Happy Hour In Hell: Volume Two of Bobby Dollar (15 page)

Riprash went on like this for a while more, then asked if any of the fellowship wanted to give testimony. I had thought I would be bored and restless, as I would have been in any religious meeting back on Earth, but instead I was fascinated. The first one to speak was a damned soul that looked more than a bit like a gingerbread man made out of moldy, ancient paper. He explained carefully that when he had lived on Earth he had been a thief in Antioch, and that although he had only stolen food to feed his starving family, he had been put to death by the Roman overlords and condemned to Hell.

“It’s good news to hear we might be free again someday,” he said in a slow, serious tone. “Good news. And I will do all I can to behave myself and learn the way to do that. Because I want to be free. It wasn’t fair, what happened to me. And when I’m free again, I will go find that shit-eating merchant who called the guards on me, and my bitch of a wife who didn’t even come to see me executed, and all the bastards who
did
come, and I’ll cut them all into pieces.” He might have been reading a laundry list. He’d been thinking about it a long time.

“Not sure you really grasp the details of the thing, fellow,” said Riprash gently as the gingerbread thief sat down again on the ledge above the stinking flood. “Not about revenge, this. About making ourselves
better
than we were.”

“I’ll feel better when that stinking merchant is dead,” the gingerbread man muttered, but already somebody else had risen to speak. This damned soul was female, although that wasn’t clear when she first stood up, because she looked more like a person-shape made of overcooked spaghetti, with eyeballs tucked into the tangle in place of meatballs. For a moment she stood, hesitating, winding her tendrils with equally limp fingers.

“Go on, then, love,” said Riprash in an encouraging tone. “It’s Deva, isn’t it?”

She nodded and seemed to find courage. Several more eyes emerged. “When I was alive . . . well, I was a very bad person. I’m sure I deserve to be here.”

“What did you do, dear?” Riprash asked. If you’ve never seen a ten-foot-tall monster making nice, it’s quite an experience.

“I lost my little babies.” A few of her eyes retracted into the forest of noodles or whatever they were. “No, that’s not right. I didn’t so much lose them as . . . I did away with them.”

I might have made a noise of surprise, but nobody else did. “Why was that, dear?” Riprash asked.

“I’m not certain now. I was frightened, and they were so sick, and I had no money to feed them. They were always crying, you see, even though they were terribly weak . . .” She trailed off. She was down to only a few eyes still showing. “I tried everything, really I did. I sold myself to men, but I could never make enough, and the woman who watched them for me when I was out, well, she didn’t . . . she didn’t take very good care . . .” The creature named Deva curled her fingers and tugged at her tendrils so hard I thought she might break them off. “She drank too much toddy, that one, and one day she let my youngest one wander, and my little girl fell from the window down to the courtyard and died. I came home with the smell of a man still on me and found her there on the stones. The bitch taking care of her had not even known she was gone!” The damned woman shook her head, or the lump near the top that I assumed was a head. “I knew then that I would be going to Hell. And the others were still sick, still crying, getting thinner and thinner.” After a long, long silence that nobody interrupted, she said, “So one night, I took them out when everyone else was asleep, took them outside the village and drowned them in the river. It was so sad, because even as I took them down to the bank I was looking for crocodiles. I was going to drown them, but I was still worried that a crocodile might get them!”

She broke down at this point, and it was a while until she could talk again. The strange thing was that the other damned, and even the demon members of the congregation, all waited for her to continue. In a place where nobody even bothered to look twice at a badly injured person writhing on the ground, or a child being beaten or sexually assaulted, these Hell-creatures were waiting patiently, even kindly, for one of their own to find her way back to herself.

