Happy Hour In Hell: Volume Two of Bobby Dollar (31 page)

That sort of took my breath away. I was suddenly filled with a sense of how big and tragic Hell really was. God, if He was as responsible as my superiors claimed, had built a huge machine to concentrate suffering and institutionalize His punishment. The quid pro quo, as far as I’d ever been able to tell, was, “If you do wrong, even if it is only once for a brief moment, you will be tortured for it forever and ever, amen.” Period. No appeal, no parole. But old Origen of Alexandria hadn’t believed that, and maybe Temuel didn’t either. Could that make any difference in the larger scheme of things?

It could if these damned souls believed it. It would give them something they had never otherwise had—hope. So was my archangel really trying to bring comfort to the most afflicted of all? Or was it, as I had first assumed, just a cynical way to make trouble for the Adversary?

After all the time I’d spent here in the Pit, and despite everyone who had been trying to destroy me, I was having more trouble than ever with the whole idea of Hell. It’s hard to think of the enemy the same way when you’ve seen them at home, met the wife and kids,
etc.
And I was definitely far into the “etc.” phase, considering that I thought of a female demon as my girlfriend, even if she said she didn’t want to be. Was there still a chance Caz was going to show up tomorrow night? And even if she did, how was I going to get her safely onto Riprash’s ship?

All of those unanswered questions made me restless, so I got up to walk around. That didn’t last long, since the room was full of hideous hell-creatures annoyed with me for creaking the floor while they were trying to listen to Riprash, so I wandered out into the open corridor that crossed the upper level. Most of the storage rooms were empty and their doors were open. For a moment I thought I saw a disturbingly familiar shape, gray and hunched, in one of the doorways. After a moment’s stunned surprise, I pulled my knife out of my belt and cautiously approached the door. When I stepped through, the room was empty of even the piles of black straw that I expected, and the window at the far end was open, the shutter still propped up.

Could it really have been Smyler? But if it had been, why would he run? Was he afraid of all of the others in the nearby room? Somehow that didn’t seem quite what I expected of him. Maybe he was just waiting for a better opportunity to get me alone.

Rattled, I hurried back to the greater security of Riprash’s Lifter meeting, but I had barely slipped back inside when I was startled by a crash and harsh voices from downstairs. I wasn’t the only one: eyes widened in the near darkness all around the room, then a second later our quiet gathering of damned turned into a cockroach party suddenly exposed to light, malformed shapes scuttling in all directions as the first of the Murderers Sect guards burst through the door with whips and torches and nets.

Had Smyler been spying on us for the authorities? It didn’t really make sense, but it was hard to believe his being here was a coincidence, either.

I struggled through the chaos looking for Riprash, but the ogre appeared as if from nowhere, picked me up by the back of my neck like a stray puppy, and carried me toward the window. He held Gob in his other massive hand, and before I could even make sense of his plan, Riprash had leaned so far out of the window that the boy and I were dangling in midair, nothing beneath us until the hard stone cobbles nearly a hundred feet below. I didn’t have much time to think, however, because a moment later I felt a massive yank and Gob and I were flying through the air with everything spinning around us like the view in a kaleidoscope. It took me a panicked half-second or more before we crashed and rolled and slid to a halt, and I realized that Riprash hadn’t flung us down, but all the way up onto the roof of the warehouse. After that, I was too busy to think about anything much, trying to find my weapons and dodge the shrieking Lifters who had found their way to the roof.

I quickly got separated from Gob in the mad skirmish. It was no longer just the other Lifters on the tiled roof now—the Murderers Sect bullies had arrived, climbing up after us, and they were wading into the nearest of the squealing heretics, dealing out what looked like serious pain, tearing flesh from backs with their bladed whips, crushing limbs and skulls with heavy maces. Those they had beaten down were hauled away in nets, trussed, and left at the corner of the roof while the guards concentrated on those of us who were still free.

As I staggered toward the edge of the roof, waving my boot knife and trying to put as much space between the guards and myself as possible, I heard a scraping, rasping crash and then thunder from just below us. I looked over the edge and saw that Riprash had taken the easiest way out of the room downstairs, smashing his way through the constricting windowframe, taking a lot of the surrounding wall with him as he jumped to the distant ground. He had apparently landed safely and now stood in the middle of a pile of debris and shattered paving, looking up.

