Happy Hour In Hell: Volume Two of Bobby Dollar (32 page)

“No, really. You might as well hold a grudge against the factory that makes judges’ gavels. We’re doing our job, same as you.”

Another time he popped in to say, “Actually, I lied when I told you we’re doing Heaven’s work. Because there’s really no such thing as Heaven.”

I wasn’t going to respond this time. Something had pulled my tongue out a few hours earlier and hadn’t bothered to reattach it yet.

“It’s kind of like a science fiction story, really,” the grand duke explained. “Hell, Heaven—it’s all nonsense. Earth was conquered a long time ago by invaders from space, but humans don’t realize it yet. The aliens lifted all this stuff right out of our subconscious to keep us docile, toeing the line and behaving like a good little captive populace. Do you see how it all makes sense now?”

Later on, when I had my tongue back, Eligor had a new explanation. “Actually, it wasn’t aliens. I lied about that. It was humans from the future, when they mastered time-travel. They realized that the kindest gift they could give their benighted ancestors was to create the kind of universe the primitives already believed in. So they did. All this stuff, me, you, the Highest, everything, was invented by mankind’s own descendants. Kind of like being humored by your grandchildren, huh? ‘Yes, Grandpa, that’s right, a loving God watches over you and punishes all the wicked people. Now finish your nap.’”

The grand duke seemed to love doing this, and kept reappearing with some new explanation of how the universe was ordered, many of them possibilities I had considered myself. Maybe one of them was true. Maybe more than one. Maybe none. I’m pretty sure that he was just shitting on everything that might explain things, everything that might mean anything at all, so that I was left with the belief that nothing made sense.

A bit like modern political advertising, when you think about it.

Anyway, even Eligor got tired of that game after what seemed a few centuries, and left me to the serious physical torture, which went on and on despite the fact that I had no secrets left. Or perhaps
because
of that. It’s hard to know with Hell. You can’t even be sure about death and taxes there. The only certain things are pain and sorrow and then more pain.

“So, Doloriel.” Eligor put down his cup and sat up straight in his conference chair, as if the flames and poison and murder had just been the preliminary handshakes and bows, and now the business meeting could begin. “Tell me where the feather is now.”

It felt like it took me about an hour to find the strength to talk. “I . . .
told
. . . you. I told you everything.”

“No, as a matter of fact, you didn’t. You told me it was in your jacket pocket, hidden by some angel trickery, with your body in a house in San Judas. My people went over every inch of the place. Your body isn’t there.”

Even out where I was, on the far side of a million years of torment, this scared me, not because I cared about my Earth body at this point, or even G-Man and his girlfriend Posie, who were living in the house, but because all I wanted to do now was die the real and final death, and I knew Eligor wouldn’t kill me until he had the feather back. “It’s . . . gone?”

“In fact, now that I think of it, the whole thing’s a bit convenient. You had the feather all along and didn’t know it? And it was your buddy Sammariel who caught Grasswax trying to plant it on you? Cute, since your friend’s hiding out in that discount version of Heaven the Third Way dreamers created. And to make it even more suspicious, we both know who Sammariel takes his orders
from
.”

I was having trouble keeping up and not just because of the pain. Eligor was wrong, I hadn’t tried to hold anything back. If the feather was gone, if my body had disappeared, I was just as surprised as anyone. “Sam takes orders from . . . ? You mean Kephas?”

“Yes, ‘Kephas,’ or whatever name you want to use. The architect of this whole fiasco.”

The mysterious higher angel had recruited Sam to the Third Way, and had given him the tools to make it happen, including the thing Sam called “the God Glove,” which he had used to hide Eligor’s marker for his deal with Kephas, namely Kephas’ own angelic wing-feather. Hid it on
me
, as it turned out, although I hadn’t known it at the time. It was what got me onto Eligor’s radar in the first place. I really wished I had never seen or heard of the thing.