“They stoned me to death, of course,” she said finally. “Even the woman who let my littlest one die threw a stone! I have been here a long time. I cannot even guess how many centuries. On and on and on . . . It will sound strange, but even though I am dead, I did not truly know I had been alive until I heard Riprash speak, heard him speaking of how we might someday be lifted. Since I awoke here, I have been like a mole who lives in the ground, go forward, go backward, every day in the dark, and knowing nothing else. My children—I did not think of them. I could not think of them. I could not remember them, because my heart was burned away inside me. But when I heard Riprash talk of the lifting, I could feel myself again. I knew nothing could ever take away my wickedness, that what I had done would be a terrible curse in the mind of God forever . . . but I could hope that someday, perhaps when Heaven and Hell themselves come to an end, I might be forgiven. One day, no matter how dark and dreadful my act, I might see my little ones, my babies, again, so that I can tell them how sorry I am that they were ever born to such a mother—” She bowed her head, and all the tendrils shuddered together. “Ah, God! I am so sorry! So sorry!”

My eyes were dry as I sat in that crowd of damned, doomed folk and listened to her keening apologies to her dead children, but that was only because the demon’s body I wore had no tear ducts.

a filthy river runs through it

G
OB AND
I hid out at Gagsnatch’s until the second beacon had been lit, then our new friend Riprash buried us (carefully) under a load of ship’s provisions on a wagon and drove us down to the docks. My view was entirely of the undersides of coarse sacks full of dried maggots, but I’m not sure it was any worse than seeing the actual city of Cocytus Landing, at least judging by the astonishing variety of unpleasant noises and odors that made their way through the cushioning layers of bagged demon yummies.

Riprash unloaded the provisions himself to make sure we weren’t accidentally beheaded by one of his helpers, then hurried us up the swaying gangplank.

“You’ll stay in my cabin,” he said, gesturing proudly around the low-ceilinged room, which would have been adequate for us if Riprash never came in. As it was, he took up so much of the space that it felt like sharing a bathtub with a humpback whale.

When day had passed and only the afterlights burned, the dockworkers went home. Riprash took us out on deck and showed us around the ship like a retiree displaying his rhododendrons. The
Bitch
was halfway between a garbage scow and a Chinese junk, long and low, with sails that must have looked like bat wings when they unfurled. It was built with timbers that didn’t seem to match, and was so smeared with tar all over that the ship might have been made from chewed licorice. But from what I could gather from Riprash’s proud descriptions, despite its age and decrepitude,
The Nagging Bitch
was state of the art when it came to things like shackles, cages, and tools of punishment. I tried to smile and look impressed, but when you’re looking at a thing with metal teeth meant for digging into someone’s crotch to prevent escape . . . well, like I said, I tried to smile.

Riprash had apparently decided he liked me. He showed this newfound solidarity by clapping me on the back from time to time, hard enough to make my bones creak. He also introduced me to the hellish rum he liked to drink, which tasted like bile and gasoline and packed the clout of pure moonshine. No, I didn’t ask how it was made, or from what. Riprash loved to watch me trying to swallow the stuff and rewarded me for the entertainment of seeing me cough, retch, and sputter by telling stories late into the night when I would rather have slept.

But the liquor helped, and it wasn’t that the stories were bad. In fact, by Hell standards my new, large friend’s tales were quite sweet, really, of a simple ogre and his slave ship having interesting adventures around the infernal world. By local standards, Riprash was really an okay guy. Yes, he’d killed a few people—a few hundred, more accurately—during the course of his life, and he had trouble thinking of the damned souls he trafficked in as anything other than mobile meat, but once we got to know him I never felt afraid of him, and there’s very few hellfolk I can say that about. Including my girlfriend.

The ship set sail just before the first day-lamp was lit. Riprash let us out on deck once we were underway so we could look around.
The Nagging Bitch
had so many black sails that the masts looked like some kind of vampire nesting trees. Weighted down with a hold full of caged slaves, she wallowed so low that the river was constantly slapping over the gunwales, and the deck was always at least ankle-deep in Cocytus sludge. but I was delighted to breathe the (comparatively) sweeter air outside the cabin.

