Happy Hour in Hell

twenty-four: fickle

MY HEART felt as though it had stopped, literally stopped, and would not start again. Caz’s face was rigid, blank as a mask. She wore a long red dress whose spatters and splashes of white made her a mirror of her master, an even clearer mark of Eligor’s ownership than the guard who seated her next to the grand duke and then stood behind her chair like a jailer.

Oh, God, my heart. Everything came back in a moment, our desperate nights together, the months of longing since, and it was all I could do not to climb out of my seat and run toward her. The crowd, many of them still whispering, had turned back to the action as the emperor stepped up to sing again, but I couldn’t look away. I can only imagine what my face must have looked like. Finally, Vera’s elbow applied briskly and with obvious anger to my ribs brought my attention back to the stage, but I could think of nothing else for a long time. I snuck a few glances at Caz, but she was never looking at me or anyone else in the audience, not even looking at the performers. Instead she sat like a frightened schoolgirl, eyes downcast. Eligor ignored her, watching the action below through a pair of opera glasses.

The snickering and jeering resumed as the singer with the bulging throat laboriously climbed the mountain of his aria, looking more than ever like someone who desperately wanted to be somewhere else. The catcalls got louder; then, as he strained for and badly missed a high note, something came hurtling out of the lower galleries and past his head. He did his best to dodge it and suffered only an unpleasant stain on his tunic as the clot of mud or excrement bounced off him.

For a moment, as I watched what looked like a small riot beginning in the seats below us, I almost forgot Caz, so tantalizingly close. I assumed that whoever had tried to assault the performer was being caught and hustled out, but it quickly became clear that the ruckus was more general. Something like anarchy broke out on the floor of the Dionysus Theater, and before a few more bars of the aria had wavered by, a heavier projectile hit the emperor right in the gut, knocking him to his knees. Something else struck his head. Blood coursed down the side of his face and onto his white imperial tunic. For a moment he cowered as more missiles hit him, arms wrapped around his head for protection. The jeering grew louder and a whole cloud of rocks and rotten food and less pleasant things arced out of the crowd, seeking out the cringing singer as though he were the condemned at a public stoning.

The music played on but the singer was on his hands and knees now, bloody and weeping. The crowd shrieked at him, an animal sound that seemed to grow louder by the second. Then they quickly, if not uniformly fell silent, and all eyes turned again to the grand president’s box. Caym was standing at the rail, and the contortion of his crowlike face showed he was furious, but instead of berating the unruly crowd, he leaned out and pointed a long, clawlike finger at the performer.

“Get up, you tub of mischief! Who do you think you are? You have been brought here to sing, and sing you will!”

The actor looked up, his face bloody, his throat sac deflated and hanging over his chest like a dirty bib. “Please, Grand President, please . . . I cannot!” A rock hit him in the shoulder and he almost fell. “It hurts! It hurts me so!”

“Shut your mouth, you pathetic ingrate. You wanted to sing, and sing you shall. And what better role for you than your own wretched life?”

For an instant even Caz and my hated enemy Eligor fell out of my thoughts as I finally realized what was going on. This was Nero himself! The emperor who had tried to cheat Hell, singing the story of his own wretched life for the amusement of Hell’s high rollers.

Like I’ve said before, nobody can carry a grudge like a demon.

Order was restored, but it only got worse for Nero from there. Time and again he would begin to sing and be pelted by garbage and shit or knocked down by stones, some of them big as a baby’s head. I distinctly heard one of them break his arm, but Caym wouldn’t let him stop, although it was harder and harder to distinguish his singing from shrieks of pain and terror. I kept sneaking looks at Caz. Her face showed no emotion whatsoever, but Eligor was clearly enjoying the spectacle, laughing and whispering with Caym. At last, nearing what seemed to be the middle of the opera, a thunderous barrage of larger missiles, great jagged things that might have been broken paving stones, crushed Nero to the stage, and though he struggled to get up it was hopeless. At this point things went completely mad. Members of the audience leaped up on stage and began to kick him and beat him with the largest pieces of stone. Nero offered no resistance—it all had the feeling of a ritual enacted many times. Even with the musicians still playing gamely along, it sounded like someone jumping up and down on a barrel of eggs.

As Nero was reduced to a bloody wet tatter I looked up to see Eligor saying goodbye to Caym. Caz was already gone.

“That was his best performance yet,” a man said in a loud, braying voice behind me. “Folded him up before they even got to the part about Seneca.”

In other words, this happened all the time. Two thousand years Nero had been in Hell, and they still humiliated him in public on a regular basis, not to mention tormenting and destroying his body over and over again. What would they do to me if they found out? After all, Emperor Nero had been on their side.