Bam!
Eligor hit the table and made his cup jump, sloshing coffee across the imitation wood grain Formica just as if it were real coffee in a real room in a real place. “I want it. And you’re going to fetch it back for me.”

“Yeah, right. If it’s gone, I don’t know where it is, either. Get thee behind me, Shit Hat.”

I didn’t really feel him hit me, it happened so quickly. I just suddenly realized I was on the other side of the room, lying in a heap on the patterned carpet with my vision blurred and my head clanging like a church bell. Eligor stood over me, twenty feet from where he had just been sitting. “Watch your mouth. You wouldn’t be the first dead angel I’ve made.” He leaned in closer. His Vald disguise seemed perfect from a distance, just like a human body and face, but from inches away I could see the fires beneath the skin leaking through his pores. “However, I’m a pragmatist, so I’ll make you an offer, Little Wing. You may live to fight another day for the glory of your bullshit Holy City in the Sky.”

I didn’t dare breathe, let alone speak, because I was still nearly paralyzed by how hard he’d hit me, and even after all the shit I’d just been through, I was terrified he’d hit me again. It felt like he’d shattered every bone in my body, and I was quite ready to roll on my back and show him my belly. What had made me think I could mess around with something like Eligor and survive? Nobody that stupid deserved to live.

The grand duke was suddenly back in his chair. A moment later, with no conscious understanding of how it happened, I was sitting in the chair across from him once more, trembling like a whipped puppy.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “I want that feather. It should never have left my possession. It’s my insurance policy for Kephas keeping faith. I don’t trust anyone, but I trust ambitious angels least of all, and Kephas is nothing if not ambitious. So you’re going to go back and get it, then give it to me. If you don’t . . .” he lifted his hand and suddenly Caz was there beside him. This time she had a blindfold over her eyes and a gag in her mouth, her hands bound behind her back. “If you don’t, I’ll give her everything I’ve just given you, and a lot more.”

I had no power, no leverage, nothing. I was completely outgunned, outsmarted, and outclassed. I didn’t have any choice at all.

“No,” I said. “No deal.”

“WHAT?”
Eligor’s cry of fury was so loud it toppled me onto my back. “Do you want to see her burn right now? Burn until there’s nothing left? RIGHT NOW, YOU LITTLE INSECT?”

“Don’t do that, please.” Eligor was so much more powerful than me, than pretty much anything I knew, that it was exactly like having fallen into the lion’s enclosure at a zoo. The only thing I could do was move very, very slowly and hope that he didn’t destroy Caz out of sheer irritation. “It would be a mistake.”

“You have a couple of seconds to explain before I render you into individual atoms, each one extremely pain-sensitive.” Eligor’s face was shifting now, as though I’d made him so angry he was having trouble looking even remotely human. I saw a hint of goat horn, a glimpse of suppurating skin, a glint of shiny metal skull, flashes that came and went all in a moment.

“Look, I’ll give you the damn feather—I don’t want it. I only came here because you sent Smyler after me, looking for it. But you have to let us both go. Me and the Countess.”

“Both?” Eligor was pushing his anger down now, but I could tell he wasn’t enjoying himself. “Why should I do that?”

“Because otherwise I’ll just keep saying no. Then you can torture me forever, or kill me when you get bored. You can torture and kill Caz, too. I could never stop you, and the only thing I have that you want is the feather. So let me go and let her go or forget it.”

He raised an eyebrow. He had regained his composure, was handsome and incredibly successful Kenneth Vald once more. “I’ll say this for you, Doloriel. You’ve got balls like grapefruits.” He moved his finger and Caz was gone so quick I didn’t even have a chance to look at her face again, in case it was the last time I saw it. Then he flicked his finger at me and the conference room, the donuts, the spilled coffee, everything around me disappeared, and I was alone with my pain and the horror of my recent memories in yet another version of the conference room, this time floating in an endless space as empty and gray as the evening fog coming through the Golden Gate back home.