That first night, as the city fell away behind us and we sailed into the dark, the great black snake of river soon became invisible. With only the distant beacons on the walls of Hell for light, we might have been traveling through a universe of flickering red stars. I felt suddenly lonely, lonelier than I’d ever been, even with Gob beside me, open-eyed and open-mouthed as he journeyed into what must have been a life he’d never dreamed of living. I was desperate for Caz and that unique moment of completeness she’d given me, I was badly in need of friends like Sam and Monica, and I missed my familiar haunts. You’ve been there, I’m sure, but it feels different in Hell. Chances were very small I’d ever see any of them again. Little Gob was company of a sort, but he wasn’t exactly chatty, and since I was planning to ditch him before things got really dangerous, I didn’t want to get too close, either.

Riprash thumped toward us and spread his massive arms. “This . . . this is freedom,” he said, conveniently ignoring the shrieks of the damned in their cages below. “No master but the winds and the tide. When I felt this, I was first lifted. But I did not even know it then.” He laid a huge paw on my shoulder; if he’d pushed down, I’m pretty sure he could have driven me into the deck like a finishing nail. “Perhaps you come to another fellowship with me, Snakestaff? When we reach Gravejaw, maybe?”

I mumbled something noncommittal. I’m not really a joiner, but out of curiosity I asked, “How many are in your fellowship?”

“Ah, it is not as small as it was back in that other day, when your master first spoke to me. More join every day. Still, we are few.” He nodded. “But we are lifted, in our thought if not in our bodies.”

I never found out where he picked up the Origen stuff, but he had a pretty good understanding. Origenes of Alexandria was a Christian scholar, back in the third century or so, who proposed that if free will and forgiveness were real, even Satan himself had a chance someday to make peace with the Highest and achieve forgiveness. Needless to say, the early church stomped all over this idea, because they thought a Hell that wasn’t forever was pretty toothless. Plainly, many of those early Christians had never spent centuries dogpaddling in molten lava, or they would have rethought that concept; even a mere decade of constant, agonizing burns might adjust attitudes, I’d guess.

I was impressed by Riprash’s belief, and I speak as a confirmed cynic. Gob was interested too, or at least I guessed that he was, because he listened carefully when the ogre spoke.

“But the lords of Hell . . . they can’t like that idea very much,” I said at last.

“And they don’t, that’s a fact.”

I couldn’t help thinking that my supervisor Temuel was playing a pretty dangerous game, encouraging the rank and file of Hell to start thinking about salvation. Did our superiors have any idea? Because it sounded like just as revolutionary and dangerous a plan as Sam’s mystery-angel Kephas had hatched with the Third Way, which I was already trying to wipe off my shoes. Bobby Dollar sneaking off to aid a religious rebellion in Hell wasn’t going to make the Ephorate any happier with me. Not that I wasn’t already fucked before I got here; I had slept with a high-ranking demon, helped a rogue angel (who happened to be my best friend) escape, bashed another angel over the head while he was pursuing his lawful duties, and then lied to Heaven about all of it.

Slam dunk, I believe our friends in the earthly legal profession would call the case against me.

“Here on the Bitch, we yaw and we pitch
,”

Riprash sang in a voice like a slow avalanche.

“
And we don’t give the bandits no quarter

We’re drinking and stinking, but also we’re thinking

We might take a ride on your daughter!”

Yeah. Why worry about one more strike against me at this late date? In fact, as long as I was down here in Hell, I decided I should look around for a nice piece of property, because the odds were high I was going to be coming back soon on a more permanent basis.

gravejaw house

T
HE RIVER
was as horrible and dangerous as you’d imagine, full of skeletal pirates on leaking rafts and fanged serpentine creatures big as slimy commuter trains. But we were on a large, well-armed boat, and the nightly tales of Sinbad the Split-Skull Sailor almost made up for the stench and the constant terror that something was going to eat us.

Riprash had started out in the service of a demon lord named Crabspatter and worked his way up to a position of responsibility in the guy’s personal guard, until Crabspatter was cut to ribbons by another, badder demon in a sea battle at a place Riprash called Sucking Marsh.

