Happy Hour In Hell: Volume Two of Bobby Dollar (2 page)

Frustrated, I finally reached down and yanked on its leg to get its attention, but although the man-shape looked solid, it was as brittle as a dessert meringue. The entire limb broke loose underneath my fingers in flaky shards, leaving nothing below the knee. In horror, I dropped the substantial piece of leg. It broke into pieces, many of which bounced slowly over the edge of the bridge and vanished into darkness. The thing finally stopped crawling long enough to turn toward me, and I caught a glimpse of a gray face with empty hollows for eyes and an equally empty hole of a mouth stretched wide in surprise or horror. Then it tilted to one side as if the loss of the leg had overbalanced it and toppled off the bridge without a sound.

Shaken, I stepped over the greasy flakes that remained and walked on.

Whatever the crumbling horror might have been, it was not the only one of its kind. I caught up with the next gray thing before too long, another man-shaped blob creeping toward the still invisible walls of Hell. I tried to poke this one gently enough to get its attention. It seemed as fragile as sea foam, but just the feel of it on my fingertip made me queasy. How could something with no substance hold a shape, let alone crawl forward with such blind determination?

But this is Hell
, I reminded myself,
or at least the suburbs.
Nothing normal applied here.

I poked it again. Like its predecessor it turned, but this one reached for me with its shapeless hands; in fear and disgust I stepped back and kicked at it, catching it square in the hindquarters. With a whispering crunch it broke into several large pieces. I waded through them, though they were still slowly squirming, and kicked several of them into the abyss. I didn’t stop to watch them fall.

As hours passed, or would have anywhere else, I encountered more of the hideous things. I’d given up any idea of communicating with them and simply kicked them out of my way, wading through the sentient scraps. When I had crushed several of them I began to notice an odor on my skin, like faint traces of lighter fluid in the ashes of a barbecue pit. The things were slow and mindless as dying termites, and disgusting in a way I can’t even explain. I wanted to grind each one of them to powder, to scatter their very atoms to the void. In fact, I was losing what little remained of my mind.

What saved me, strangely enough, was Hell itself. After fighting my way through an entire squirming pack of the things, showering myself and the emptiness on either side of the bridge with ashy fragments, I bent over in a cloud of the last swirling bits and realized that the bridge no longer narrowed to nothingness in front of me. The terrible span had an end point, something I had only believed because I had to. Now I could see it ahead of me, a wall of broken black stone with a titanic gate of rusted iron in the middle of it, tall as a skyscraper. But thousands of the gray, mindless things still squirmed between me and that gate.

I’m betting that some of you can’t imagine what was so bad about having to fight through things that offered no resistance of any kind, that collapsed under my touch like fireplace ash. Try thinking about it this way: there might have been nothing left of them but crude shapes, like the dead of Pompeii preserved in the fiery ash that spewed from Vesuvius, but they had all been people once.

You see, as I came up that last span, fighting my way through the creeping shapes, making a storm of floating, powdery fragments until I couldn’t see my own feet or the bridge, I finally realized what they were. Not damned souls—that would have been bad enough. These weren’t prisoners of Hell, they weren’t trying to get out, they were trying to get
in
. The shapes were souls who had been sentenced to Purgatory, the essences of countless human lives—failed lives but not irreparably evil. And for whatever reason, these things, once men and women, were so consumed by self-hatred that they crawled forever toward the place where they felt they truly belonged.

I should have pitied them but understanding only made it worse. As I neared the walls of Hell the things flocked as thickly as insects swarming around a hot light bulb, driven by a self-destructive urge they couldn’t understand. I was too exhausted to say anything, but inside I was screaming. I thrashed through the clotted mass as if I were swimming, until everything I was and had ever been dissolved into a madness of greasy flakes and swirling, kerosene-scented dust, until I no longer knew where I was, let alone where the bridge was—the only thing between me and oblivion. The fact that I did not fall is the only testament I will ever need that something or Someone bigger than me wanted me to survive.

Grunting, gasping, I stopped to suck in air and realized abruptly that nothing stood before me now but the massive, rusty entrance and bare black stone: I had reached the shadows beneath the gate. The swarming crawlers were now behind me, confined to the bridge as if by an invisible fence. The pathetic, self-loathing things didn’t belong in Hell, they just believed they did. They would not be admitted.