“Jump down!” the ogre bellowed when he saw me. “I’ll catch you! Don’t be afraid!” He held out his massive paws. I hesitated, not because I didn’t trust him, but because I still didn’t know where Gob was, and I couldn’t just leave the kid behind. He never would have been in Pandaemonium if it hadn’t been for me.

I saw him at last, struggling like a wet cat in the arms of a guard. Gob’s captor had leathery skin and lips that stuck out in bony, beaklike plates, as if to demonstrate how a real life mutant ninja turtle would be anything but cute. Gamely as he was fighting, Gob clearly didn’t stand a chance; his assailant had already all but immobilized him and was only a moment from getting him into the net with a bunch of others.

I dove on the guard from behind, jabbing my blade deep into where his kidneys should be. I was slowed down by the chain-mail stuff he was wearing, but the demon-cutter was a big knife, and I slammed it into his back with both hands. He made a surprised, croaking noise and let Gob drop. I didn’t bother trying to retrieve the knife, but snatched the kid up and dodged through the chaos of guards and Lifters on my way to the edge of the roof. Down below, Riprash was fighting with three guards, but he was winning, and when I screamed his name he looked up, then made quick work of his enemies, literally knocking the head off one of them with his fist.

I threw Gob down to him. I had a second or two to watch the boy tumble into Riprash’s massive hands, then I was snatched back from the edge of the roof by a couple of Murderer Sectarians. Two or three more joined them, fell on me like thick men on a rugby ball, and that was about it. The last I remembered was someone beating the thoughts out of my skull with some kind of club. It was the worst drum solo ever, and for me, that’s saying something, but fortunately I didn’t have to experience it for long.

the conference room

I
WAS AWAKE
for some time before I opened my eyes, but my senses kept telling me I was in a meeting room in some Holiday Inn or a Hilton business hotel when I knew I was actually in Hell. Still, I could definitely smell coffee and glazed donuts and the scent of room freshener purchasable in bulk quantities. I was just trying to make sense of it when someone spoke.

“My, my, Advocate Doloriel, you are a persistent little beast, aren’t you?”

My heart didn’t just sink, it crawled into the darkest, deepest corner of my chest and refused to come out ever again. My eyes popped open, too, even though I immediately wished they hadn’t, so I could have pretended a little longer the whole thing was a clubbing-induced dream.

Grand Duke Eligor stood over me in full hellish nobility drag, seven feet tall, in Renaissance-ish robes of flowing black, with a high collar that came up right under his chin. The only odd detail was that, except for the inhuman smolder of his eyes, he was wearing his Kenneth Vald, human billionaire face instead of one of his really scary ones. Not that I wasn’t scared.

I did my best anyway. “Nice outfit, Ellie. Remind me again what the safe word was.”

He didn’t say anything. The room looked exactly like it smelled, with Vald/Eligor standing at the other side of a perfectly ordinary conference table in a perfectly normal hotel conference room (at least it would have been in Visalia or Bakersfield or San Leandro). There was even a box of donuts and a coffee service, with artificial sweeteners and powdered creamer. The only thing missing from this vision of Rotarian perfection was a window with venetian blinds open to a view of the freeway or a business park next door. But this room had no windows.

Eligor folded himself gracefully into a chair just across from me. I didn’t seem to be restrained in any way, but I wasn’t quite ready to test that—not yet, since it was almost certainly what he’d expect me to do. I had no leverage at all except possibly to do something unexpected, and I probably wouldn’t get a second chance, so I was going to wait until I actually thought of something worth trying. In the meantime, I knew Eligor the Horseman well enough from our previous encounters to know he didn’t mind talking.

“So that was all some trap of yours?”

The grand duke smiled a little. “What, that little holy-roller meeting you were attending? Do you really think I would set some elaborate trap for you? The Countess was right—you
do
have an exaggerated sense of your own importance. No, nobody even knew you were here, little angel, although you were trying very hard to get noticed. Honestly, you came to my own house, Dollar. I thought Heaven didn’t allow suicide.”

“And I thought Hell would knock the pussy out of someone after a few million years, but clearly I was wrong. You saying you didn’t come after me?”

