The Inferno by Winston Brady

Author:Winston Brady
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fidelis Publishing
Published: 2023-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XX

A TROUGH OF PIGS

We crossed the bridge and entered a valley curling around the rest of Hell. The smell of it all hit me first, an awful mixture of sulfur, waste, and death, and I saw the valley was filled with pigs wallowing in, and feasting on, their own refuse. As with the snakes in the Vale of Thieves, the shades were continually merging into pigs and the pigs back into shades, so I could scarce tell the difference between any of them. Should any shade pull themselves above the lot of condemned swine and return to the shell of a man, they soon descended to the level of pigs again: their shades diminished while their bellies bulged, and as their faces fattened to a snout, a tiny tail from their rumps curled out.

“What did these shades steal?” I gasped.

“The public trust,” Ernest answered me. “We’ve entered the Vale of the Barrators, shades who bought and sold political offices, or used political offices for their own enrichment, robbing the state and gorging themselves on public money as pigs devour their slop. This valley is full of cabinet members and senators and congressmen who fattened themselves on the state’s largesse, embroiled in some scandal like Crédit Mobilier and Teapot Dome,1 or else they were party bosses from Chicago and New York and Washington, DC, who stole from the public treasury the fat they needed to grease themselves and keep their cronies in power. In life they fattened themselves like pigs on the moneys of the state, so now they feast upon themselves for their eternal fate.”

“Is that really all I am?” asked a shade, on his hands and knees but slowly rising above the swine. “A party boss but not a statesman, not even a politician? Per a compromise, if you would give me but the name of a plain republican, I would be most grateful, for in life I aspired only to be faithful to the spirit, the ideals, and the aims of the Jeffersonian Republicans, that first great party in American politics founded by no less a man than Jefferson, whose vision I aspired to implement during my days on earth—and surely you are familiar with that most esteemed and venerable patriarch of the Old Dominion?”

“I know all about Thomas Jefferson,” I answered. “I even attend the same college he did in Williamsburg.”

“Indeed, William & Mary!” the shade exclaimed. “You too must be of a wise, noble, and generous disposition to be admitted into an institution that can boast the father of our independence among their ranks.”

“No, I did not mean to imply anything like that,” I answered, flattered. “But who are you, and why are you here?”

“I will answer your inquiry, for not only is your conversation pleasant and mild,” the shade smiled coyly, “but your talk seems to keep me from falling back into my most unfortunate state, for it is about the time I become a man when I descend to the level of swine again.

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