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CHAPTER ONE

Ibelieved in Hell for the first thirteen years of my life. Then, when I was fourteen, I learned about the Prudhoe Bay Borehole Theory.

According to the theory, a team of researchers was drilling deep into the earth’s crust to confirm the presence of some ore or mineral. After drilling about twelve kilometers beneath Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, they pierced a hidden cavity. They lowered a heat-tolerant measuring device into the cavity to investigate. In the six-and-a-half minutes before it melted, they measured temperatures at approximately 2,000 degrees. They also recorded modern man’s first encounter with eternal torment.

The sounds of roaring flames, like a busted blast furnace, were nearly drowned out by the symphony of shrieks and screams; the voices of men, women and children trapped in eternal fire, under tons of rock and black earth. That recording leaked, and although elements of the press tried to suppress it, Christians around the world saw it as hard evidence of Hell’s existence.

A boy from my school played me the two-minute clip, preserved like a religious relic on his family computer. It was in a dedicated folder on the desktop. Any member of the family who needed a reminder could listen any time.

I was horrified. So I went to the smartest person I knew: my grandma. I know, it’s unusual for a thirteen-year-old boy to be tight with his grandma, but if your drunk-ass parents routinely locked you overnight in a pitch-dark crawl space full of spiders and fiberglass insulation, you’d cozy up to your grandma too. She always showed up to let me out and threaten my dad with a broken vodka bottle. Eventually.

Grandma still had her own apartment back then, behind the Jewel-Osco in Jefferson Park. She was in her eighties and not super mobile, so I would swing through the grocery and get her some fresh produce before visiting once a week. I asked her about Prudhoe Bay while I unpacked onions and beets. She got so mad, I thought she was going to spit.

Idiotic, she hissed. And I’ll bet your little friend is scared stiff by this. Shivering in his bed, afraid one misstep will condemn him. It’s nonsense.

I hadn’t expected that. We were orthodox Christian, at least in theory. I thought believing in Hell was part of that package, and I told her as much. She waved her hand like she was swatting at a fly.

Leave that, she said. Take a seat.

Where we are from, Grandma told me, the water was so clear you could drink it from the stream. The air was so clean—remembering it feels like a dream. I can hardly explain it to you, little one. Breathing was… sweet there and then. Our village was one extended family, everyone watching for each other, helping each other. It was nothing like this… Grandma waved her hand vaguely at her dingy apartment.

Back then, I was attached to my papa like a barnacle. I was his favorite, you see. Like you are mine. He always took me out on chores. He would chide me and say ‘you work like a boy!’ But he loved me very much. He even spent family money to get me a pet. A dog. I called him Sofia. It was a girl’s name, but I didn’t care. I loved my Sofia. About once a week, my father, Sofia, and I would go to the market to trade. It was our special time together. We would take a secret detour to the inn and eat my favorite beef stew. I was even allowed to feed Sofia a little beef from my hand. Grandma shook her head, as if she could still hardly believe it.

Then, just around the time I came of age, the war came. And it stayed, for longer than anyone would have imagined. More and more young men disappeared from the village. Those who came back were broken and cruel, like your grandfather, curse him. When the war ended, we were so happy. We thought things were going to improve, that all the world would unite in victory and peace. Instead, Stalin starved us from his palace. He killed two of my sisters, your great aunts. He tried to kill me. And he would have been successful if it weren’t for my papa.

Grandma absentmindedly reached for a pack of her nasty, unfiltered cigarettes with Russian writing on one side and no health warning on the other. She stuck one in her mouth and picked up one of those long red lighters you use on a gas stove.

One day, Papa and Sofia and I were on our way to the market, she said, lighting her cigarette. She took her first pull and sighed.

We didn’t go to the inn anymore, of course. Couldn’t afford it. So when papa started walking that way with Sofia, I asked why. He didn’t answer. Part of me knew, I think. You didn’t see many pet dogs in the village anymore, at least not among the poorer families. They had just…disappeared as the years dribbled by. When we got to the inn, they led Sofia away. She whimpered and I called after her. Papa scolded me. Told me to be quiet.

