Lucifer's Lottery (15 page)

“Look, it’s not what you think,” Gerold bumbled. “I was just . . .”

“Come on. We’ll get you taken care of.”

Another siren approached, an ambulance, no doubt.

“Life ain’t that bad, pal.”

As Gerold was rolled backward into the apartment, he saw that a crowd of spectators had gathered down below.
Shit, shit, shit, shit!
he thought, and then they took him down and out.

His face turned red. Were fifty people in pajamas and nightgowns congregated outside? It looked it.

Can’t even fucking kill yourself without other people butting in
, he thought, humiliated. He’d probably be in the papers tomorrow. His
boss
would see it, his landlord, the neighbors. They’d all think he was nuts. As they put him in the ambulance, he could see the headlines:
DISTURBED VET TRIES TO KILL SELF BUT POLICE INTERVENE
.

In the back of the ambulance, two EMTs said nothing as he was driven away. They were eating doughnuts.

I guess I just can’t do anything right
, Gerold thought, feeling like the perfect ass.

They took him straight to the local hospital, where a silent intern took his vital signs; then another intern wheeled him to an elevator and took him up. The first thing he saw upstairs when the doors opened was a sign:
PSYCHIATRIC UNIT
. He felt like a putz as a drab-faced admittance nurse
rolled him down stark halls. Eventually an abrupt turn took him past blue-painted metal doors with chicken wire windows. Faces appeared in some of them. Voices bled from others. “Abandon hope, ye who enter here,” someone said, and another: “Where’s my cake?”

A dark-haired woman in a white lab coat eyed him from behind a desk when he was wheeled into an office. She looked tired and displeased.
Probably on call
, Gerold figured.

“Well, well, well.” Her eyes were bloodshot when they scanned a computer screen on her desk, no doubt his records sent over from VA. “Gerold, I’m Dr. Willet. My, what an inconvenience you are.”

Gerold was outraged. “
Sorry
about the inconvenience.”

“Suicide is the coward’s way out. There are patients in the quadriplegic ward who would sell their souls to be you.”

“I know that,” Gerold said. He wanted to spit. “I’d trade places with any of them. The fact is, I’m sick of living. I feel I have the right to kill myself.”

The woman scowled. “Oh, but you don’t. Life is a gift, Gerold, and suicide is a crime. It’s a form of homicide, and you can be prosecuted for it.”

“Come on,” he scoffed.

“Not in this day and age, of course. Everyone’s a victim, hmm?” She had large, fake eyelashes that looked whorish. “You’re sick of living? Tell that to the people in the Sao Paulo ghettos, or Paraguay, or Chad. You’re young, capable, and have a lot to contribute in spite of your disability. But, no. You’d rather
kill yourself
because you can’t hack a little hardship. Tell the people in Sao Paulo or Paraguay or Chad about your hardship. Tell the people in the quad wards how miserable your life is.”

I can’t believe this!
“You really know how to make a guy feel good.”

“You should feel
ridiculous
, Gerold. You’re wasting tax dollars and wasting time, when you should be
contributing
.”

Gerold winced. “What, is this some new kind of behaviorist psychiatry?”

“You don’t need a psychiatrist, you need a kick in the ass.”

Wow
, Gerold thought.
I picked the WRONG NIGHT to try to off myself
.

“There’s nothing wrong with you mentally—I could tell that the second you rolled in here.” The frown on her face kept sharpening as she continued looking at his records on the screen. “There are better ways to get attention—”

“Listen, lady! I don’t want attention! I want to be dead! I’m sick of this!” Gerold bellowed. “It’s my business.”

“Well then next time, do it right. We’ve got people here who need genuine care. We don’t have the time or money to screw around with whiny pains in the ass like you.”

Gerold was flabbergasted.

“I hope they bill you for the 911 call, the police time, the EMT time, the fuel—everything,” she said. Disgusted, she tapped a bit on her keyboard. “Tomorrow morning you’ll be transferred to the VA hospital. Nurse!”

The drab nurse returned, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

“Take this upstanding gentlemen and pillar of the community to the precaution wing and get him a bed.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

When Dr. Willet came out from around her desk, she didn’t do it on her feet. She did it in a wheelchair.

Her body was gone from the waist down.

Oh, my God
, Gerold thought.

“I’d be sick to my stomach if I had one. You’re a disgrace, Gerold. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” For the first time, the doctor smiled. “Now get the hell out of my office.”