He shook his head as if it almost wasn’t worth answering. “We’ve been looking for ‘Pseudolus’ ever since you made your little visit to Flesh Horse. Did you think we wouldn’t check with the Liars Sect to see if you were legitimate? Then, when somebody took out his bad temper on Candy and Cinnamon—well, as you can guess, we were getting
very
interested. When the Pandaemonium City Guards picked you up with those Lifter idiots, one of my informants recognized you as the one we were looking for . . . so here you are.” He shook his head. “You’ve all but ruined the Countess’s bodyguards. Was that really necessary? First you kill my assistant back in San Judas, now you come all the way to my place here and do in a couple of harmless wage-slaves. You have something against working folk?”

“Enough of your bullshit,” I said. “Let’s cut to the hugs and learning so we can finish this. You want the feather. That’s why you sent Smyler after me. Our business with the Countess aside, I had to do something, since it was obvious after that you weren’t going to leave me alone. And you knew I’d made it into Hell because Smyler followed me here, so don’t pretend you’re surprised to see me.”

He looked at me for a long moment, his face as blank as a weathered statue of some ancient king. “Yes, Smyler,” he said. “Of course.”

“You don’t need to play games, big man. You hold all the cards. Do what you’re going to do. I’m not giving you the feather, and I’m not going to tell you where it is. You’ll just kill me anyway, so why should I make it easy on you?”

He smiled, his lips curling slowly back, an unhurried predator with a staked-down meal. For the first time, I could see that he was probably as old as the planet, if not older. “Very good. The hero speech. But I think you’re supposed to say that
after
I’ve tried to soften you up a little. Has more resonance that way.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Take your best shot. What are you going to do with this—” I gestured to the conference table and the bad oil paintings, “—make me sit through a sales pitch for a time-share condo?”

“Oh, you don’t approve of the decor?” Eligor looked around. “I requested it just for you. I thought it would make a small-timer like you feel at home. We can do something else if you’d rather—”

And just that suddenly the room was gone, and I was falling through whistling blackness, grabbing at nothing, helpless.

“How about this?”

Watery light all around me, dirty glass, stainless steel tables striped with old blood, ancient linoleum brown with the dried scum of countless vile fluids. Hanging above the operating table on which I was strapped was a gallery of machines that would have made Torquemada flinch: drills and bone saws and claspers and graspers whose purposes I couldn’t even grasp, but whose rusted, stained surfaces spoke volumes.

“Or if you’re more of a traditionalist,” said Eligor’s voice, “we could try this.”

The light dimmed. Now there was only a single torch, just bright enough to reveal that the ancient stone floor around me boiled with crawling things. The walls, too, were alive with moving, clicking shapes. I gasped and jerked, but I couldn’t get up, let alone away.

“How about Surrealism? You like all that 20th century stuff, don’t you?”

I was stretched in a dozen directions, my eyes impossibly far apart, binocular vision in two separate directions. A vast mouth had replaced the pale ceiling above my head, lips as big as the front end of a car that giggled and made kissing noises and murmured things I couldn’t quite hear while a fine mist of saliva fell down onto my face. Spiders with the heads of birds and birds with the heads of medieval harlequins hopped and fluttered all around me. The lips made a choking noise, then rounded into an “o” and something gray and ropy and as big as a gorilla began to climb down from between the teeth, eyes floating around in its body like bubbles in a bag of liquid.

“Or maybe you’re beginning to appreciate the original theme,” Eligor said, and suddenly the hotel conference room snapped back into being around me. “You see, it doesn’t really matter. You’re not in a place, Doloriel—you’re in
my
place. And you will tell me where the feather is. It’s only a matter of time, and we’ve got . . . forever.”

Great roiling, billows of crematory flame leaped from the walls, red and yellow and orange, the same hideous orange as Eligor’s eyes. I couldn’t see Eligor anymore, though. I couldn’t see anything but the flames.

I felt my skin charring. I felt it dry and then crack, then burn away. I felt my nerves become blackened wires, my muscle tissues shrivel and catch fire, my very bones burst into flames. I felt just what you would feel as you burn to death, a level of shrilling pain in every fiber that cannot even be described, agony beyond anything I could have imagined. And I kept feeling it. It went on. It went on, and on, and on.

I don’t know when it stopped. Hours later. Days later, maybe. I was somewhere else by then. I was
someone
else. The person who had been burned that way, that Bobby, that Angel Doloriel, was gone now beyond retrieval. That person could never exist again. And the thing that remained behind would never stop screaming, I felt sure. Never stop burning.

Eligor carefully picked out a donut. “The last powdered sugar,” he explained. “So, where’s my feather?”

