The Hottest Colony in the Empire Is Literal Hell

The Hottest Colony in the Empire Is Literal Hell

Robert G Penner

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An excerpt from Notes on a Colonial Situation in Hell by Robert G Penner

The train rattled out of the tunnel just below the place where the mountains stopped being mountains and became instead a sheer wall of pale rock that stretched from horizon to horizon and up, up, up until the yellow stone faded into the yellow haze of the sky. Everyone had crowded to the window for that first glimpse of Hell—everyone except Maureen, gloomy and doomed in the corner. But it was clear most of the girls were disappointed by the view. Bored and underwhelmed. It was very bleak, thought Bridget. Desolate. That first view. And the views that followed only reinforced that initial sense of desolation.

The train careened through artificial canyons, crooked alleys blasted by British engineers out of black and brown stone, the rock walls streaked with orange, with rust, with queer mildews and stains. The red dirt across which the tracks were laid was a mix of shifting sand and dust, strewn with pebbles, rubble, the occasional boulder. Every once in a while the tracks cut across a natural valley or gorge and Bridget would see a flash of yellow sky, or a stunted grey tree, or a brief panorama of bare, rugged, brown hills marching off into hazy oblivion. But for the most part it was just the towering stone walls. So, after the initial excitement at having arrived, and the disappointment that immediately followed, Lily fell asleep beside her, and Emma and Jane on the seats opposite. Mary was reading her magazine, and Maureen was fingering her superstitious beads and muttering prayers under her breath.

Maureen was the most scared. Maureen was terrified. Not in a panicky or hysterical way. She wasn’t quaking. Threatening to run away. Making scenes. She had accepted her fate. Maureen had always believed everything the nuns had whispered in her ears at the Catholic Orphanage Asylum, and she was sure she was on her way out of the purview of the Lord our God’s mercy and into endless, eternal, and never-ending damnation. Darkness! Bridget imagined Maureen saying to herself, eyes wide open, earnest, and frightened: Fire! Darkness! Bonfire of Vanities!

They had had a conversation about it. Bridget and Maureen. Several. In the workhouse. On the train to Astley Deep. Most recently in the giant lift as it fell down the Drop, as the walls of the shaft whizzed by.

“If you are going beyond”—and Bridget had carefully used the word that Maureen preferred—“the purview of God, why do you keep praying? And doing your rosaries and all that nonsense?”

“Because he’s still God,” said Maureen. “And I love him.”

“But he’s deserting you,” said Bridget.

“I am deserting him,” said Maureen, and her eyes shone with tears.

“But you’re not,” said Bridget. “It’s not your fault you’re being sent to Hell, it’s his.”

“It is not his fault,” said Maureen. “He doesn’t choose damnation for anyone. He doesn’t choose suffering. We do.”

“But you didn’t,” said Bridget. “You’ve been sent to Hell. You’re a child.”

“I could have run away,” said Maureen. “I could have refused. I could have stopped eating. I could have made a fuss. I could have gone mad. Or acted so.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Maureen wiped a tear away.

“You’re a child,” said Bridget again. “A destitute orphan. Just like the rest of us. It is not your fault.”

Maureen said nothing.

“Besides,” said Bridget. “It’s not really Hell, is it? It’s just a hole in the ground. It’s just the outskirts at best. Or at worst. The periphery.”

“It feels like Hell,” Maureen said.

The other girls were from good, secular institutions of various Protestant varieties and no more nervous than they would be if they were going off to Canada or Australia or South Africa to be put in thrall to some money-grubbing, illiterate Boer or another. Same roll of the dice. Just a different location. In their view Hell was merely one more colony in a long list of colonies the Queen would not have acquired unless it was worthwhile in some way to have done so. And the government would not be philanthropically dropping cargoes of kitchen drudges and unpaid maids and potential child brides down the great shafts at Astley Deep Pit like packages of dry goods and cheap cloth to be signed over to whichever toiling unbathed colonist showed up that day to collect the handouts at the Female Factory in the old capital of Vespers, or Barnardo’s Home for Orphans and Destitute Children in the new one at Alexandra, unless it was a perfectly safe and reasonable thing to do.

But if this was the majority view of the situation, it was not exactly Bridget’s.

Not quite.

She had heard enough from her mother about why her grandparents had left Ireland for Liverpool to not have a great deal of faith in Empire, God, or Country.

The bloody English, her mother always called them. Before she died.

The fucking English, her brother Sam had. Before he too died.

But we’re English, she’d always said to them. First her mother and then her brother. Aren’t we? Now? Aren’t I? I was born here. I’ve always lived here. Surely I’m English?

At least that was what she said to them before she ended up at Brownlow Hill Workhouse and learned to swear and rage at the world with as much enthusiasm as they ever had.