Emptiness is another form of torment. Loneliness, too, especially when they both go on forever and ever, and ever.

thing

I
DON’T KNOW
how long I hung/lay/floated there in the gray nothing. Forgive the confusion of verbs, but I honestly couldn’t tell you what I was doing. I was in my hell-body, the Snakestaff body striped like one of the antelopes of the African veldt, naked and helpless. I wasn’t wearing restraints, but that didn’t make any difference, because I couldn’t move anything but my head and neck.

Obviously, that was better than being actively tortured, but only for the first thousand or so hours, after which I began to go a little crazy. I know, I know, you’re saying, “Hey, he’s already said he was tortured for hundreds of years or something, and now this.” You’re right, time does pass in Hell, even if it passes differently than in the real world, and the subjective time I’d experienced would have made at least a bunch of years of earth-time, but the key word here is “subjective”—as long as I was Eligor’s prisoner, I was out of normal time altogether. He could make it feel like whatever he wanted. It was entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that this was still the same morning of the day I entered his hospitable clutches.

Still, for the first time since I heard the grand duke’s voice and knew he’d caught me, I felt something a bit like hope. Not much, but he’d offered me a deal. It might be just another trick, but the mere fact that he’d taken a break from flaying my skin and boiling my nerves like vermicelli suggested he wasn’t sure what to do with me. Paradoxically, my threat to let him torture me to death was keeping me alive, at least for the moment.

I wasn’t bluffing, either. I had realized, somewhere in the worst of it, that my situation was truly hopeless. Eligor was just too strong. I couldn’t escape him, I couldn’t fight. The only thing I could do, I realized in that cauldron of pain, was suffer. But I could keep on doing it if I had to. Yes, I would beg for mercy. Yes, I would tell him anything, say anything. But as long as I kept refusing to actually
do
what he wanted me to do, he could only subject me to more torture. He could torment and kill Caz in front of me, but he could do that to her whether I helped him or not. The only way I could do anything for her was by refusing to do what he wanted and forcing him to bargain.

So I hung, or floated, or lay there suspended in nothingness, forever or even longer, trying to build up my strength for when the hurting would start again. And I knew it would start, because I would have to prove to Eligor that I wasn’t bluffing. I would have to make him give up on pain.

It started again. I won’t bother to describe it. After a few millennia, even Eligor seemed to get bored and left me to the eager attention of something named Doctor Teddy, which looked like a plush bear toy but had the stunted fingers of a human child and the eyes and whisky breath of a terminal alcoholic.

Doctor Teddy made Niloch’s torturer look like the weekend amateur he’d been. Not only did he give me everything all over again, Doctor Teddy also had a few cute ideas of his own, but even my furry new friend seemed to run out of ideas after a while, and at last I was sent back to the gray place again, weeping and trying to remember my name, even though I knew that if I remembered that I would also remember why I was here and what was happening to me. They’d done something strange to me so I couldn’t sleep, and although I could tell time was passing by the slow easing of my suffering, there was nothing else to make the hours and days pass in that dreadful, empty, uncolored place.

When things finally changed, I was at first aware only that something was in the gray with me, and that whatever it was wasn’t quite in or out. The best way I can explain it is like being underwater, somewhere there’s more shadow than light and distance distorts things and plays tricks. For long moments what I was looking at was only a slantingly vertical shape, wildly distorted as though coming at me from a dimension I couldn’t entirely see, and then it stood over me, gray corpse face and pinhole eyes, that weird underslung jaw hanging open like a fish’s as it stared at me. The rest of it was gray, too, gray dead skin stretched over bone. Smyler hadn’t gotten any prettier since our last encounter.

I didn’t even care much anymore, to be honest, but I still flinched a little at the sight. “What do you want, Handsome?” I said when I found my voice. “Getting impatient? I’m sure you’ll get to play with me when your master’s done.”