Gerold wished he could shrink into nonexistence when the nurse wheeled him away.

Your name is Hudson Hudson and you’ve just won the Senary. Your soul has been turned into gas and squeezed into Hell through a hole in the wall.

And here you are . . .

Regaining consciousness reminds you of the time you got your wisdom teeth pulled at the dentist’s. You’re a balloon underwater that has just risen to break the surface. First, senses, then awareness, then memory. The only difference is, that time you awoke into your physical body, but now . . .

I don’t have one
, comes the oddly calm realization.

There’s a faint noise, something reverberant like water dripping in a subterranean grotto. Your eyes open in increments but only register scarlet murk, just as another sensation registers: rocking back and forth and up and down as if in a car with too much suspension. Your vision struggles for detail as the dripping fades, to be replaced by a steady metallic clattering along with a
hiss
.

Then your vision snaps into perfect, even surreal, focus.

The macabre lips on the Snot-Gourd scream.

You’re in a vehicle of some kind, which idles down a street whose surface is chunks of wet bone, split ankles and elbows, and other odds and ends of meaty gristle. “How’s that for your first glimpse of the Offal District?” comes the familiar New England accent. “My own reaction was much the same, but of course, that’s why they
call
it the Offal District. It’s constructed primarily with surplus scraps from the Pulping Stations: less-edible organs, joints, bits of bone.”

You look up and scream again when you realize exactly what you’re looking at: a very black sickle moon hanging in a scarlet sky.

The attempt to move your arms and legs comes reflexively; then you remember, My
body’s back in the house with the deaconess, but my consciousness
. . .
is in the pumpkin
. . .

Your cue ball–size eyes blink.
I’m in Hell
. . .

“The Senarial Sciences here are impressively successful,” Howard tells you, sitting off to the left. He cranes around and looks into your eyes as if looking into a fishbowl. “I trust your senses are in proper working order?”

“I . . . think so,” you reply through the brutish, demonic lips.

“Your Auric Carrier is quite the top of the line.” Now Howard is cleaning his round spectacles with his shirttail. “You have the mouth of a Howler-Demon, the eyes of an Ocularus, the nose of a Blood-Mole, and the ears of a City Imp. Each represents a superlative. It is with only the greatest acuity that we wish you to perceive everything.”

“But, but—”

“Just relax, sir—if that possibility exists—and give your psyche time to acclimatize to the new environs, as well as the new vessel for your soul. There’s no rush—answers to all your questions will be furnished. Just relax . . . and behold.”

You try to nod.
Relax? Good Lord
. . . First, you focus on your immediate surroundings. You appear to be sitting in the elevated rear seat of a long automobile—that is, not actually sitting since you no longer possess a rump; instead your Auric Carrier has been mounted on a stick in this queer backseat. The clattering vehicle reminds you of pictures you’ve seen of cars from the 1920s, spoke-wheeled and long-hooded monstrosities like Duesenbergs and Packards. Yet no hood actually forms the vehicle’s front end; instead there’s a long iron cylinder showing bolts at its
seams, and a petite pipe where one would expect a hood ornament. It’s from this valve that steam hisses out.

Howard talks as if he can detect your thoughts. “It’s a steam-car, the latest design, an Archimedes Model 6. It burns sulphur, not coal—Hell never enjoyed a Carboniferous Period.” The car rocks over more chunks of butcher’s waste. “The sulphur heats the blood and other organic waste in the boiler; steam is produced and, hence, mobility. Nothing like the motors of my day, I’m afraid, though I never liked them. Awful, soot- and smoke-belching contraptions. But this suffices more than, say, a buggy drawn by an Emaciation Squad.”

You don’t understand how your head—the Snot-Gourd—can turn upon the command of your will—
I’m just a fruit on a stick!
—nevertheless, it does, and now that you’re getting used to it you find the courage to look upon the more distant surroundings with greater scrutiny.

The street
stinks
, and then you spot a globed pole that names the street:
GUT-CAN LANE
. Mottled storefronts whose bricks contain swirls of innards pass on either side. You notice more signs:

SCYTHER’S

PAYCHECKS NOT CASHED

THYMUS GRINDER’S

TOE-CHEESE COLLECTOR

A chalkboard before a café boasts the day’s specials:
BROILED BOWEL WITH CHIVES
and
BEER-BATTERED SHIT-FISH
.