On the way home Vera was quieter than usual, and although she stroked my hair as she liked to do while we sped through the red-flickering streets of Pandaemonium, she did it roughly, distracted perhaps by what she had seen, so that again and again she pricked me with her fingernails. As for me, I should have been as excited and terrified by seeing Caz as I had been during those first moments after she entered the theater, but instead I was suddenly exhausted. Too much for one day. I was finding it hard to keep my eyes open as the roar of the steam boiler and the red strobe of the city lights dragged me down into a half-sleep. For a moment I imagined myself on that stage, broken and bleeding, laughed at by Hell’s leading citizens, but even that horrific image couldn’t keep me from being pulled down, down, down.

“Tighter,” I heard Vera saying to someone, as if down a pipe or from a long distance. I was groggy, I realized, but understanding didn’t improve anything. Groggy and weak. Why was she talking? Why wouldn’t she let me sleep? “No, tighter,” she said.

“I can’t, my lady,” said a deep female voice—Belle. “It doesn’t fit right, even with his hand growing back. The strap won’t stay.”

“Then tie it. Use a piece of cord.”

Belle was apparently helping her mistress put on her nightclothes, but why were they doing it in my room? Or was I in Vera’s room? And why were they talking about my hand? Wherever it was, I couldn’t be lying in a very comfortable position, because my joints were aching.

I tried to open my eyes, but that wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Even my lids felt weighed down, like someone had set Charon’s heavy coins on them. But I had already made that journey, hadn’t I? I had already crossed the River of Death because I was in Hell. Could you cross twice? I was confused, my thoughts thick like syrup.

At last I got my eyes open, something that took actual hard effort. I was in my own room, all right, and Vera and Belle were indeed struggling with cords and straps, but it had nothing to do with Lady Zinc’s nightware because Vera was still dressed for the opera. The cord in question was being tied around my wounded arm, which apparently had kept coming out of its restraining strap. My other arm with the whole hand hadn’t been a problem for them—it was bound securely to the headboard of the bed.

As Belle pulled on the cord knotted around my arm just below the elbow, I realized for the first time what was going on, although for a moment I didn’t quite grasp the why of it. Had I fallen out of bed? Injured myself? Why was I being restrained? But then the first cold gust of reality blew through me and some of the grogginess receded.

“You may go now, Belle,” said Vera when both of my arms were pulled out straight on either side. My ankles had been bound as well, and I was helpless as any sacrificial victim. “I have things to say to Lord Snakestaff that require privacy.”

“As you say, Mistress.” But Belle clearly didn’t want to go, and she paused in the doorway, filling it with her huge frame, to look at her handiwork: me, trussed like a turkey about to go in the oven.

Vera was pacing back and forth beside the bed, the color in her cheeks darker and deeper than I had ever seen.

“Ingratitude.” Her voice had changed. All the charm and life had gone out of it, and although it’s hard to believe, I promise you that her cold tones frightened me in a way that even the straps hadn’t. “Ingratitude and fickleness. Again. All of you! I thought you were different, Snakestaff! Oh, I had such hopes for you!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It was hard to make words properly. I felt drugged or drunk.

“All men are liars.” The hatred was so strong in her voice I couldn’t believe it was the same woman. “Whores! You call us whores! But you are the ones without shame! I saw her! I saw you staring at that filthy, white-haired slut of Eligor’s! Why do you like her? Why do you like her?” She came to my side and grabbed my hair so hard some of it came out, shaking my head until I thought she’d snap my neck. She was stronger than I’d ever guessed. “I gave you everything! I gave you my love! I would have given you more than that! I would have made you one of my immortals! But now you’ll rot in the dung heaps of Gehenna. Pig!”

Even as Vera was shouting at me, tears of anger running down her red cheeks, she clambered onto the wide bed beside me. Helpless, I could only turn my face away, certain that she was going to hit or scratch me, but instead her fingers plucked frenziedly at the strings of her bodice as if it were too tight and she couldn’t breathe. She put a knee squarely on my belly and then pulled down the front of her opera dress, spilling her breasts. She was beautiful and, perversely, never more so than at that moment, her chest heaving, dark hair swinging as she straddled me. I braced myself again to be hit, but instead she bent and fumbled with my trousers. I yanked at my restraints but couldn’t pull either my arms or legs free, and although I did my best to buck her off me it was like wrestling with some great, wild cat. She flattened herself between my legs as she pulled down my clothes, then she sat up straight, my legs locked between hers. She reached down and grabbed my cock and squeezed it until I shouted in pain.

“Miserable thing. Man!” The eyes staring into mine now were terrifying. I’d known—I’d kept reminding myself—that Vera was in Hell for a reason, but meeting Caz had changed me. Why had I been so willing to believe Vera was only another lost soul, that the kindness she had shown me was real? It was like I hadn’t been myself.

