From a distance, it looked solid — a black wall lying across his path, dense and impenetrable. But as Aidan Merritt drew closer, he could look into its depths. He was able to watch it coil and seethe as the wind drove it across the heather. It was like a vast sooty snake crawling relentlessly over the moor. But he didn’t need to watch it for long to realise it was an illusion. This thing didn’t crawl. Its speed was frightening.
Further up the hill, Merritt saw more dark spirals, drifting low to the ground. Two, three or maybe more of them, disappearing over the moor. He could smell their acrid stink, feel their heat on his skin, taste the millions of burnt fragments choking the air as they passed.
Smoke. Acres and acres of smoke. The world was full of it.
A sudden awareness of danger made him pause. That smoke was poisonous, lethal. It could kill him if he let too much of it get into his lungs. And the blaze behind it would scorch his flesh in a second. Yet today this smoke might actually be his friend. That fire could save his life.
But still Merritt hesitated before he left the path. A strange foreboding froze his limbs. He felt as though he was about to step into a great inferno. He would be a solitary human figure walking out on to a fire-ravaged wasteland.
‘My God, what am I doing?’ he said aloud to himself. ‘Who in his right mind would be out here?’
Within the space of twenty-four hours, this part of Derbyshire that he’d known so well had turned into a landscape resembling one of the nine circles of hell. Merritt imagined there ought to be a guide to take his arm and point out the glimpses of tormented souls writhing in the flames.
It was something he’d read in the sixth form at school. The guide was some Roman poet, surely. Virgil, was it? Yes, Dante’s
Merritt recalled that the narrator of the
Merritt looked up. He supposed the sun was still up there somewhere, hanging over the Peak District moors. But it was clogged and blackened with smoke, as silent as it would ever be.
He pulled out his phone, and saw that for once he had a signal. There were only a few places on Oxlow Moor where you were out of the dead spots. He dialled his wife’s number, and got her recorded message, her voice sounding much too jaunty and cheerful.
‘Sam, it’s me,’ he said.
Then he stopped, his mind suddenly empty. He couldn’t think of anything meaningful to say. Instead, he told her about the ninth circle of hell, trying to explain what was in his thoughts. But he knew he was becoming incoherent, and he ended the call abruptly.
‘That was stupid,’ he said. ‘Stupid.’
Merritt wiped the sweat from his forehead, took a deep breath and coughed at the dryness in his throat. Poetic justice? Yes — and that meant not just divine revenge, but a destiny chosen freely by a soul during life, and fulfilled in death. The inevitability was the most terrifying thing of all. It was what had struck him deeply as a seventeen-year-old, just starting to think about the future and what life might hold. The idea that he might already have chosen his own destiny weighed on his mind like a millstone. His place in the inferno was pretty much guaranteed. Well, that was the way it had seemed back then.
And now here was the physical manifestation of hell, almost exactly as Dante had described it. Those indistinct figures flailing in the smoke could only be the demons of his imagination — inhuman forms with the heads of beasts, their bodies glittering and suffused with bright artificial colours, their movements lumbering, their hands filled with strange instruments of torment. God, yes — they were there. All the creatures from his nightmares. He could see them in the smoke. See them, hear them, smell them. They were so close that he could practically touch them.
Yes, that was one other thing that Merritt remembered. According to Dante, the nine circles of hell weren’t located in some mythical universe, detached from the real world. All that torture and suffering was taking place among us now. This minute, this second. Hell was right here on earth.
‘Damn it, man — get a grip.’