But Bobby Dollar? Apparently I was different. No guards and nothing to keep me from walking in but the good sense I had surrendered a long time back. By Hell’s charming standards, they’d pretty much put out the welcome mat. But I don’t think I’m giving away too much when I tell you it wasn’t going to prove anywhere near as easy getting back out again.

pillow talk

W
E ONLY
had one night together, really. And I remember every moment of it.

“So what’s it like, living in Hell?”

“Oh, it’s great. We drink ice cream sodas all day and play pool and smoke cigars and never, ever turn into donkeys.”

“That sounds more like Pleasure Island, from Pinocchio.”

“Shoot. You got me.”

“Come on, woman, it was a serious question.”

“Well, maybe I don’t want to answer it, Wings. How’s that for serious?”

We were both naked in Caz’s secret hideaway and had just made love for the first (well, technically first, second, and second-and-a-half) time. Her head was on my chest and her legs were clamped around my thigh like a bivalve mercilessly trying to compel surrender. I stroked her hair, a gold so pale you could only tell it wasn’t white in direct sunlight.

“That bad, huh?”

“Oh, you beautiful, stupid man, you can’t imagine.” She lifted herself on one elbow so she could look me in the face. She was so gorgeous that I promptly forgot what we were talking about and lay there staring like I was brain damaged. By any normal standards I must have been, because otherwise why would a minion of Heaven be making naked squishies with a tool of Satan in the first place? “Not just bad,” she told me. “Worse than you could possibly imagine.”

I kept wondering how anyone, even the lords of Hell, could want to harm that radiant beauty. The official version would be that she had a face like a Renaissance angel, beautiful, delicate, full of lofty thoughts. But the truth was that she looked like the most innocently wicked graduate of a very, very expensive private school. If I hadn’t known for a fact that Caz had been around since before Columbus sailed, I’d have been feeling very, very guilty after all the things we’d just done. I was beginning to believe I was in love with this woman, but of course she wasn’t actually a woman at all, and she came from Hell. Think about that a little and you’ll probably understand why I didn’t want to consider our situation too closely.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything . . .”

“No! No, thank your lucky stars that you don’t know, Bobby. I want you to stay that way. I don’t want you ever to know what that place is like.” And then she suddenly hugged me so tightly that for a moment I thought she was trying to crawl
through
me somehow and out the other side. Her small, hard body seemed both the most real and the most vulnerable thing in the world.

“I won’t let you go back,” I said.

I thought she laughed. I only realized later that the noise had been something else, something far less simple. Her legs tightened on my thigh; I could feel her wetness pressing against me. “Of course you won’t, Bobby,” she said. “We’ll never go back, either of us. We’ll stay here and drink ice cream sodas forever. So kiss me, you dumbfuck angel.”

Have you ever had somebody you loved die on you? All that stuff you feel, and you’re
still
feeling it, but they’re just gone? You carry that around with you every moment—all the things you failed to tell them, all the ways you were stupid, all the ways you’re missing them. It feels like holding up a huge, collapsing wall, as if you were some hero in a movie waiting for everyone to get to safety, but you already know you’re not going to get away yourself. That eventually the weight will just crush you.

Ever had somebody leave you and tell you they never really loved you? That you’re a loser, a waste of time they should have known to avoid? You carry that one around too, but instead of an insupportable weight, it’s more like a horrible burn, nerve endings fried and stuck on jangling alert, a pain that occasionally subsides to a bitter, itching ache, but then flares up into agony again without warning.

Here’s one more: Ever had somebody steal the thing that mattered most to you? Then laugh in your face about it? Leave you helpless and seething?

Okay, now imagine that all three things happened at the same time, with the same woman.

Her name was Caz, short for Casimira, also known as the Countess of Cold Hands, a she-demon of high standing and about the most mesmerizing creature I’d ever seen. When we met we were on opposite sides in the ancient conflict between Heaven and Hell. We became lovers, which both of us knew was an extremely stupid, supremely dangerous thing to do. But something drew us together, although that’s a pretty damn bland, vanilla way of putting it. We made sparks—no, a raging fire—and it still blazed inside of me, long after she’d gone. Some days it seemed like it was going to burn me to ashes.