Smyler leaned in so close I could see the lines on his skin clearly for the first time ever in the flat, medical light of the gray, and I realized that they were not just random wrinkles or even a tattoo but something much more intricate, much more strange. The murderer was covered in writing—trails of tiny letters laboriously cut into the skin with something very sharp, thousands of characters in some illegible text that covered every exposed inch of his skin. I looked down to the grayish hand pointing the four-bladed knife at my face and saw that the skin on his gnarled fingers was decorated too. His other hand was hidden behind his back, but I would have bet it was the same, covered in little scars as numerous as crawling ants.

“Why did you do . . . what was reason?” Smyler still ran his words together in the same slow but breathless way, monotonous as a bored priest reciting a too-familiar catechism. “Why you not run?”

“I don’t know what you mean. Look, if you’re going to stab me or something, just do it. It’ll give me something new to think about.”

“No.” He leaned even closer, until the leathery flesh of his face was almost touching mine, and I could see his eyes moving wetly in the deep holes. His voice was strained, even desperate. “
Tell it.
Tell it why.”

“Tell what?” I could smell the faint odor of his decay even in this gray nowhere, the musty, nauseating sweetness of something that had spent a long time dead and undiscovered.

“Tell it why you go back. Why you help little thing. Why no run, save you.”

It took me a while. In my defense, may I remind the jury about the thousands of hours of sadistic torment I’d undergone. Anyway, at last the astonishing truth dawned: this horrible creature wanted to know why I’d gone back to save Gob. He had watched the whole thing, it seemed, not just Riprash’s meeting but what happened afterward.

“Why did I go back? Because it was my fault the kid was there in the first place.” It had suddenly occurred to me that maybe Stabby McMurder-Mummy was now searching for Gob too, so I tried to make the kid seem less important. “I forced him to come with me in the first place. He didn’t want to leave Abaddon. I was just trying to help him . . .”

“No!”
It was the first time I had ever heard anything like anger out of Smyler. Ordinarily he was as weirdly cheerful as one of those old grandpas who don’t speak any English that you see sitting in the back of Chinese grocery stores watching the news in Mandarin. “No,” he said a little more calmly. “You no help. Angel help. You devil. Keefs tell me. Devil in angel clothes.”

“Keefs . . . ?” It sounded weirdly familiar. Again, it took me longer than it should have. “Wait a minute—
Kephas
?” Sam’s mysterious benefactor. The angel who had made the deal with Eligor and used the golden feather as a marker. “
You
know Kephas?”

“Keefs . . .
Kephas
so beautiful. Beautiful like clouds and silver.” And suddenly the thing smiled, a full display of those ugly little bottom teeth as well as the few nubs in its upper gums. “Kephas tell it, do my words, and it will be an angel too.”

“What will be an angel? What is ‘it’?”

Smyler pointed the knife at his own chest. “It. It will be an angel if it do everything right. Kephas says it will.”

Oh my sweet God
, I realized.
He thinks he’ll get to be an angel by killing me.

“I
am
an angel,” I said, slowly and carefully. “I’m Doloriel, Advocate Angel of the Third House. Are you saying that Kephas told you I was . . . some kind of devil? It wasn’t Eligor who sent you after me?”

Smyler tipped his head to one side like a puzzled dog. For the first time I realized that he was as naked as I was, but whatever external features he’d once had, like genitalia, were gone, just more ruined, dead flesh. “Eligor?”

“The big old demon who owns this place. The one whose prisoner I am. You weren’t working for him, but for an
angel
?”

“It loves angels.” The corpse-puppet head bobbed up and down. “It will be angel when it’s done.”

I don’t like these “everything you know is wrong” moments when they happen to me in the course of absolutely ordinary life, but I like them even less when I’m a prisoner in Hell, taking a little break between bouts of indescribable punishment. What was going on here? This monstrous thing, this gibbering killer, didn’t belong to Eligor and maybe never had? Now that I thought about it, the grand duke’s reaction when I mentioned Smyler’s name had been a bit strange, a bit . . . noncommittal. But why would Kephas employ such a creature? Wasn’t Kephas hiding his or her identity from the rest of Heaven precisely because Kephas thought the Highest was too rough on the souls of the dead? How did that gibe with sending a serial murderer after a perfectly blameless angel? Who was the real villain here, Eligor, Grand Duke of Hell, or Kephas, supposed heavenly idealist? Neither of them? Both of them?

