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.”
“If anyone is to be struck, it should be moi,” Ripper interjected. “I must insist, I really must.”
The guard cursed, then shuffled back to Ripper’s cell. After a furtive look around, he gave her a quick jab with his club. She was cooing with pleasure when he limped away.
“Nothing for me?” Banger called after him.
“Nyet,” said the guard, “because you are jackass.”
Silence reigned awhile. X lay back on the rocky ground, the bones of his face still glowing with pain. Just as his heart had begun to settle, he heard Banger’s annoying whisper.
“Talk to me, man,” he said. “Tell me your life story. I’ll tell you mine.”
X fought back a wave of anger. He had no desire to talk. He spoke harshly to snuff out the conversation.
“Banger, your story is well-known to me,” he said. “Do you forget that it was I who conveyed you to this place? Or that it was I who trained you to be a bounty hunter just as Ripper trained me? I know your crimes only too well. Hearing them again would only disgust me.”
“Jeez,” said Banger. “Way to be a dick.”
When it was quiet again, X closed his eyes, already regretting his outburst. He had collected 14 souls for the lords of the Lowlands, and Banger was by no means the worst of them. But X hated telling his story: it only reminded him of the injustices of his life.
X had committed no crime.
He was an innocent.
Unlike every other soul he’d ever encountered, he did not know why he had been condemned. He did not know what outrage he had supposedly committed—or even how or when he might have committed it. But rather than making him feel pure, X’s confusion only convinced him that there was something vile and corrupt in his heart that he would one day discover.