Hell Is Empty (Walt Longmire, #7)

by Craig Johnson

“He’s supposedly a very interesting case, a specific form of psychotic schizophrenic where the subject is overcome by a culture-bound syndrome and hears voices—sees . . .” I couldn’t help but pause. “Sees apparitions. He refers to them as the ‘Seldom Seen’ and believes that he’s actually possessed by evil spirits that force him to sacrifice others.”

“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”

ABANDON. He’d seen the Basquo reading the Inferno. He’d left the message for me and evidently hadn’t had the bladder capacity to finish the stanza: “. . . hope all ye who enter here”—the warning above the gates of hell in Dante’s opus.

“You better become a misanthrope, too . . . Kill ’em, kill ’em all. Kill ’em fast.” His hand went to the rifle scabbard. “And from far away.”

I noticed the creature was attempting to do something other than tear me apart. I froze as its massive paws dug underneath the machine and, in an incredible show of strength, actually lifted the gigantic four-wheeler off of me. The roar that came from the bear was enough to rattle my own lungs, and it flipped the Arctic Cat down the hill where it rolled once and then landed upright on the ice below.

I stared up at the shaggy head that seemed as wide as the trunk of my body. Astonishingly, it spoke. “What’chu doin’ this high, Lawman?” Virgil.

One of his large fingers rested on another stone, the turquoise and coral wolves on his ring chasing each others’ tails.

The same ring Walt later finds on the mumufied hand. Therefore it seems pretty clear that Walt is interacting with Virgil's ghost just like Dante is in the Inferno.

but there was something about shooting a man, even a guilty man, unawares from great distance that didn’t sit well with my job description.

Like I said, the rules are different this high—we do not have the final say.” “How so?” He breathed deeply and thought about it. “Down there—it is so loud and so busy we can block them out, but up here is different.”

“They tell me to watch over you and to keep you safe—which is all very strange.”

“They don’t watch over white men.”

“You have great sorrows burning in your heart, and you’ll have more sorrows with someone very close to you in the not so distant future. The Old Ones have told me this, and that’s probably the most important thing I have to say to you.”

It was silver with coral and turquoise wolves chasing each other around the band, and I couldn’t help but feel that I’d seen it before.

“The ones you call the Old Cheyenne.” I shivered and not just because of the cold. “Yep.” “They are not only Cheyenne.”

“I don’t know why they didn’t send him. I know that he’s dead. Maybe it’s because he’s not with my people; perhaps his spirit is uneasy and they can’t find him—maybe he can’t find me.”

He was holding the battered copy of Inferno. I looked at him, and he fumbled with the book. “This book . . . You know who the lowest ring of hell is reserved for?” I kneeled back down. “Virgil, I don’t think you should be talking.” “Traitors.” I didn’t say anything at first, but the words were in my mouth, looking for a place to go. “I thought you said you hadn’t read this book?” He tried to smile with a bunching of one of his cheek muscles. It must have hurt. “Are you trying to tell me something, Virgil?”

It’s never about who’s the fastest, strongest, toughest—it’s always about who, when everyone else would pause, will commit.

in the Inferno, the real hell was an arctic, glaciated, and windblown place far from the warmth of God.

“I think that one of us was sent to guide the other one to the Beyond-Country.”

“That is why they sent you, Lawman. I thought it was because you never stop; you never quit. That first time we met in the long road culvert, you fought me to a standstill and no one has ever done that. I thought that was why the Old Ones had sent you, but it is because you make me laugh. No one tickles me the way you do—you say some of the craziest shit.”

“You must remember how I did this.”

I’d never given up on anything in my life when I was alive. I hadn’t always won, I hadn’t always been right, but I’d never given up. Not till now. Now that I was dead.

Maybe it was like Virgil’s statements about the Inferno, that all horrors are horrors of the mind. We summon up the devils we need to punish us for the things that we’ve done. If that was the case, then why had they sent me for Virgil?

sometimes it helps to be dead to confront your demons, and that I had been dead a long time.