‘We need the money,’ he said. ‘And they need the meat.’

In that moment, I hated my great-grandfather more than anything. Since then, I’ve come to realize that he saved his daughter’s life that day. Then, decades later, she did the same for me, by giving me this vital nugget of information:

"Man makes Hell, little one, she said. It’s not a pit beneath the earth. It’s suffering. Deprivation. Loss. There is no one Hell. Everyone has their own. She tapped her own forehead. The swirling smoke from her cigarette got swallowed up by the filtration fan above her stove. Waiting to be awakened."

A quick web search reveals that the Prudhoe Bay Borehole Theory (also known as the Well to Hell theory) has been thoroughly debunked. The screams supposedly recorded from the borehole were actually clipped from a torture scene in an exploitation movie—Baron Blood, 1972. And anyway, think about the logistics. How does one physically get from death to hell? Are human corpses slurped from their coffins and sucked through layers of soil and sediment before being reanimated for eternal torture in an Alaskan cave? What if they died in Japan? Or Africa?

I didn’t buy it. But my friend still did. I still remember how his voice trembled as he laid out the story, like holy scripture. The pastor at his family’s church had described to them exactly what it would be like to watch everyone you love roast for eternity in a molten pit. I trembled too, but I was thinking of the pastor, not the pit. What kind of man went to such lengths to sew fear? The same kind of man who starved my great aunts to death, maybe.

My family raised me Orthodox, but from that day forward I stopped believing in God and Hell alike. I still don’t believe in God. Here’s the story of how I restored my faith in Hell.

CHAPTER TWO

I’m a skip tracer. I use simple tools, mostly digital, to track people who skip town. I’ll be honest with you up front here: I’m not some hardboiled detective. I’m no Sam Spade. I’m just a skip tracer. I do most of my work for debt collectors and credit card companies, and I spend most of my time working from a home office, sipping coffee. A good skip tracer rarely needs to resort to wearing out their shoe leather these days. Most of the time, all it takes is a couple of Python scripts to get the data you need.

People leave so much of themselves online these days that you can usually find not only where they are, but also who they are. They just lay it all out for you, from what they read to who they fuck. Or who they want to fuck at least. You know when you’re cleaning up cat hair and there’s so much fur on the brush by the end you say Hey, you could make a whole new cat from this!? That’s kind of what it’s like to be a skip tracer. You have so much data at the end of the investigation that actually finding the meatsack it belongs to feels like an afterthought. Who’s to say what’s more integral to a person? Their body, or their data? You could make a whole new cat from this.

Except imagine that, after you finish brushing, you have to call American Express and tell them that the cat who owed them a quarter of a million dollars jumped out the window of a 12th floor Atlantic City Hotel room and failed to land on their feet.

Actually, I had just wrapped up a case like that when I first found out about the suicides. It was a frigid Wednesday morning in January, and I was celebrating by getting high as balls and playing an MMORPG on my new gaming computer. I’d souped it up myself with new graphics card optimization software. This completed case would help me pay for a new round of upgrades. Outside, Chicago was coated in a grayish brown crust of snow. The sky was the color of steel.

There was a knock at my door, and I paused the game. I figured it was a UPS delivery.

The woman at my door had dark eyes and dark freckles, plus dark coils of black hair tossed over one shoulder. Her dark blue jacket, almost black, had white lilies printed on its surface in the style of a Japanese woodblock painting. It looked expensive, but too big for her. She wore it draped over her shoulders like a cloak. She flashed doe-eyes at me when I opened the door.

You’re the Skip Tracer? she asked breathlessly. I blinked, stoned.

Yeah? I said.

The doe-eyed look disappeared. Her eyes were like needles, sharp and glinting.

Hold still please.

The next thing I felt was the jab of a syringe plunging into my neck. It hurt, but I was more viscerally aware of the scent of garlic on her breath