Happy Hour in Hell

twenty-five: the other white meat

“YOU’RE AN ingrate,” Belle said, and hit me again, a close-fisted shot to the mouth that made my teeth feel like the beads on an abacus. Vera’s servant had very large hands, and she was also pretty damned strong. “She gave you her love. She made you special!”

Boom! Pow! I could almost see the cartoon violence captions appear in the air over my head as she hit me again and again. The big bitch didn’t seem to mind at all that I was tied up and helpless. She didn’t even seem all that mad at me. She was just enjoying thumping the shit out of me.

I didn’t say anything, since I’d discovered there was even less point arguing with the servant than with her mistress. I stayed loose and tried to go with the beating, but there was a part of me that was definitely having a few fantasies about what I’d do if I ever caught this large, nasty piece of work when I was free to fight back.

Several days had passed since the opera and so had the pretense that I was anything but a prisoner. Each night, and sometimes during the day, Vera took me. I’ve never thought rape was anything pleasant, but I had never understood it the way I did now. Helpless, raging, burning with shame, all of these things I now grasped in an extremely intimate way. I even understood the deepest fear now, the feeling that my life was not my own, that whatever happened to me would be beyond my control. There were times when I wept, and not just from the pain of being used, but I always waited until I was alone. That was all I had left.

Belle hit me one last time, a backhand blow that thumped my skull against the headboard of the bed. It had become a ritual: she cleaned the room, although nowhere near as carefully as before, she emptied my chamber pot, and then she beat the crap out of me. She was built like a heavyweight boxer, our Belle, like one of the old ones, long arms and big torso. I was guessing that in life she must have gone about two-fifteen, two-twenty, almost linebacker size, but here, with the sharp spikes of bone growing from her joints, I’d guess she was a good twenty or thirty pounds more. Bigger than me, in other words, and with all the strength that a demonic body can give you.

“You should kiss her hand and thank her that she’s kept you,” Belle said from the doorway. “I would have pulled your head off and thrown you on the midden. I know how to treat your type.”

“I’ll bet you do.” My head was still ringing and it would have been smarter to keep my mouth shut, but I didn’t really care. Even being destroyed would be better than this, and it would certainly be less humiliating. “I’ll bet the boys loved you, with that pretty face and figure.”

She smirked. “You think I couldn’t get a man? They came and knocked at my door. They brought me money!” She jutted her heavy jaw. “I had as many as Vera. I just wasn’t so sentimental. No ‘immortals’ for me. No, I would have put you in the fire and watched you sizzle, little fella.”

She really was a charmer. I’d like to say that she was bad cop to her mistress’s good cop, but given a choice between the two I’d rather have just been beaten instead of raped, even if my rapist was crying as often as she was cursing me. Man, was I ever being reminded not to trust anyone in Hell. Vera’s joy-juice had lulled me, but my brain had still worked fairly well, so I couldn’t dodge the blame. I’d grown careless, and now I was paying for it. And paying for it and paying for it.

Most nights, Vera wouldn’t even look at me after she’d finished: when her spasm was over she would crawl off me and rearrange her clothing into respectability. Tonight, as if in parody of one of those old movies where the couples sleep in separate beds, she was dressed in an extremely modest nightdress that she smoothed over her long legs, hiding the alien horror between her thighs. She was Mina Harker as well as Dracula, the Victorian maiden and the beast of darkness rolled into one.

“Vera. Vera, talk to me.” It was hard to speak in a normal voice after the pain I’d just suffered, but I was fighting for my life. “Why does it have to be this way? Because I looked at a woman at the opera? I thought I knew her, that’s all. It was nothing to do with you.”

“Nothing to do with me.” Her voice was heavy, the words bleak. She was always like this after her attacks on me. “That is just the problem. I wanted you only to care about me. I wanted you only to see me.”

I tried to get her to talk, to explain, anything that would keep the lines of communication open. Already she was losing interest in me, I could tell. The worst of her anger, her almost operatic feeling of betrayal, was beginning to cool, but I didn’t fool myself that when she was done with me she’d just let me go.

“Listen, we could try again!”

She didn’t even bother to reply, just shook her head and slid off the bed, then walked out of the room, bare feet whispering on the stone floor. Belle, who always stood guard now during Vera’s frenzies, gave me a look of contempt.

“She’ll be done with you soon. Maybe she’ll give you to me. I’ll break your neck like a chicken’s and then you’ll be no trouble to anyone.”

I didn’t say anything, but I wondered what this breaking of my neck would mean in a place like this. It probably wouldn’t kill me, since as far as I knew you couldn’t die in Hell, but it would make things pretty unpleasant, especially if it was combined with being thrown on a garbage heap somewhere or burned, as the two women had both threatened to do. Not to mention when my soul arrived at the depot for re-bodying, and Hell’s authorities realized it was the kind that usually sported a halo. Lameh’s implanted briefing made it clear that mere destruction of my demon body would not free me from these horrors. Unless I left Hell under my own power, by the route Temuel and the guardian angel had given me, I was going to stay there forever.

When the door shut behind big Belle, I went back to work on my strap. What she and her mistress hadn’t realized was that not only was my hand growing back, but I now had movement in the regenerating fingers. The thick gray skin of my demon body might have been striped like a gazelle’s, but my hands were weaponized, with curved black nails sharp and heavy as parrots’ beaks on the good hand. The claws were much less impressive on the hand that was growing back, but if I twisted it until it hurt so badly it felt like Block was biting it off all over again, I could just touch the strap around that arm with my index fingernail.