So Bridget’s view was a little more complicated than those of the other girls—the Catholic one terrified of her busy devil or the Protestant ones so confident in their distant God.

It was Bridget’s view that Maureen was too scared of Hell and the others not enough.

Hell was Hell. Certainly. Despite what she had suggested to Maureen. Everyone knew it. It was obvious—despite the attempts of scientists and atheists to explain it away. And that was eerie and strange and frightening enough. But it was Hell filled with desperate Englishmen on the cusp of bankruptcy risking it all on one last hopeless wager, and Bridget couldn’t decide if that made it seem more dangerous or less. All those desperate characters desperate to get rich. She had no ambitions in that direction, thankfully. Finding her fortune in the colonies and all that schoolboy rubbish. Not like dear, sweet Lily who dreamed of a sturdy young rancher with blue eyes and a quicksilver smile with whom she could breed a brood of squalling children, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, descendants numberless as the stars in the sky that they could no longer see. That they would likely never see again. No, Bridget wasn’t going to be sticking around on the settled edges of their new home. Washing floors and boiling potatoes and pushing out babies like some barnyard bitch. She had plans. Her own plans. Her brother Sam was already down there somewhere. Gone on ahead. Deeper in. Farther in. The Seventh Circle, Sam had told her in the days before he had hanged himself. That was where he was going to go. The suicide forest. She was going to save him from it, retroactively. Bring him back. Bring him back from his terrible choice. His mistake. From the injustice of it. The absurdity of it. It was so stupid that Hell had been thought up in the first place, and altogether more stupid that it was real—real! Too stupid for words. Not that it felt especially real. Even now that she was really there. It didn’t seem real at all to Bridget. Not like it did to Maureen. The barren mountains and the yellow sky. Not really real. Not really Hell. Not really.

At least that’s what she thought until she saw the demon.

The train was sweeping through a curve, the tracks raised on rattling wooden trestles, above a narrow valley, a deep wedge carved out of the stone by ancient floods. Bridget looked down, hoping to see a bit of water splashing over the rocks; even a trickle would have brought some relief to the dry bones of the landscape, just the hint of its past passage across the sandy valley floor: caramel whorls and curling grooves and patches still dark with damp.

Instead of water or its evidences, however, Bridget saw a figure down there looking up at the train roaring past. She was so startled she jumped in her seat. A figure maybe as big as a man. Maybe a little bigger. It was hard to tell from so far away. Anyway, it was not small. A perfectly round torso, glittering black like a beetle; long, crooked insect legs and tail like a lizard’s; bat wings instead of arms tucked in by its sides, and at that strange knuckle on the point of the wing where the funny little claw should be, pale human hands reaching up towards Bridget; the big, bald head too, was humanlike, tilted back so she could see a white face with small eyes, a long nose, and a wide, emotionless mouth.

It was there in plain sight.

And then in a flash it was gone from view beyond the curve of the bridge.

Her startled jump had woken Lily.

“What did you see?” Lily asked and yawned. “What’s out there?”

“Nothing,” said Bridget. “Nothing but ugly rocks and an ugly sky.”

They disembarked at a place called Dog Pit where the unfinished tracks came to their end. Not quite their end. The tracks did keep going past the grubby little town where the girls clambered out of their carriage, but they ended somewhere nearby in the foothills, and it was at Dog Pit that the train could be turned around. But, all the same, the end of the line. The tracks were still being put together. Laid out. Long before Vesper. Long before Alexandra. The train from Astley Deep Drop would take them no farther. There was a row of oxcarts waiting by the station, and one of these would take them the rest of the way.

There was also a small man there from Barnardo’s Home for Orphans and Destitute Children in Alexandra. Waiting for the girls. Standing on a bare dusty platform made from unused railway ties. Old but well-kept suit. Bowler. Hands fluttering like sparrows. Flies buzzing and bumbling about him. The girls were all tired.

“Can’t stay here!” he laughed and looked around at the other passengers. “Not a place for children! Not Dog Pit!”

The population was entirely male. Rough-looking men, a little threadbare, who for reasons pecuniary or legal or both had reached a point in life where there was nothing for it but to take the Drop and try to make a little money hammering railway ties together, or clearing land in Scortatus, or overseeing some lazy rich bastard’s plantation of damned souls.

“That’s right, girls,” said one of the threadbare worn-out men as he walked past. “If Hell had an asshole, this would be it.”

“Sir!” said the man from Barnardo’s.

Bridget snorted at the joke, but the other girls looked frightened; they all moved a little closer to the dapper little fellow with the lilac handkerchief in his pocket who had been sent by the powers-that-be to protect them from all the moral and physical dangers of this seedy new world.

