peeling off to reveal pink, fleshy muscle. Towering above them like Gods, stood gleaming statues, half finished, of dangerous looking, tunic-clad demons glaring down at the souls as they worked. Ingleseid noticed one that looked suspiciously like Ammelius.

Shaky looking platforms wove their way up them, and souls hammered away at the hulking stone as demons shouted at them, cracking a whip every so often.

Holly, Samael, and Ingleseid slid down the dune and pushed themselves to their feet. If they could get around the construction site, they might be able to make it out unnoticed.

A demon whipping a collapsed soul swivelled its shrivelled, wart ridden face towards them and shouted.

Well, crap.

Ingleseid grabbed Samael and hoisted him up as he and Holly ran, tearing through the sand as the sun glared down at them like ants with a magnifying glass.

A good few feet away, a dozen or so demons roared, gnashing their teeth and curling their hands around the whips at their belts.

Ingleseid's head was spinning. Everything around him was slowly melting away. The shoulder of his shirt caught fire. He screamed. Behind him, Holly collapsed to her knees.

"Abner, I can't," she rasped with a dry, dead throat.

His legs gave out. Sand whistled into his mouth. It Sprinkled into his eyes, and they burned at the touch. Samael stood above the two of them, gazing down blankly. The demons' cries were getting louder.

This was it.

He was going to die.

In the moments before his vision faded, and he melted into the heat and the sand, he saw something.

Water.

A pool, barely bigger than a pond, lying a few feet away, sparkling under the sun.  With the last of his strength, he pulled Holly through the sand. She moaned weakly. He couldn't stand, had to crawl, heaving her along beside him. Welts boiled to the surface of his shoulder, popping in sharp bursts. He was going to make it.

He threw Holly in with limp, groaning arms. She sank into the water and disappeared. He held out his hands, and Samael wrapped his arms around him. As a clawed hand closed around Ingleseid's shoulder, he fell, and the blissful, cool water melted around him. The wind was rushing through his hair as he was falling and-

His back crashed into something. A lot of somethings. Cold, slimy somethings. His hand closed around one, and he picked it up.

A skull.

He had landed on a mountain of skulls.

Samael let go of him and examined the skull with a lot more interest than was probably healthy.

They were in a cave, that much was obvious. A giant, gaping cave like the mouth of a man-eating beast. Dotted along the murky waterfront were more islands of skulls that melted into the shadows dancing on the ceiling.

Ingleseid tested his shoulder. It was fine. Not even a mark.

Holly was breathing heavily behind him. She slid down the base of the mountain, skulls toppling into the water in her wake. She dipped her hand in.

"Holly, don't!" Ingleseid yelled.

Her head snapped up. "What?"

"Don't touch the water!"

"Why?"

A grey, skeletal hand burst out in a spray of seaweed and clutched her wrist, dragging it down. She gave a cry, grabbed one of the skulls and smashed it across the hand until the fingers snapped off, and it slithered back into the murky depths.

She blinked several times. "Don't touch the water. Got it." She looked around. "Then how are we supposed to get across?"

No sooner had the words left her mouth than a little wooden rowboat drifted towards them out of the mist as though being pushed by invisible hands.

"I think that's how," Ingleseid said.