When the steam-car clamorously turns through a red light—Abattoir Boulevard—you detect buildings that appear residential, like festering, squat town houses whose walls are impossibly raised as preformed sheets of innards.

“I don’t believe this place,” you finally say. “Everything’s made of . . . guts.”

“Construction techniques differ greatly here from the Living World; where you utilize chemistry, physics, electrical
engineering, we utilize Alchemy, Sorcerial Technology,
Agonitical
Engineering.”

“But how can they make guts and bone chunks . . .
hold together?”

“Gorgonization, Mr. Hudson,” Howard replies and points past the vehicle’s rim. “
Your
masons pour cement into molds and allow it to dry, ours pour
slaughterhouse residuum
and Gorgonize it with Hex-Clones of the Medusa’s head.”

You see what you can only guess are demonic construction workers emptying hoppers of butcher’s waste into various sheet and brick molds. After which several cloaked figures with purplish auras walk slowly past the molds bearing severed heads on stakes. Each severed head has living snakes for hair. The horned construction workers are careful to look away from the process. Hoods are then placed over the Gorgon heads; then the molds are lifted, revealing solid bricks and wallboards fully hardened.

Impossible
, you think.
And everything here is made of it
. . .

“Fascinating, eh?” Howard remarks as the car rattles on. “At any rate, untold Districts exist in Hell, to compose an endless city called the Mephistopolis. Lucifer prefers diversity to uniformity; therefore each District, Prefect, or Zone features its own decorative motif. You’ll see more as we venture on.”

Beyond, though, you have the impression of losing your breath when you see what sits beneath the bloodred sky. It’s a panorama of evil, leaning skyscrapers that stretch on as far as you can see.

“Hell is a city,” Howard explains, “which I didn’t find all that surprising myself. Why would it be? More and more the Living World is becoming metropolitan, so why shouldn’t Hell follow suit? Progress is relative, and so is evolvement, I suppose. Lucifer has seen to it that Hell progresses in step with Human civilization. It’s only the
direction
of the steps
that are antithetical. It provides for a rich environment, and more so in this District than most others.” And then Howard’s nose crinkles at an awful smell that reminds you of the Dumpster at the restaurant where you used to shuck oysters. “It’s just that the smell is
appalling
, not to mention the clamor—a babel of filth and noise, a breeding pot of cheapness and vulgarity. This horror-imbrued place reminds me of New York City in 1924. Ugh! I hope you’ve never had the misfortune of visiting there, Mr. Hudson.”

You try to frown again but then think of something. “Hey. How do you know my name? I didn’t tell it to you back when we were doing the hole-in-the-wall thing.”

“An Osmotic Incantation apprised me of everything about you.
Every aspect
. It’s necessary, and part of my duties in this little side job of mine as the Trustee for the Office of the Senary.”

“Side job? But didn’t you say something about being a writer? That you worked in the Hall of Writers?”

“The
Seaton
Hall of
Automatic
Writers,” Howard corrects. “One of many, but my facility devotes itself entirely to the writing of fiction. This is my forte; my job, since my Damnation, is to produce copy—novels, novellas, stories—which a select group of Wizards known as Trance Channelers then communicate to fiction writers in the Living World via the process of Automatic Writing and Slate Chalking. It’s Lucifer’s way of influencing worldly art forms so, quite wisely, he picks the most qualified of the Human Damned for the task.”

A writer
, you think,
in Hell?
“So . . . before you came here, you were a writer, too?”

“Indeed I was, sir, a writer of weird tales, and it’s been conveyed to me that my work has since risen to considerable acclaim. Just my luck, eh?
Posthumous
acclaim—now I know how Poe felt.”

“When did you die?”

“March 15, 1937—the Ides. Fitting that I should expire on the celebration day of the Mother Goddess Cybele. I penned a tale concerning that once but—drat!—my memory fails me. Something about rats . . . The Rats in the . . . House? The Rats in the . . . Tower?” Howard shakes his pale head. “Such are the pitfalls of Damnation. You’re not allowed to remember anything gratifying. But it was some ballyhoo called Bright’s disease that killed me—shrunk my kidneys down to walnuts—oh, and cancer of the colon. Too much coffee and soda crackers, I can only presume. It’s no wonder ‘The Evil Clergyman’ wasn’t very good.” As Howard straightens his tie, he appraises the orb of your head with something hopeful in his eyes. “Are you a reader, sir? Perhaps you’ve heard of me—my name is Howard Phillips Lovecraft.”