It was a start. I decided that if I sawed away for a long stretch, ignoring the pain (and good lord, was it painful) I might be able to fray the edge of the strap that held my wounded arm to the headboard of the bed. The leather was thick, and after an hour or so my claw was too dull to do any more work, but I found out that if I performed another agonizing stretch in a different direction, I could rub the claw against the metal bedpost and eventually put enough of an edge on it to get back to work.

Needless to say, this was slow, achingly miserable work, and the chances I would survive long enough to get all the way through the strap were minimal, but I didn’t have a better plan. Lady Zinc and her servant were both crazy. Nobody was going to rescue me, and I was getting weaker by the hour. It was ironic, really: Vera had saved me when I was bleeding to death and nursed me back to health, but now she was taking something at least as vital from me, even if I wasn’t quite sure what it was. It wasn’t just my precious bodily fluids, it seemed to be my very essence, and there was less of it each time she drained me.

Big Belle had just finished tightening the straps on my good arm one night—I was so weak they didn’t even bother to tie my ankles anymore—when I gasped out a question: Why did she and Vera hate men so much?

Vera had taken so much out of me that Belle had hardly bothered to slap me around, and now she looked at me with genuine amusement. “Hate men? That just shows you know nothing. For me, men have never been worth hating. A means to an end, that’s all. All my husbands, my boyfriends, my lodgers, they brought me money. I didn’t need them alive to spend it with me—in fact, I didn’t want to argue about how to spend it—so I did away with them. But if it had been women I could have lured, women who had the money, well, so it would have been. I certainly killed a few. But my lady, she is very different. She loves. She loves so much that she is helpless against it.”

“It’s a pretty goddamn funny way to show it.”

Belle shook her head, her big jaw jutting with irritation. “It’s a perfect way to show it. She’s like a butterfly. She lives for love, and she dies for love.”

“She’s not the one dying.”

Belle grunted, then reached out and gave me a lazy slap that loosened a few of my teeth. “You understand nothing. Do you know why she is called Lady Zinc?”

My ears were still ringing from the blow. It was all I could do to shake my head.

“Back in the old life, in Bucharest, she was a wealthy woman. She took many lovers. Nobody ever saw those lovers again. She made only one mistake—letting a local banker into her bed. When he vanished his wife made a stink. The police came, and when they searched Vera’s house they found nearly three dozen zinc coffins in her cellar, each with a window over the corpse’s face, all those zinc boxes arranged like a group of admirers at a party. There was even a chair so Vera could sit and speak to them, look at them, all her beloved, unfaithful lovers. She couldn’t bear to lose them to other women, so when she saw their interest beginning to die, she poisoned them, and they died, too. Too much love, you see? Too much love. It was quite beautiful.” Belle put her great, callused hand on my face and shoved me against the headboard so my brain rattled in my skull. “She offered you a love like that, and you spat in her face. You will not be one of her immortals, like those men were.”

And that was what I was left with, as I struggled through another desperate, painful night trying to scrape through the heavy leather strap on my wrist. Zinc coffins. Thirty or more. That was the measure of Vera’s love. I was only the latest, and I wasn’t even going to have the distinction of earning one of those gray metal boxes.

I lost track of how many nights Vera came to me, how many nights she drained me. It was just as well I was tied to the bed, because my groin itched and stung so horribly, I’d have scratched myself to ribbons trying to relieve it. There wasn’t much left of me now—I had been sucked nearly dry. I didn’t even dream of Caz any more, but floated between two kinds of being half-asleep, with brief interludes of searing pain and then the wretchedness that followed, and bouts of weakness that lasted longer each time, broken by desperate sawing at the thick leather strap. Soon Vera would feast on me one last time, take the rest of me, and that would be it. Belle had already told me that I was going into the furnace when I was through, that she didn’t want anything left for her mistress to become sentimental about.

I no longer dreamed of Caz, but I did dream a little, the kind of sickly fantasies you have when you’re in the grip of a fever, complicated but basically meaningless. That was why it took me quite a while on this night to realize that I was actually awake, and something really was kneeling beside me on the bed, resting a splayed hand on my chest.

I was so weak that for a long moment I just stared at it, blinking against the light of the single small candle that lit the room. In one sense I had never truly examined the face that now swung down close to my own, staring at me with an intensity that seemed as hungry as Vera’s; in another sense, I knew it better than I knew mine, that dead gray expanse of shrunken flesh, the jutting lower jaw, the tiny teeth like pieces of gravel, the glittering little shark’s eyes. Smyler.

“It look for you.” The voice was a scratchy whisper. “It look for you so long, Bobby Bad Angel. Now it find you.”

The scrawny thing climbed onto my torso and then began to poke solemnly at the skin of my face with the depressingly familiar four-sided blade, each little stab as painful as a botched injection. The murdering creature looked different somehow, his skin darker, body thinner, the ropy musculature more exaggerated than before.

“What . . . what do you want?” I shifted my weight, trying to get into a position where I could throw all my force against the frayed strap. I didn’t think I had done enough damage to break it yet, but it wasn’t like I had a lot of choices. My movement irritated Smyler. He pushed his blade against my upper eyelid. I went very still. A drop of blood caught in my lashes and began to leak into my eye, but I didn’t dare blink.

“What do you want?” I must have sounded terrified, because I was. I had already been down to my very last reserves of belief—of faith, if you will—and now things had become dramatically worse.

“What it want?” Smyler gave a little chortle, as crisply dry as the shake of a rattlesnake’s tail, t-t-t-t-t-t. “It want the feather. Come a long way for the feather. Tell where it is, or it will have the wicked angel’s eye in its pocket and the wicked, bad angel’s heart in its lunch box.” Suddenly the deformed mouth spread in what must have been a grin. “Bad angel is sweetest meat. Bad angel always taste so good.”