“We’ll wait until the platform’s cleared, I think,” said their chaperone. “And then gather your bags.”

A couple of porters were unloading barrels and crates from the train, and two Chinese men with their hair in queues were loading them into the oxcarts. One of the passengers was inspecting his luggage. Well dressed, with dark hair and a moustache. He had set up a tripod and was struggling to balance a camera on it.

The man from Barnardo’s cleared his throat and the girls all looked at him.

“My name is Mr. Quarington,” he said.

He smiled at them tentatively and they all looked away.

Bridget nudged Lily and nodded at the photographer. He had made the two Chinese men pause in their work so he could take their picture.

“He’s very handsome,” whispered Lily, and Bridget rolled her eyes.

“But he is,” said Lily, and the man looked.

He was very tanned with heavy brows and looked fierce until he glanced up and smiled at them.

Neither of the girls smiled back.

“I suppose,” said Bridget.

Mr. Quarington was looking nervously at his watch. Other than the photographer, the rest of the passengers were gone. And the porters were nearly done unloading the train. A trickle of men came out from a hotel across the bare track that was the main street. Two or three at a time. They would climb onto their oxcarts and then give the poor beasts a lazy lick with their whips and the carts would creak into life and slowly roll out of town. Soon there was only one oxcart left. The photographer, carrying all his clumsy gear, made his way over to where the girls were clustered around Mr. Quarington.

“I suppose that is yours,” he said to Mr. Quarington and nodded at the cart.

He had an accent. From the continent, maybe. Or South America.

“I certainly hope so,” said Mr. Quarington and looked at his watch again.

“I’m sure the driver will be along shortly,” said the photographer. “Probably just having a bite to eat at the hotel. Perhaps a drink.”

Mr. Quarington made a sort of a noise at this. A nervous horse snort.

“Do you mind if I take a photograph of your wards while you wait?” asked the photographer.

“Sir,” said Mr. Quarington. “I hardly think . . .”

“For the newspapers, sir,” said the man. “For The Times.”

Emma gasped and exchanged an excited glance with Jane.

“Even so,” began Mr. Quarington, “I hardly think . . .”

“Oh, please,” said Lily. “Please, Mr. Quarington. We’ve never been photographed.”

The photographer smiled at her. At all the girls.

“Please, Mr. Quarington, sir, it will be a memento,” said Mary, and then the others started chiming in.

It made Bridget think of chicks harassing a hen.

“It will help pass the time,” said the photographer.

“Very well,” sighed Mr. Quarington. “And your name, sir?”

“Klier,” said the photographer. He was already setting up his equipment. “Felix Klier.”

While he set up and Mr. Quarington tried to arrange the girls into something like a little choir, the two Chinese workers squatted on the platform and watched. The porters too, one sitting on carriage steps and the other leaning against the carriage beside him. All four men were smoking.

That long, slow moment as they waited became fixed in Bridget’s mind, just as it must have been fixed on the photographic paper. The girls were facing back the way they came, trying to stand still as the flies buzzed and bumped around them, looking over Mr. Klier’s shoulder at the battered carriages, and the workers where they sat smoking, and the train tracks winding out of the narrow valley up into the dusty, dry hills and the heavy yellow sky—almost mustard in that moment. It was very hot; they were all flushed and perspiring; Lily’s blond hair was dark and limp. Bridget could feel sweat trickling down her spine, on her forehead, threatening to drip from her nose. She could smell her own armpits and those of the girls nearest her; she could smell the ox manure from the road, the oil and the coal from the train, the tobacco of the men watching, and beneath all those smells something quite foul, a latrine maybe, or more likely just the ditches and stands of grass where these men stopped to relieve themselves, and rotten meat too, perhaps from across the street, refuse from a kitchen or a butcher’s shop. Decay regardless. Something dead and rotting in the bright sunless air. It occurred to her as Mr. Klier ducked under his cloth that in the image he was about to capture, there would be none of the colour and none of the stink of the place. There would be none of the heat in the photograph, no incessant buzzing of the flies. Nothing of the sort in any of however many reproductions of the original were to be made, reproductions in their thousands and thousands and thousands if it was actually placed in The Times. In all those newspapers there would be nothing but a silent row of washed-out little ghosts in matching frocks with pale skin and black eyes staring silently up out of Hell at all those gentleman readers, gentlemen who could derive absolutely no sense of the place as it actually was—the smell and the sound and the heat and the colour—no sense whatsoever no matter how long they stared at the image, no matter how many words they read about it in the text underneath, no matter how many pounds they ordered their brokers to invest in it after studying the stock prices on the next page over. They could not know Hell at all, Bridget thought, until, that is, the day—at the very moment of their death—they would arrive there themselves.