It took a while to form words, although from what I could see of my trembling hands I was whole and unburnt again, as though I hadn’t just experienced a lifetime’s worth of scorching, unholy agony. “Fuck . . . you.”

“Right, then!” he said and saluted me with his
World’s Greatest Boss
mug as the flames blazed up once more.

He had lots of other ways to hurt me when he got bored with hellfire, some of them quite inventive. I had to watch Caz tortured and raped by Eligor himself and various demons, or at least something that looked like her. Then later I had to watch another version of Caz participating happily, even enthusiastically, in all the same activities, even as my own nerves were stretched and burned and scraped and tormented. Eligor liked to cover all the bases.

I talked, of course. Fuck, yes I did. I told him everything I knew about the feather and everything else. Pain hurts. Pain in Hell hurts even more. And this was personal pain that Eligor
wanted
me to feel, and he made sure I got every last drop. I don’t think it had as much to do with Caz as it did with me being an annoyance. The fact that unimportant me had managed to waste so much of his precious, infinite time. You’d think he’d have thanked me for the diversion. But no.

It didn’t seem to matter that I was vomiting out every secret I had, though. Eligor went right on hurting me. After the flames I found myself in a place bright and white as an industrial clean room, where men with faces featureless as thumbprints pounded on me with iron hammers, smashing every bone in my body, flattening me like a cutlet. Each blow forced more screams out of my mouth, which changed shape with each strike, so that it was almost impossible to form words. But still they kept hitting me, and I kept screaming out what I knew.

Dark, oily liquid. Writhing things sinking their teeth into my flesh and wrapping around me like sex-crazed eels to pull me down. I managed to kick free just before I drowned and made it back to the surface, gasping out foul, poisoned air and taking in lungfuls of something not much better, only to be yanked down into the darkness again. And again. And . . . you’ve got it by now, right?

Packs of rotting skeletons trying to eat my face as I struggled to escape over mounds of garbage. This was less fun than it sounds.

My skin trying to tear itself loose from my body. Exactly as fun as it sounds.

A chamber full of stinging ants and biting flies the size of pigeons. Me with no arms or legs.

An all-black room, where nothing happened except an excruciating pain blooming right in the middle of my skull, like an insane sea urchin with thumbtack spines trying to shove its way out through one of my eye sockets. It got worse and worse until I finally tore my own head off my neck, at which point my head grew back and the process started over.

And every now and then, just to remind me why I was literally suffering the tortures of the damned, I would be back in the original conference room with Eligor. He would ask me a few more questions, or the same questions again. Sometimes he just looked at me and laughed, then I went back into the acid bath or dangled on the electric fence again. A couple of times he was reading emails on his cellphone and didn’t even look up. Once I saw Caz, standing straight and silent as Eligor held her with one hand around her neck, like a chicken going to the chopping block. Her eyes were wet and her lashes frosty with crystallizing tears, but she didn’t move, didn’t speak.

Back to the crematory flames again, but this time all my friends from the Compasses were there with me—Monica, Sweetheart, Walter Sanders, all of them shrieking as they burned, begging me to help them.

The next time I came back to the conference room, Lady Zinc was waiting for me, eyes bright with madness. While Eligor watched and drank his coffee Vera raped me again, just as she had before. Then she took me in ways she hadn’t been able to do before. It all hurt worse than you can imagine—merciful God, a lot worse.

Vera disappeared after a few thousand hours.

“Little man,” said the grand duke, grinning. “You’ve had a busy day.”

He sent me to a room whose floor was wire mesh painted with acid. The flesh kept melting off my bones and dripping through, and as determinedly as I crawled, the door remained just as far away.

An endless desert of broken glass and salt.

A dim forest full of predatory birds with teeth. They laughed like demented children.

More fire. Needles. Filth. Innocents suffering. Over and over and over.

Over and over.

As kind of a break between bouts of indescribable agony, Eligor would pause the torture ride to explain how things in the universe
really
worked. Kind of like those old educational fillers they used to run between the Saturday morning kids’ cartoons.

The first time, he appeared as I was screaming helplessly and said, “You know, you’ve got it all wrong.”

I didn’t answer, being too busy spitting out blood and bile.

“You see, Heaven has you suckered. They’re not against what we do—they ordered us to do it. We’re the official alternative. We’re as much a part of God’s system as the guards who work in a prison.”

I spat again, and mustered a single, “Bite me.”