Caz belonged to Eligor, one of the Grand Dukes of Hell. After our affair, our fling, whatever you want to call it, she went back to him. She even tried to make me think she’d never cared about me, but, see, I didn’t believe that. I was certain she felt something too because, if not, then I was wrong about
everything
. I’m talking about
up is down, black is white, the world is really flat after all
kind of wrong.

Call me stupid if you want, but I wouldn’t believe that. I couldn’t. Beside, I had a more practical reason for thinking that she really cared for me. Don’t worry, we’re coming to that soon.

Anyway, now Eligor hated me because I’d messed with his “property” (okay, also because of some other stuff, like shooting his secretary, getting his bodyguard eaten, and generally interfering with his plans). The power imbalance between us was ridiculously skewed in Eligor’s favor: he was infernal royalty, and I was a minor mid-level functionary who already had a bit of a negative reputation with my superiors. So why wasn’t I dead? Because I had
the feather
—a golden feather from the wing of an important angel that marked an illicit bargain made between Grand Duke Eligor and someone in Heaven whose identity I still didn’t know. Eligor definitely didn’t want that feather going public, and as long as I had it stashed safely away I felt sure he would leave me alone. On the other hand, Eligor had Caz, and he’d taken her back to Hell, far out of my reach. Stalemate. At least that’s what I’d thought when the whole thing started. As it turned out, I had built a house of cards out of the flimsiest set of assumptions possible.

Oops. Getting ahead of myself a little. A lot of things happened before I even heard of the Neronian Bridge, and I should probably tell you about some of them before we return to Hell.

The latest episode of the ongoing craziness that is my afterlife started with what normal folk would call a job review. Except normal folk wouldn’t be reviewed by a group of pissed-off celestials who could literally destroy an immortal soul with a single word. Even the poor bastards who work for Trump don’t have to put up with that.

five angry angels

I
’D BEEN
called to Heaven, specifically to the Anaktoron, the great council chamber I had visited once before, an astounding architectural impossibility with cloud-high ceilings, a floating table of black stone and a river running right through the middle of the floor. My archangel, Temuel (sort of my supervisor) brought me into the mighty building and then discreetly retired. Floating on the far side of the stone table, as if someone had jerked away a candelabrum and left the candle flames burning in midair, were the
ephors
, my five special inquisitors.

“God loves you, Angel Doloriel,” declared the filmy white flame that was Terentia. “This Ephorate welcomes you.” Like the first time I’d met them, Terentia seemed to be the one in charge, although I knew that Karael, the warrior-angel beside her, was about as high as anyone can get in the hierarchy of the Third Sphere (everything to do with Earth and its inhabitants). Beside him hovered Chamuel, a mist that gleamed from within, and next to Chamuel was Anaita, a childlike presence that I knew from unpleasant experience could be as coldly formal as Terentia. At the edge of the group was Raziel, a being of dim red light who was neither male nor female. All of these important angels were Principalities, the judges of the dead and the living. There is no higher rank among the angels in our sphere.

I returned Terentia’s greeting, trying not to look like I was waiting for my blindfold and cigarette. “How can I serve you, Masters?”

“With the truth,” said Chamuel, but almost kindly. “These are great matters in which you have been caught up, Doloriel. Dangerous matters. And we wish to hear of them from your own lips.”

Yeah? And
what would you know about lips?
I wondered, since Chamuel’s form was indistinct as a rain cloud. I’m not entirely stupid, though, so I only bowed my head. “Of course.”

