The cave brought us to the muddy banks of a lake, and source of the foul stink. The placid water was congealed like week old gravy, and over it, I noticed over fifty arms reaching out of the murky sauce.
The semi-solid lake stretched as far as the eye could see to a lingering blanket of red fog. The sky overhead was a weird, rippling mirror of jelly, reflecting all us sinners underneath it. "Truly another world,” gawked Harmony.
Stepping foot on a muddy shore, we soon arrived at the marching men, a parade of soldiers as long as the lake itself. Millions, perhaps billions, and not one without a uniform or weapon. Harmony informed us that the diversity of this cue spanned the entire history of the Earth and other Planets. British redcoats soldiered behind modern day marines, whose khaki outfits could easily camouflage them in the woods or forests of the Distinct Earth. Scattered Roman legions followed those hollow faces and dull coloured uniforms of the Great War. The American, Russian and Chinese civil wars were represented, the French and American Revolutions too. Those of alien kind were varied in appearance, immeasurable in number, and spread indiscriminately amongst humans. There were loathsome looking creepy crawlies; a brutish race of walking tall Rhino; what can only be described as a bear having a conversation with a cricket half his size, and others with as many eyes as teeth. Those souls not soldiers sat a picture of melancholy, their spirits vanquished by a lingering bitterness in the air and heart.
We moved diligently passed and ever present along the shore was the chattering teeth and waggling tongues — strangers getting acquainted with neighbours, alien conversing with human, whilst others remained in solemn, regretful reflection.
"Called me out a cheat!" one complained to another. "Nobody calls me a cheat!"
"How do you think I feel mate," came the reply; "my missus fell down the stairs but they claim I pushed her!"
Through and around them we wandered. "How can they stand this wretched filth?" asked a disgusted Eddinray, pegging two fingers over his nostrils.
"More to the point," I said, "what are they waiting for?"
"Some wait to cross the lake,” answered Kat, always ahead. "Others, the soldiers, remain in step without motive, and without question."
"Do they eat?" I pried, careful not to touch them. "What can they eat?"
"Plenty to go around…” said Kat, with a straightforward kick at the glob by his boot.
Bombarded by the constant gripes of these damned, it was hard not to sympathize. None that we passed could possibly conceive why they deserved such torture; every one had justification why they should not be suffering here, how they did not deserve it.
"Think harder,” Kat said to one lamenting old man. Our leader then reminded us to have no pity, and that every soul who marched or lay hopeless in mud was here for a very good reason, the guilty secrets best kept to themselves.
There was a sudden outcry when two men broke free from their march. One wore a swastika armband over his dirty uniform; the other was dressed in an R.A.F officer's suit with all the stripes. Rolling on the mud, they swapped insults and punches, and Kat held his arm across us to prevent any intervention.
"Their business," he hissed, “is none of ours."
Their feud came to a savage conclusion. The Nazi sat atop the squiggling officer, grasped the nearest boulder and pummelled his fellow pugilists skull to squash; and as the victorious man recovered over his victim's disappearing chest, a tiny orb of light arose from that body. The Nazi and crowd paid no attention to this delicate star of plasma slipping into the mire; they had seen it too many times before.
***
A middle-aged woman stood solitary in the lake, up to her knees in the gravy. With a constipated expression and great panting breaths, she bent over then waft the water between her thighs.
"My baby!" she cried, hysterical. "Push! Push!"
Passing, we shunned her sight at the shore, but this only increased her howls for attention.
"Some towels young man!" she begged me. "I'm having a baby! A child, you hear!"
Harmony noticed a flat stomach on the confused woman and returned a queasy smile.
"Angel girl!" she continued. "Help deliver my baby! I cannot do this alone!"
"Do not stop,” Kat urged. "Move."
"Wait! Wait!" the woman pleaded. "Please don't leave me!"
She let out a final, agonizing screech, before parting the sludge between her legs.
"Oh my God! Someone, someone has stolen my baby! My baby boy!"
Manic, she plunged herself into the sticky waters…and was never seen again.
Fights spilled more frequently out of the cue — commonplace and best ignored.
The mundane memories of my previous life were fading, but amongst the forsaken faces here, I saw one that I recognized from the old days. His name was Willie Castle, a down and out I'd pass on the streets, holding out his begging cup for loose change — he was a thief and convicted sex offender, and alive when I last laid eyes on him.
I hoped to avoid him now, but an exiled angel, a legend samurai and a glimmering knight tends to attract the eye. "Well, well, well!" he heckled. "Look who it is — Detective Fox! It is! Remember me, Fox? Over here! Oh, I see you! Don't think I don't!"
I stared ahead, purposely upping up the pace.