“Old Crabby went down to the bottom with a spear through his guts, yes he did,” said Riprash in the nostalgic tone of someone talking about a dotty uncle. “He’s probably still down there, trying to get out of the mud—he was a mean fucker. That’s when I got this.” He reached up and touched the huge gash in his head. “And then I woke up, stripped and robbed of everything, chained in a line of captives. The winner kept some of us, sold the rest.” He laughed. “Not surprised he didn’t keep me. My head didn’t stop bleeding for months.”

But the slave trader who bought him recognized Riprash’s quality, or at least his immense size, and put him to work as an overseer. Freedom is kind of a moot point in Hell, apparently, and Riprash was never granted his, but he worked his way up to positions of greater trust until he was the slave trader’s right-hand man. Centuries later, Gagsnatch took over the trader’s business (neither a gentle nor a legal transaction, from what I could tell) but he kept Riprash in the same position of trust, and my new chum had worked for Gagsnatch ever since. He gave me a startled look when I asked him how many years ago that had been.

“Years? Words like that don’t mean anything much here. Some of the new ones come in and they ask how long this, how long that, but the rest of us find it doesn’t do any good to think about it.”

It made me wonder how many years Gob had been a child, scuttling through the narrow alleyways of Abaddon. The kid had been born in Hell, but time here didn’t seem to mean much, and Gob didn’t remember much beyond a few days back, probably because, until he hooked up with me, it had all been pretty much the same.

I was beginning to see that the whole Hell thing, including the timelessness, had been craftily arranged to make the inmates as unhappy as possible. They had to scramble for food and shelter every day, but other than that, things hardly ever changed—or changed just enough to make the repeated doses of punishment more painful. If things are always the same, you get used to them. If they change, if sometimes they get a little better, that makes the return to misery all the more painful. So if any of you plan to open your own Hell, remember this time-tested recipe: Vary the suffering so your victims don’t get completely numb. Show them something better from time to time, just to keep them hoping.

I couldn’t help wondering whether Riprash’s fellowship, the Lifters, might actually be part of the infernal master plan. After all, what better way to insure suffering than to wave a little hope for better days in front of the damned and the doomed? Riprash didn’t believe that, though, and I certainly wasn’t going to argue. I had come to trust him, and he even seemed to like Gob, in a how-demons-do-it sort of way. Since Gob was always as hungry as a feral cat, he gave the boy little handouts of food and was amused by the kid’s elaborate caution whenever we left the confines of the tiny cabin. “Don’t you know you’re on
my
ship, little bug?” Riprash would bellow. “Nobody even pisses on
The Nagging Bitch
without my say-so!”

I never did find out if Riprash’s ship was named after anyone in particular, but Riprash had women (using the term loosely) in every port the slaver traded. Not that I ever encouraged him to share
those
stories. If you ever want to lose your interest in sex, try spending your vacation in Acheron Landing or even Penitentia, the spit of mud, rock, and ramshackle huts where we stopped for supplies on the second day. The dockside hookers looked like extras from
Attack of the Mole Men
, but Riprash assured me that only the best looking ones got to work the incoming vessels.

I won’t bore you with a description of the entire trip. From the middle of a river, one Hell city looks pretty much like another—namely horrible. The third day we finally sighted Gravejaw, a sullen knob of black lava rock that stuck out into the black swell of Cocytus like a bunion. A natural bay at its base had made it a port, and the desperate nature of life in Hell had soon turned it into a crawling ant heap of souls and demons. At the top of the great mound of stone, surrounded by walls as high as those of the city itself, stood a castle, a forest of black towers slender and sharp as an eel’s teeth. A huge banner flapped on the uppermost spire, a white bird’s claw painted on sable ground. It wasn’t the tallest thing on Gravejaw, though: at the center of the city a massive column loomed over everything else like a giant central pillar holding up the sky.