And so the ephors asked, and I answered. I tried to tell the truth when I could (it makes keeping track of the lies easier) but there were just too darn many things I didn’t dare mention, too many laws of Heaven that I had stomped all over while trying to get to the bottom of the whole mess. They knew that my demon-lover Caz had given me information but they definitely didn’t know what else had happened between us, which was good, because I was pretty sure fraternizing with the enemy was a capital offense in the angel business, and I had gone a lot farther than “fraternizing.” They also knew that my buddy and partner Sam Riley, aka Advocate Angel Sammariel, had been secretly working for a group that hijacked souls belonging to either Heaven or Hell and offered them instead a “Third Way” that both sides of the ancient struggle were pretty eager to obliterate. They also knew Sam had escaped, but luckily they hadn’t found out it was because I’d let him go. (They also didn’t know that he’d had offered to take me with him to the Third Way’s new-minted afterworld. I still thought about that sometimes.)

As I think I said, I’ve never just stood up and lied to Heaven before. I’ve kept many a not-very-angelic thought to myself, of course, but I always told the truth about what I was doing and whom I was doing it with. But the last couple of months had changed all that: truth was no longer an option. If my bosses found out what I’d done I’d be sentenced to the nastiest pits of Hell or, if I was lucky, I’d just have my memory wiped and start over again, another fledgling angel learning how to keep his robe clean and sing Hosanna. So I lied and kept on lying.

“. . . As for the last part, well, it’s all in my report.”

“Which we have absorbed with interest,” said Terentia. “But we have called you here so you can relate your experiences again, and perhaps, with our help, discover details which were inadvertently left out of your report.”

How could a guy resist such thoughtfulness? “Well, as I said, when the monster attacked me in the abandoned amusement park, Angel Sammariel took advantage of the distraction to escape. I didn’t see where he went. By the time the
ghallu
was dead, there was no sign of him.” (Fighting the monstrous ancient demon—and almost being swallowed by it—had definitely happened, I promise you. It was the oops-Sam-got-away part that hadn’t.)

Raziel’s dark light grew darker for a moment, like a thunderstorm starting to roll. “But both you and Angel Haraheliel were together after the creature of the pit was dead, or nearly so. He says he was struck by one of the creature’s death-throes, but before he was rendered senseless he confronted Sammariel. These conflicts confuse us.”

A silence fell between the boss angels; I had the disturbing sense of things flying past above my head, of conversations I couldn’t hear but which would determine my fate whether I liked it or not. Haraheliel was the real angelic name of rookie advocate (and company spy) Clarence, and trying to make the kid’s report jibe with my invented recollections was one of my major challenges.

“I’m sorry, Master,” I said quickly. “You’re right, of course. When I said ‘attacked,’ I meant the creature’s last movements. I thought it was dead. It lay still for a long time, but then it stunned Angel Haraheliel with its leg and started to get up again. I fired my last bullets into it, and it finally stopped moving.” I was praying—ironic, no?—that I was remembering the details right, or at least the details of the version I’d submitted to Heaven’s auditors. I had been studying my report and Clarence’s for days, like a panicked freshman in finals week. I’ve got a pretty good memory, but being here in the Anaktoron would be enough to make Einstein put his fingers to his lips and go
bblbblbblbbl.
“Then, when I looked up, Angel Haraheliel was unconscious and Sam—Angel Sammariel—was gone.” I was tempted to prattle on, reemphasizing all the important points, but instead I clamped my mouth shut and waited. Again the awesome, nerve-wracking silence. Moments only, but a moment in Heaven can literally seem like hours.

“Another thing that has been puzzling me, Angel Doloriel,” said Anaita in her sweet, childlike voice. “How was it that you were able to defeat a creature of Old Night with nothing more than silver bullets? It seems strange that such a mighty enemy should be dispatched as easily as one of the Adversary’s foot soldiers.”

Because the silver I put into the monster at the end was more than just any old silver. It was a gift to me from Caz, a tiny silver locket, the only precious object that remained from her life as a human woman. And it was given to me with love, I’m convinced of that. The fact that a monster from the depths of time had died from that fragile little bit of silver but had laughed off all the earlier silver slugs was one of the biggest reasons that I didn’t believe what happened between Caz and me had been mere infernal seduction. But I could no more admit that to the ephors than I could claim that God Himself came down in a fiery chariot and crushed the
ghallu
beneath its wheels.