But what I’d thought of her didn’t matter now. What mattered was what she truly was—a raging mad thing. And I was her prisoner.

Even as Vera cursed me she rubbed herself all over me, tore open my shirt and dragged her heavy breasts across my skin, across my face, for a moment even pushing one swollen nipple into my mouth like a grieving, hysterical mother trying to suckle a dead child. It was all I could do not to bite down, but she hadn’t hurt me badly yet, and for the moment I was in her power, the good arm and the bad one both immobilized. My only hope was to let her work out her anger and hope that afterward she would listen to me. But what could I tell her? I didn’t love her, of course, and even if I hadn’t discovered this truth about her I still wouldn’t have been able to give her what she wanted. Whatever was in me that could love belonged to Caz, and seeing her at the theater had rung me like a bell, so that even as I struggled to keep Vera’s nails from my eyes I was still vibrating with that powerful, astounding need for the Countess of Cold Hands.

Weeping now, Vera climbed down and grabbed my balls. I tensed, terrified that I would find out what it was to lose something even more important than my hand, but she seemed intent on pursuing her parody of passionate affection. She began to stroke, lick, and squeeze me, holding my cock against her face, muttering both endearments and the ugliest kind of threats. It wasn’t what you’d call a romantic situation unless you come from the outermost rooms of bondage and degradation, and I’ve seen too much ugliness in my years on Earth to enjoy that. Not to mention my well-known aversion to pain. But Vera was determined. She tugged and squeezed, she kissed me all over, she even put a finger up inside me, nudging until I hardened against my will. Then Vera slid up my body and sat on my chest, naked from the waist up, her hair now completely down and wild on her shoulders, her pale breasts, flushed unevenly, swinging above me like church bells.

“I would have waited,” she panted, still holding me by the root, still squeezing me with her hand to keep the blood in me, to keep me rigid. Her eyes were fixed on mine. They had changed again, her stare wide-eyed and full of something that looked like desperate affection. “I could have waited until the time was right, darling. It has been a long time, but I have gone a long time before. I wanted it to be perfect!”

She was squeezing my cock so hard I could barely speak. “It doesn’t have to be . . .”

Then her eyes went empty again, as if a switch had been thrown. “You could have been one of my immortals, Snakestaff. You would have been treasured forever. Instead you are just another . . . miserable, fickle, lying man. But you’ll never go to your white-haired whore. You belong to me. I found you, and you’re mine!”

Her knees against my armpits, Vera began to fumble at her long skirts, pulling them upward with a loud rustling of crinoline, exposing the layers of snowy white petticoats. I could feel a heat against my belly from between her legs, but no matter how I squirmed and fought I couldn’t roll her off me. She was lost in some kind of frenzy of anger and misery, something primitive and not very human. She rose into a half crouch and pulled the rest of her petticoats out of the way.

Between her legs, a horror.

Purple and dark blue and angry red, it was a bulging, quivering thing like a jellyfish, its ropy strands of translucent flesh dangling on my belly and thighs. A prickling where they touched me became a stinging, then a scalding fire. I screamed. Vera squatted above me and reached down to put her hands flat on my chest, and just before her fingers touched me I finally saw the translucent, flexible spines, like the bristles on a toothbrush, growing out from beneath Lady Zinc’s fingernails and into my flesh. She had been poisoning me. All that time petting me, stroking my hair, she’d been pumping her toxins into me, some stay-happy fluid to keep me stupid and cheerful. But those toxins had been mild. What she gave me now definitely wasn’t.

The acid burn in my groin suddenly went nova, filling me up like flaming brandy in all my veins. I could feel my flesh swelling everywhere. Blood pounded in my brain, and I could hardly see, but her eyes held me. Vera’s mad eyes.

The thing between her legs made a wet noise, a ghastly squelch like nothing I’d ever heard, and then it opened. Beyond the ragged, mouthlike frill, the edges were lined with tiny needle teeth, hundreds of them, gaping from the slippery, shining purple and pink.

I’m sure I tried to scream again, because she pulled one of her hands away from my chest—the finger-tendrils came loose with a string of sucking pops like ivy being yanked from a wall—then used it to cover my mouth as she lowered herself onto me. My heart wanted to jump out of my chest, but my groin pushed up toward her, offering itself, riding the tide of my own infected, blazing blood.

Then she eased herself down, and I felt those tiny, impossible teeth, and I screamed again from behind her hand, screamed and screamed and screamed without stopping. Her face sagged down toward me, mouth open in a kind of ecstasy, then some kind of membranes slid down from her eyelids, turning her eyes milky-white.

She rode me without stopping, the obscenity between her legs chewing at me, milking me, until I burst and filled her. Lady Zinc collapsed on top of me, and my mind finally escaped into blessed darkness.