“How did you meet Kephas?” I asked.

Smyler stared hard at me, perhaps sensing some of the unhappiness behind my words. “Kephas came. Kephas spoke. Showed it Heaven. Showed it the light. Told it Papa Man and Mama were wrong. It wasn’t bad, it was made for . . . something else.”

“Papa Man? Mama?” Smyler had been alive once, so of course he must have had a family, or at least a mother, but it had been a long time since I had thought of him as anything other than a force of supernatural evil. “Were those your parents?”

“It was their cross to bear. Mama always said. It was borned because Papa Man had the sin of pride. Because he tried to make a baby at her when she was blessed by God to stay a version.”

“A . . . virgin?”

“Yes. Version. But Papa Man put the dirty in her. He made it inside her, and when it came out she saw it was ugly bad. That was what she said, what Mama said.” Smyler was getting worked up again, his voice getting monotonous and rushed as though the words were carried along on a river of feelings too fast and deep to be reached or even looked at closely. “Dirty thing, dirty thing, and Papa Man left it behind like dirt on the floor. Like mud on her dress. Can’t beat the dirty out of it, that’s what Mama said. Can’t make it die because God has reason for it. God wants it in the world, no matter how ugly bad. No matter how ugly bad and mean and wrong . . .”

I almost wish I’d never asked. It had been unpleasant enough just knowing it was out there and wanted to find me, this vile thing, this monster that had killed so many innocent people. Knowing how it had become such a monster was worse. Much worse.

It told me its story in bits and pieces, in strands that at first seemed to have no connection but later proved to be bits of a larger web. In some ways the tale was depressingly familiar, the dreadful story of so many sociopaths and religious psychopaths, a child treated like an animal or worse, the name of God used as the excuse for torture, an existence with no safe place, no kindness, no love. It was almost like Smyler’s vicious, dreadful parents had done their best to make something even more terrible than themselves, and they succeeded.

But every time he had killed, at least during his mortal life, Smyler had thought he was sending something beautiful to Heaven, a gift for the angels. Even the name he had given himself, the name he had left at the scene of so many brutal crimes, was not meant to evoke Chaucer’s “smyler with a knyfe,” but because when she had finished beating him, or puncturing him with sharp things, or burning his fingers or toes or face with a hot iron, Mama would always tell him, “Stop crying. You’d better smile. Remember, God loves you.”

And that was how he thought of himself, how he still thought of himself, no matter how deep the blood and madness. He was God’s smiling little soldier.

The story trailed off at last in confusion, because Smyler himself still didn’t know what to make of me. His tunnel-vision idea of the world, the same crazy focus that had set him to murder and driven him to follow me all the way to Hell, was not able to easily absorb new information, and the new idea that I
wasn’t
some kind of demon pretending to be an angel had left him baffled and uncertain of what to do next.

“It has to think. It has to pray. God will tell it what to do.” Smyler revealed the hand that he had kept hidden since he entered the gray space. It looked no different from the other, until first his fingertips began to glow, then the fingers themselves, then his palm too, until I could see his bones through the skin as though they were made of blazing phosphorus. His hand was so bright it was hard to look directly at it.

“What . . . ?” I blinked. If I could have raised my hands in front of my eyes I would have, but I was still helpless below the neck. “What are you doing?”

“Hand of Glory. Kephas gave it the Hand. To do God’s work.” Smyler swiped the glow at the gray nothing that surrounded us. The nothingness tore, leaving a ragged, smoldering edge and more nothingness beyond. Then Smyler climbed through the hole.

“Wait!” I cried. “Don’t go! Don’t leave me . . . !”

But it was no use. He was gone. The gleaming wound healed over in an instant and vanished. The gray was empty once more and I was alone.