“I still don’t know,” I said as humbly as I could. “I put quite a few silver bullets in it during the course of perhaps two hours. At the end . . . it seemed to be laboring.” Which was a lie. Until I used Caz’s locket, the thing had swallowed silver rounds like they were lemon drops. “Perhaps . . . I . . .” If I had been breathing, I would have stopped to take a deep, deep breath, because I had no good answer, and I was just plain scared. “I honestly don’t know.”

“Don’t underestimate an angel of the Lord,” said Karael suddenly. He was talking so I could hear him, but he was clearly saying it for the benefit of his fellow ephors. “Angel Doloriel was trained as a member of Counterstrike Unit
Lyrae
to resist the enemies of Heaven, and those angels are as brave and tough a group as we have. I have fought many times beside our Counterstrike Units. If anyone could bring down a creature of such ancient, evil lineage, it would be a CU veteran. Isn’t that right, Doloriel?”

I could have kissed him, I swear. I could have wrapped my arms around his fiery, beautiful awesomeness and planted one right on him. “We . . . we do our best, sir. We always do our best.”

“Exactly. Doloriel was a Harp.” The way Karael said it, it seemed to roll and echo through the great council chamber. “One of those courageous souls who defend the walls of Heaven itself—even if the ones they protect do not always remember. That
means
something.”

So was Karael trying to get me off the hook simply because he didn’t like to see the angelic equivalent of ex-military being run down by the bureaucrats? Or was there something else going on? Shit, who was I kidding? In Heaven there’s
always
something else going on.

“Of course, noble Karael,” said Terentia, again speaking so I could hear. “But this angel left the
Lyrae
, did he not?”

I couldn’t figure out what was going on, and that scared me all over again. Why were the top brass arguing in front of me, a mere foot soldier? It didn’t make sense.

“Doloriel left Counterstrike because he was gravely wounded in a battle with Hell’s forces.” Karael almost sounded defensive.

“And now he serves the will of the Highest as a member of His holy advocates,” said genderless Raziel in a voice like quiet music. “Defending the souls of the worthy from the lies and trickery of Hell.”

“Perhaps,” Anaita replied. “But it was one of those selfsame advocates who conspired with members of the Opposition to create this wretched Third Way, causing all the trouble in the first place. And while there is no doubt that Angel Doloriel has been a brave fighter and an effective advocate, no one could dispute the fact that he seems to . . . attract trouble.”

“It is true,” said Raziel slowly, “that there have been times since I created the Advocacy when I wonder if we are asking too much of the Elect, requiring them to take on earthly bodies again, exposing them to all the temptations and despair that beset the living every day on Earth.”

They fell into silent conversation again, which was just as well because I must have been gaping like someone had broken a bottle over my head. Raziel created the Advocates? I had never heard that. In fact, I had never heard anything to suggest our existence came from anything less than a divine order from the Highest Himself. How important
were
these five angels? And why were they spending so much time with little Bobby Dollar?

Then an idea came to me, stealing over me like a fog, sending chills up and down my non-corporeal form. Something was going on here far beyond a fact-finding meeting, or even a meeting about something as important to these high angels as the renegades of the Third Way. Sam had told me that he’d been approached by a disguised angel that called itself Kephas, and everything about Kephas had suggested powers beyond that of Heaven’s rank and file, including the God Glove it had given Sam, a device or power or whatever it was that had allowed him to do so many unexpected things. Might Kephas, the revolutionary behind the Third Way, be a high angel like this quintet of ephors? Or, even weirder and more disturbing, was Kephas one of the Furious Five themselves?

The games they play in Heaven are incredibly subtle, but they’re still deadly—no, worse than deadly, because the loser’s lot is an eternity bathing in fire. What was I caught up in? And how was I going to avoid becoming a Bobby-colored smear in the grinding gears of heavenly politics?

“Angel Doloriel,” said Terentia suddenly, breaking into my thoughts so abruptly that I almost squeaked in terror. I’m glad I didn’t, since angels usually don’t squeak.

“Yes, Mistress?”

“We must consider all you have told us. We will speak to you again. Be ready for a summons.”

And just like that it was all gone, the fiery ephors and the gleaming magnificence of the Anaktoron’s council chamber, and I was back in bed in my miserable apartment once more, back in my miserable, shivering human body. It was still dark outside, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep.