Happy Hour In Hell: Volume Two of Bobby Dollar (25 page)

But there were body parts all over too, and like a school of slow, slow fish they were making their way through the glass and spilled liquids toward Vera.

Now I pushed over whole rows of jars, trying to fill the floor with broken glass and free as many of Vera’s immortals as possible. As they piled around her, different parts from dozens of different bodies built bridges with each other, clinging, climbing. Hands worked together to lift a head up to other hands. Many-headed, many limbed piles of dripping meat built themselves up from the sloshing floor like volcanoes being born. The composite creatures quickly surrounded Vera, and despite the love she had lavished on them and the kindnesses she had shown them, none of her immortals seemed willing to miss out on this reunion.

She had forgotten about me and was trying to fight her way free, but the coral reef of fingers and feet and kidneys and faces had already risen to her waist. Hands climbed her body like crabs—many already clung to her dark, loosened hair. She shrieked and tried to knock them away, but more flung themselves onto her and then made chains so that other hands could cross, until Vera swayed at the center of a crowd of these teetering, squirming piles, white-faced and astounded, still screaming but almost without sound now because she had shrieked herself hoarse. Hands scuttled closer and pulled themselves to her so that the heads could kiss her. As the body-meat piles grew higher, the heads ran their tongues over her, tongues that sometimes came loose and dropped to the floor like overfilled leeches.

Much as I hated the bitch, I didn’t stay to watch. The moment I could see a clear space, I stumbled past the bizarre reunion, ran, heart ratcheting, until I found the stairs at the far side of the cellar, then climbed for what seemed like days upon lightless days. Vera’s hoarse shrieks followed me for a long part of that journey, until I finally found myself in a regular part of the tunnels near the Terminus. From there I was able to make my way upward, to stand free at last beneath Hell’s vaulted, claustrophobic night sky.

I could never have guessed how glad I would be to see that terrible blank firmament again.

chancery

O
NE GOOD
thing about Hell is that there’s never any problem getting rid of stolen goods, no matter how late it is. I’d had a lot of time to think between visits from Vera and her vampire groin, and I’d come up with a few ideas of what to do next if I ever got the chance. Now I had it.

Vera’s fancy neighborhood was on the edge of Sulfur Lagoon, a prestige location close to, among other things, the Night Market, a vast array of stalls and tents and shacks made of various awful things where you could buy or sell pretty much anything. Limping and bloody (two things that fortunately don’t attract much notice in Hell) I made my way to the market and asked around until I found the bazaar of a fellow named Saad Babrak who looked like a hairless tarantula from his neck downward and had a reputation as a discreet disperser of goods. In other words, a fence.

I could only hope Vera’s jewelry was good quality. I hung onto one necklace of lumpy, lagoon-grown pearls (I’ll explain why later) but dumped all the rest of the stuff on Saad’s counter and let him piss all over me in the guise of “bargaining.” I didn’t want to give in too easily because he’d remember that, but I also didn’t want to be there so long that Smyler or some other survivor from Vera’s house found me. At last I got a price I could live with, spent a little on the spot purchasing some of Saad’s other goods, including some clean clothes which I didn’t put on right away and a long, sharp, well-made knife with a backward-curving guard; the kind of thing I wanted to have in my hand the next time I wound up fighting for my life.

I’d made two gold weights, three copper handfuls, and a couple of iron spits in change from the stolen stuff, plus the coins I’d already taken from Vera’s jewelry box, so I was pretty much wealthy, at least for a while. Jewelry dumped and pockets jingling with money, I picked the inn with the least horrifying reputation I could find, a place called the Black Ostrich, that overlooked the stinking backwater where the Styx bellied out into Sulfur Lagoon. I probably looked pretty beat up already, so as I paid I showed the innkeeper my knife, informed him I wouldn’t be sleeping during my stay so there was no point trying to rob and murder me, and suggested strongly that he and the rest of his employees would be happiest if they avoided my room entirely. Then I dragged myself upstairs and went to work.

One of the things I’d bought from Saad’s bazaar was a jug of firewater. Yes, that’s what it’s called, and it’s not the Dodge City kind. It’s made from the waters of the burning river Phlegethon, it’s uglier in the mouth than Riprash’s rum, and you don’t need to drink much before you want to go out and beat some people to bloody pulp. I drank a bit more carefully than that, just enough to kill the worst of the pain from my long captivity and dull what I was about to do to myself.

I’d bought one more thing from Saad’s place, a cracked hunk of mirror glass: very few people in Hell want to own mirrors, for some reason, and there certainly wasn’t going to be one in a cheap hostel like the Black Ostrich. Now that I could see myself, I went to work, slicing lines in the skin of my face and liberally dousing them with firewater, pausing every few minutes to stick my bloody face into the filthy mattress and scream, because it hurt really fucking bad, let me tell you.

Once I’d cut myself along the brow line, forehead, cheeks, nose, and jaw, I dabbed away the slow-moving blood, then sliced the cord on Vera’s pearl necklace and began tucking the individual pearls into my bleeding weals. I’d seen a ritual like it on a National Geographic TV show; young guys in Africa or New Guinea or somewhere stuffing their sliced skin with stones and ashes to make impressive scars. I didn’t care about impressive, I just wanted to change the look of my face. I had almost vomited out my own heart when Caym the President seemed to recognize me. Ultimately I might wind up trying to fool Eligor himself, but as I had discovered to my surprise and shock, whatever process Temuel had used to get me into this body had left me looking a lot more like my Bobby Dollar self than I could risk. So, self-mutilation.

I kept drinking little nips of the firewater, and that blotted out the worst of the agony, but there was so much blood that I quickly soaked the few rags I’d lifted at the bazaar. No point in putting on my new, clean clothes until the bleeding stopped, so I dabbed my wounds one last agonizing time with Phlegethon-liquor, then laid myself down to sleep through the worst of the pain.

I dreamed of Caz, of course, of our last night together in Eligor’s hotel before he blew the fucking thing to kingdom come, but in my dream we couldn’t make love because bits of me kept falling off and crawling around on a floor slippery with blood. At one point I roused myself from the mattress long enough to douse myself in the burning liquid again, then did my best to fall back asleep, but I could actually feel the skin knitting together over my new scars—a disturbing, tingling sensation like ants dancing in little white-hot metal shoes. After awhile I just gave up and lay with gritted teeth, waiting for the pain to subside enough for sleep to come.

It took more than a few hours. I was beginning to feel right at home in Hell now—angry, miserable, hurting, you name it. Cheated, too. Like everyone else here, I was having trouble understanding what I had done to be suffering this way.

Now that I was comparatively safe I gave the scars a full day to heal, going out to the Night Market only long enough to grab something disgusting to eat before slinking back to my room at the Ostrich. When the pain of my self-surgery had dwindled to a dull ache, I got out the broken mirror and examined my handiwork. It was a strange look: my bumpy new brow and the lumpy lines along my cheekbones and jaw made me look like some kind of desert lizard. I used a little carbon from the candlewick so my eyes would seem more deep-sunk beneath the knobby shelf I’d created. It made me even uglier, but that was fine. There’s no right or wrong in Hell as far as how people look, and my only goal was to look less like Bobby Dollar, Enemy of the State.

I lay down again to think, because I had a lot to think about. How had Smyler found me? Had Eligor brought him back here from the real world like recalling an employee from a field office? It was the only thing that made sense. But if the grand duke could find me to set Smyler on me, why hadn’t he done it sooner? Why hadn’t Eligor sent the Murderers Sect instead? And why hadn’t any of my enemies showed up here at my new hiding place?

Commissar Niloch and others had mentioned someone the authorities were hunting, an intruder, and I’d assumed that was me. But what if it was Smyler all along? What if he’d somehow followed me into Hell and only caught up to me when I was stuck at Vera’s house?

That was about all the thought I could give it, since there wasn’t much point in trying to figure things out from so little information. I was here for Caz, that was what mattered, and I had a lot to do, some of which was going to be downright terrifying. Putting it off would only make things worse. Only the Highest knew how long I’d already been in this horrible place, but it felt like half a year or more. For all I knew, there was already a heavenly APB out for me. In many, many ways, I was running out of time.

The Ministry of Justice, also known as the Chancery, was in the deepest, most overbuilt section of the Red City, a crooked maze of close-leaning towers and guarded doorways behind Dis Pater Square. I had been praying I wouldn’t have to see Chancellor Urgulap again, the hideous giant-beetle-thing that had interviewed me back on Earth about the death of Prosecutor Grasswax. Luckily, as a member of the minor gentry Snakestaff of the Liars Sect was far too unimportant to get a meeting with the chancellor, and was instead fobbed off on a (literally) very sharp young woman, who seemed to be made entirely out of scissor parts. Urgulap was present only in a portrait that hung on the wall, watching over the dark office, his shell buffed to a gleam and his inhuman face frozen in a glower of determined leadership.

“We cannot give you that information, Lord Snakestaff,” the Scissor Sister told me. “The chancellor has not completed his investigation, which he will present to the Senate and Council soon.”

“That’s okay,” I said, trying to imagine how reckless a guy would have to be to go to bed with a woman whose thighs were sharpened blades. “I just need to do something with this thing.” I tried to hand her a piece of vellum, but only managed to knock several of the files off her desk. She gave me a look of shiny distaste, then her metal surfaces rasped as she bent to pick them up. When finished, she examined the writing on the piece of stretched, smoothed skin. “What is this? Some sort of debt?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Grasswax owed me almost two weights. Gambling debts.” (The real Grasswax had indeed liked a wager, and lost pretty frequently from what I’d heard. But not only hadn’t he lost to me, I didn’t even know what contests or games he liked.) “So, could I get, I don’t know, paid out of his estate? When the investigation’s over?”

“Doesn’t your sect allow you to pursue these matters out of Grasswax’s redenture?”

I did my best to look embarrassed, which wasn’t that hard since I had no idea what a redenture even was. “Yeah. They sort of . . . kicked me out. I’m not in the Liars Sect any more.” I shrugged. “I caught on with the Thieves.”

She rubbed one of her blades down her nose, which was also a blade.
Skrrkkkkkkk
. “All right,” she said at last. “Fine. Leave this with me, and I’ll put it into the files. With an explanation.” She frowned, which looked pretty odd, I can tell you. “But don’t expect too much.”

I stood. “Why would I? This is Hell.”

Outside, I stepped into the dark space of a tower doorway to make certain I’d grabbed the right thing while Scissor Sister was picking up the stuff I knocked over. I took a quick look at the out-basket files I’d stolen, a few pieces of vellum with official Chancery letterhead. More important, though, was the other thing I’d lifted, a wooden stamp that looked like it might have come right off Ebenezer Scrooge’s desk, except instead of “Scrooge & Marley” it said “Ministry of Justice.”

Perfect.

I didn’t sleep very well that night, and it wasn’t just because of the intermittent shrieks of agony from the promenade along Sulfur Lagoon. They weren’t really any worse than the stink of the lagoon itself, and both were easier to ignore than the weird buzzing, gagging sex two or three somethings were having in the room above mine.

I was finally ready, after all this time, to do what I had come to Hell to do, or at least to begin doing it. If you know me at all by now, you know that I’m not so stupid as to do the same stupid thing every time—I prefer to alternate my stupidities. I had been discreetly checking into Eligor’s setup (loyalty is almost nonexistent in Hell, and bribery is one of the favorite pastimes). I wasn’t going to just charge into his fortress of a house. I knew I couldn’t just saunter in and liberate Caz. I wasn’t even going to make a plan until I knew more. That was why I had been sitting up all evening making fake Ministry of Justice documents for myself, until I had come up with something that satisfied my intention to walk in and out of Eligor’s stronghold with my skin on and my vital organs still in their original places.

When I’d tackled Eligor in his earthly stronghold at Five Page Mill back in San Judas, I hadn’t known who and what I was dealing with. I did now. I was pretty sure I’d only get one shot to get her away from him, and I’d have to be very lucky to get even that. I needed a real plan, but first I needed to see his castle, called Flesh Horse, up close.

Just getting near it was difficult, because although the top levels had the same kind of connective branches leading horizontally to other great mansions, they were all closely guarded. Like the Infernal Cabinet House and most other important buildings in Pandaemonium, the base of Flesh Horse sat in a wide park, walled off from its neighbors. The grounds were tangled with blood-colored trees and aggressively guarded by legions of what looked like albino scorpions with wolves’ heads. They didn’t worry me too much, because I was intending to walk right in through the front door, at least this first time.

Flesh Horse was many acres wide at its base and stretched up so far into the smoky sky that even with the red day lamps burning in the walls I couldn’t see its top. The great, stony castle didn’t actually look like a horse, or like flesh, but it didn’t look like a nice place, either. Still, Caz was in there somewhere, and I desperately needed to get her back. It felt like doing that was the only thing that might keep me sane.

So I spent several days on my due diligence and lots of money on bribes, gathering information and prepping myself. I had a special set of clothes made by a tailor at the Night Market, and paid another visit to Saad the pink tarantula to pick up a few additional necessities. My scars were all but healed now, the bumpiness of my face still just as ugly but a lot less recent-looking.

The night before I started my mission, I drank myself to near-unconsciousness with Phlegethon firewater because I was too tightly wound to sleep otherwise. In the near darkness Hell calls morning, I took one last swallow to burn out the hangover and the musty taste in my mouth, then carefully dressed and prepared myself before walking out into the Red City, whistling the theme to
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
.

Okay, I wasn’t doing that last part. I admit that I
was
wishing Clint Eastwood could have been there too, but it was only yours truly.