“The banner’s Niloch’s, and that place with the black towers is his,” Riprash said. “Don’t go near it, that’s my advice. I’ll tell you how to get across the city from here. See that?” He pointed to the great pillar, which, as we grew closer, I could see was made from some kind of mud brick but loomed higher than any skyscraper. Even now that the second set of beacons had been lit on the walls of Gravejaw—the closest thing to full daylight—it was impossible to see where the great cylinder ended, since it stretched up into the blackness of the monstrous cavern’s invisible roof. “You just get there, and the lifter’ll take you where you want to go.” I could ride it all the way up to Pandaemonium, apparently, many, many levels above us. That part was heartening, but I was still a bit confused by it all.

See, our river trip had taken us up at least a dozen levels, which didn’t make any sense at all. I certainly hadn’t noticed us sailing uphill, and the Cocytus, black and sticky and noxious as it was, seemed in all other ways to obey the laws of gravity and physics I knew. But this was Hell, after all, and although it was more realistic (for lack of a better word) than Heaven, it wasn’t any more real. As an angel I was used to the slippery distances and untellable time of Heaven, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to accept that some things in Hell, no matter how illogical, just
were
.

I scrubbed myself with bits of sail-mending canvas to get the worst muck off me, since the river was way too dangerous for swimming. In fact, ordinary souls didn’t use water to bathe in Hell: it was too rare. Then Gob and I waited for Riprash to give us the sign that it was safe to disembark. We sat for what seemed like hours, the boy pacing back and forth across the tiny cabin until I wanted to clout him. I was already wondering what I was going to do with Gob. I didn’t want to take him with me any farther, because I might have to make a hasty retreat from some very bad place, and it was going to be hard enough to figure out how to smuggle Caz out without adding Gob to the equation. On the other hand, I’d dragged him far away from the places he knew, I didn’t have a single iron spit to pay him off with, and leaving him on his own here in Gravejaw might put him in even greater danger.

Then a sudden idea hit me. I left Gob pacing and went to find Riprash. I should have stayed in the cabin like he told me, but I was suddenly fired up with the idea of doing someone a good turn (I am, or used to be, an angel, remember?) and I blundered up the ladder to the main deck.

The first thing I ran into was one of Riprash’s minions, the catlike, bug-eyed one who had gaped at me back at the slave stall in Cocytus Landing like I was some long-lost relative. I couldn’t imagine any reason why this grubby little thing should be looking at me with such insolent familiarity (you can see that Hell was starting to get to me) so before he could work up his nerve to say something, I demanded to know where Riprash was.

“On the d-d-dock,” said Krazy Kat in a high, stuttering voice, “but I th-think, I think . . .”

I probably just looked like his old Uncle Pitchfork or something. Worse, despite Temuel’s promises, maybe the little creature had recognized the demon body the archangel and Lameh had given me. Either way, I didn’t want that conversation, so I brushed past him. I was a few steps down the gangplank when I realized something about the busy dock looked wrong. Not the weird, insectlike beasts of burden being loaded with cargo, nor the other ghastly, half-naked creatures sweating beneath the whips of the overseers, some of them so deformed it was a wonder they could work at all, let alone carry such huge loads, but something far more disturbing.

Riprash stood on the dock, but he was completely surrounded by armed demon soldiers, a dozen of them or more, all wearing Niloch’s white bird claw insignia. What was worse, Niloch himself sat mounted on the back of a tall and only slightly horselike insect creature, and Riprash was talking to him.

Niloch saw me so quickly it seemed like he had been looking for me. For a moment I was convinced Riprash had sold me out, and I cursed myself for ever trusting a demon. After all, that was what had landed me here in Hell in the first place.

“And here he is, dear, dear me! How charming!” His bony tendrils wavering in the sea breeze like the fronds of a sea anemone, Niloch spurred his weird insect-horse toward the base of the gangplank. “Riprash has just told me of your bad fortune, Lord Snakestaff! It is a credit to you that you have climbed so far back after such a nasty little trick.”