"You know that fellow?" asked Eddinray. "Seems to know you, doesn't he? Who is he?"
"Don't know him,” I answered, plain faced. "He's got it wrong."
We could walk fast but Castle could shout louder, and shout he did.
"Thought you were above the law, didn't you Fox? I read all about it! That's right, ignore me you murdering bastard! You're no better than me! I always knew it! Suffer in the shit you prick!"
"Don't know him,” I repeated, until his abuse was out of earshot.
Kat, Harmony and Eddinray did not pry into my past, but they were now suspicious.
***
The terrain sucked in our legs and there was no escaping the congestion of bodies. We four grouped close through this dire market of pushing and squabbling. Harmony politely excused herself to every soul she happened to graze, and Eddinray and I followed her angelic example. Kat, however, bulldozed the throng out of his way, thumping any mug he didn't like. At one low point, he tackled a dainty man to the dirt, and an agitated crowd responded. "What you playing at?" bellowed one, irate character. "Want trouble? I've got what you want right here you pussy!"
Despite the heightening threats of the crowd, Kat maintained his bull in a china shop approach. Harmony called for him to relax, but her appeals went in one ear and out the other.
"Hey you!" an angry voice suddenly announced. "I'm talking to you shit head!"
Kat stopped — not on the man's request — but for us to catch him up. As Kat waited, the owner of the voice stepped out from the layers of bunched stink. He was a gangly 8ft tall, with a hairy face smeared with shit, and fatty gut wobbling down from his bare chest.
"Let's go little man!" he jeered. "Try me on for size fucko!"
Harmony, Eddinray and I came behind this towering man, but his thick arms prevented our progress.
"Don't,” I warned him, but paying me no mind, the man continued to taunt Kat, and on matters like these, he is always happy to oblige.
The samurai approached with a sunken frown, and we companions closed our eyes to the bloody inevitable. The man threw the first punch, and our burly Kat made his second death look like the most elementary thing in the world. He ducked the swinging fist and struck the katana deep into this man's bowels. The sword was then removed with a length of curdled intestines tangled around the steel. Harmony held the vomit in her mouth as the impressed multitudes whispered news of a man with a talent for murder. From this point on, the crowd separated in droves from the short man with the shorter temper.
***
The fuss concluded at a pier, and ambivalent souls at the head of the cue stood still; none keen to stay, nor see more of Hell.
Docked at the end of this narrow wooden pier was our transportation across the lake: a raft slightly smaller than Eddinray's, which the knight was delighted to point out. A figure, covered from head to foot in a raggedy black cloth bent decrepitly on the bobbling craft, leaning all his weight on a trusty oar of solid oak.
"Who'sss next?" he asked, slithering.
Kat took clanking steps on old wood, and reaching the ferryman, he was not repulsed by this creature's appearance underneath that cloak. There was no skin on his face, no hair or a single blotch of blood, simply skeleton. Skeleton with joints connected by wrapping snakes like many elastic bands.
"Look who it isss!" the ferryman hissed, with relish. "The Kat. The Kat himssself!"
We others joined our friend and I was the one to ask. "Kat, have you met this thing before?"
"No,” replied the ferryman for him, a slim snake popping out of his eyeless socket and returning back through the mouth; "I misssed the Kat first time around. The Black Angelsss immediately cassst him to the deepessst dungeonsss of hell-fire. They dragged him there kicking and ssscreaming…"
"No more of me ferryman!" Kat returned. "You will push us across the lake!"
The ferryman cordially reached out a skeletal palm, expecting his fee,”If you cannot pay Kat, then it'sss the long way around, or freeze with the rest on the ssshore."
Kat did not pass payment; instead, he pressed his katana to the ferryman's snake and bone-ridden wrist.
"You will take us across," he said, simply, "no bones about it."
The ferryman's face receded like a tortoise into its shadowy shell, and when it emerged from the cloak, dozens of snake were stretched over the skull, forming muscles and a strange pair of leathery looking eyeballs. We recoiled, but Kat remained unmoved, and unimpressed.
"There mussst be payment,” insisted the ferryman. "No one has ever crossed thisss lake free of charge."
With a flick of his sword, Kat cut three snakes loose from the skeleton's wrist, then three more until there was but a lonely strand of serpent connecting the wrist to the hand. "Take us across ferryman," he warned; "or you'll never take another."
The ferryman's expressionless skull seemed bitterer than the air freezing those around us.
"Let'sss go…" he hissed, and after Kat's forceful prodding, we three gathered on-board the rickety raft.
"I do not like this!" said Eddinray. "On the record let that be known!"
The watching lot at the harbour looked afraid for us as the ferryman lowered his oar into the soup, and pushed us into a dead calm.