He didn’t know if it was day or night—he never did—for the prison was plunged deep in the earth, like a tumor. He’d been trying to sleep for hours. He lay on his side, curled like a question mark on the rocky floor, when the ever-present bruises beneath his eyes began to burn. He ignored it at first, desperate for rest. But the pain grew until it was as if his face was on fire.
It was a sign—a signal. One of the lords would come for him soon and force him to capture some new soul.
X had heard stories about a Higher Power that ruled the Lowlands, but the lords were the most ferocious creatures he’d ever encountered. There were both men and women in their number, and they’d once been prisoners themselves. Now they were a race unto themselves. They wore golden bands that lay tight around their throats, and vivid cloaks that flashed in the gloom. Like the prisoners they ruled over—X knew of only one exception—the lords did not age. The ones who had been damned when they were young remained young forever. Often they were gorgeous and stately. The oldest, however, were a walking nightmare. X sometimes saw the elders stalking around the Lowlands, hissing and howling and sharpening their curling talons on the rocks. Some had long gray hair that rippled down their backs and bony hands that pulsed with veins as fat as worms. When X looked at their faces, he could see their skulls trying to press through.
He wondered which lord would come for him now—and to which corner of the earth he would be sent.
X must have drifted off. He woke up shouting.
The prisoner in the cell to his right, who was known as Banger, had overheard the exclamation.
“Bad dream, dude?” he said. “Heard you freaking out.”
The souls were forbidden from knowing each other’s true names, and Banger had earned his nickname in the simplest way possible: by beating his forehead on the floor to ease his mental anguish. Banger had been a bartender in Phoenix. It wasn’t long ago that, in a fit of rage, he had stabbed a patron in a bar. Then he’d fled to South America, abandoning his wife and four-year-old daughter. Banger was 27 when X hauled him to the Lowlands. Now he would be 27 for all eternity. The lords didn’t allow the guards to beat the prisoners, because they knew the prisoners found pain a welcome distraction. Banger, and many souls besides him, did violence to themselves instead.
X walked to the door of his cell and peered down the corridor, hoping a guard would quiet his neighbor. The nearest one, a giant Russian with a lame foot who wore a blue tracksuit and aviator sunglasses for no reason whatsoever, was 30 yards away.
“You heard not a word,” X told Banger, “for I spoke not a word.”
A third voice joined their conversation without warning: “Dissembler, dissembler, dissembler!”
It was Ripper, who occupied the cell to X’s left. To distract herself from her own searing thoughts, Ripper ripped her fingernails from their beds, then waited impatiently for them to grow so she could wrench them out once more. Back in the 19th century, in London, she had watched one of her servants spill soup onto the lap of a dinner guest. She’d stood up from her chair, followed the young woman to the kitchen—and killed her with a single blow of a boiling teakettle. Afterward, she instructed two footmen to deposit the servant’s body on the cobblestones behind the house. She knew the police would be too intimidated by her wealth to question her. Ripper had been 36 for nearly 200 years.
Many of X’s fellow prisoners were wretched men and women whose souls had been transported to the Lowlands when they died. A smaller number, like Banger and Ripper, had been snatched out of their lives by bounty hunters when earthly justice failed to punish them.
Ripper was now pacing in her cell and loudly reciting a poem from her youth: “‘Deceiver, dissembler Your trousers are alight From what pole or gallows / Shall they dangle in the night?’”
She was a beautiful, formidable woman. She had trained X to be a bounty hunter, and dozens of others, as well. Lately, however, she seemed separated from insanity by the width of a dime.
X glanced down the corridor again. The Russian guard had heard Ripper ranting, and was on his way, dragging his left foot behind him.
Banger hissed at Ripper: “Jesus, Rip, shut it, would you?”
“But he is a deceiver! I heard his exclamation as well!”
“Okay, fine,” said Banger. “But chill the hell out. And by the way, the real version of that thing is, ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire / Hang them from a telephone wire.’ Just sayin’.”
This caused Ripper to cackle.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “I shall alert Mr. William Blake to his error when next we meet.”
The Russian arrived and poked his club through the bars of Ripper’s cell.
“Vy sexy lady talk so much?” he said. “Must shut mouth.”
“I already warned her, dude,” said Banger. “I’m on it.”
The guard shuffled over to Banger’s cell.
“I am not needing assistance of dung beetle like you,” he said. “Please to shut up, also.”
“Or what?” said Banger. “You gonna hit me? Oh, that’s right: you can’t. Because your job suuucks. Do you even get health care? You obviously don’t get dental.”