I was frozen on the top of the gangplank. “Trick. Of course . . .”

Riprash turned and gave me a look of what I assume was mute pleading: It’s hard to tell when so much of a person’s face has been ruined. “Yes, I told him how you were betrayed and abandoned in the lower levels by your enemies.” He turned back to Niloch. “Snakestaff needs only to reach the lifter, Lord Commissar, and then he’ll be right as rot.”

Niloch let out one of his whistling laughs. “Of course, of course, but first he must come and take his ease with me in Gravejaw House and tell me about all the adventures he has had!” He almost sounded sincere, but even if I’d trusted him I wouldn’t have wanted to go anywhere with that fluting, inhuman thing. “Surely you must be longing for a proper meal, Snakestaff, hmmm? Delicacies, yes? And I shall see you have some proper clothes, too. Going naked as the crawling damned will not smooth your passage back to Pandaemonium. They are dreadfully judgemental up at the capital.”

“That’s very kind,” I said, croaking a little in my effort to sound casual. “But there’s no need for you to trouble yourself over a creature like me, Lord Commissar.” Whatever else Niloch was, he clearly outranked me, so there was no way I could just refuse.

“Nonsense. Where in the Red City do you live?”

“Blister Row. It’s near Dis Pater Square.” I was glad Lameh had given me a response. I couldn’t help wondering if the place actually existed. Perhaps I could use it as a sanctuary when I made it to Pandaemonium.
If
I made it to Pandaemonium.

“A delightful little neighborhood! I’ll be pleased to let you repay my own insignificant hospitality when I next journey to the great metropolis. Now come, Snakestaff, brave traveler! You shall enjoy a night with me after so long on shipboard and so many tiresome experiences in the depths.”

I only had time for a quick whispered conference with Riprash. I begged him to take care of Gob, and he said he would, at least until he could deliver him back to me, which wasn’t really what I’d hoped for. “We’ll meet again, Snakestaff,” the giant rumbled. “That you can rest yourself on.”

I wasn’t as confident as Riprash. I said goodbye, keeping it formal because Niloch’s beady little scarlet eyes were watching us. “You’ve been kind to me,” I told him quietly. The giant frowned, and I realized it was an unfamiliar term. “You’ve done me no harm, you’ve even done me a good turn. I’ll remember that.”

Then, my heart in my mouth, where it was the only thing keeping my meager yet repulsive breakfast from being forcibly ejected, I followed the rattling commissar across the dock. He directed me to a pallet, already loaded down with the cage of slaves and carried by more slaves who moaned in quiet hopelessness as I added my weight. Then the whole procession followed Niloch up the winding road through the vast slum of Gravejaw, bound for the needle-towered citadel at the top of the hill.

My first impression of Gravejaw House was that I had somehow fallen out of Hell and landed smack dab in the middle of Shoreline Park, the abandoned and thoroughly dilapidated amusement park back home in San Judas. The commissar’s fortress, rising like a bizarre tumor from the crest of the hill, looked less like a castle than a pile of giant toy blocks left behind by some bored and colossal infant. It was hard to tell under the red lantern-light of Hell, but the leaning walls and the bottoms of the crooked towers seemed to be painted in broad multicolored stripes and whorls and other odd patterns. The entrance road wound through vast, chaotic gardens, which seemed to consist mostly of partially skeletonized corpses planted waist-deep in dry, stony ground, tangled in vines and prickling thorns so that it was hard to tell where the foliage left off and the muscle fibers and slickly gleaming nerves began. When I saw one of them twitch and its ragged mouth form a soundless cry for help, I was reminded that nothing in Hell really dies.

“Ah,” said Niloch, watching my face. “Do you like it? It is so hard in these rustic areas to know what to do with servants when they become too decrepit to work. I could have sold them for scrap, but I wouldn’t have got much. This way they continue to serve.”