Happy Hour in Hell

thirty-three: the conference room

I WAS AWAKE for some time before I opened my eyes, but my senses kept telling me I was in a meeting room in some Holiday Inn or a Hilton business hotel when I knew I was actually in Hell. Still, I could definitely smell coffee and glazed donuts and the scent of room freshener purchasable in bulk quantities. I was just trying to make sense of it when someone spoke.

“My, my, Advocate Doloriel, you are a persistent little beast, aren’t you?”

My heart didn’t just sink, it crawled into the darkest, deepest corner of my chest and refused to come out ever again. My eyes popped open, too, even though I immediately wished they hadn’t, so I could have pretended a little longer the whole thing was a clubbing-induced dream.

Grand Duke Eligor stood over me in full hellish nobility drag, seven feet tall, in Renaissance-ish robes of flowing black, with a high collar that came up right under his chin. The only odd detail was that, except for the inhuman smolder of his eyes, he was wearing his Kenneth Vald, human billionaire face instead of one of his really scary ones. Not that I wasn’t scared.

I did my best anyway. “Nice outfit, Ellie. Remind me again what the safe word was.”

He didn’t say anything. The room looked exactly like it smelled, with Vald/Eligor standing at the other side of a perfectly ordinary conference table in a perfectly normal hotel conference room (at least it would have been in Visalia or Bakersfield or San Leandro). There was even a box of donuts and a coffee service, with artificial sweeteners and powdered creamer. The only thing missing from this vision of Rotarian perfection was a window with venetian blinds open to a view of the freeway or a business park next door. But this room had no windows.

Eligor folded himself gracefully into a chair just across from me. I didn’t seem to be restrained in any way, but I wasn’t quite ready to test that—not yet, since it was almost certainly what he’d expect me to do. I had no leverage at all except possibly to do something unexpected, and I probably wouldn’t get a second chance, so I was going to wait until I actually thought of something worth trying. In the meantime, I knew Eligor the Horseman well enough from our previous encounters to know he didn’t mind talking.

“So that was all some trap of yours?”

The grand duke smiled a little. “What, that little holy-roller meeting you were attending? Do you really think I would set some elaborate trap for you? The Countess was right—you do have an exaggerated sense of your own importance. No, nobody even knew you were here, little angel, although you were trying very hard to get noticed. Honestly, you came to my own house, Dollar. I thought Heaven didn’t allow suicide.”

“And I thought Hell would knock the pussy out of someone after a few million years, but clearly I was wrong. You saying you didn’t come after me?”

He shook his head as if it almost wasn’t worth answering. “We’ve been looking for ‘Pseudolus’ ever since you made your little visit to Flesh Horse. Did you think we wouldn’t check with the Liars Sect to see if you were legitimate? Then, when somebody took out his bad temper on Candy and Cinnamon—well, as you can guess, we were getting very interested. When the Pandaemonium City Guards picked you up with those Lifter idiots, one of my informants recognized you as the one we were looking for . . . so here you are.” He shook his head. “You’ve all but ruined the Countess’s bodyguards. Was that really necessary? First you kill my assistant back in San Judas, now you come all the way to my place here and do in a couple of harmless wage-slaves. You have something against working folk?”

“Enough of your bullshit,” I said. “Let’s cut to the hugs and learning so we can finish this. You want the feather. That’s why you sent Smyler after me. Our business with the Countess aside, I had to do something, since it was obvious after that you weren’t going to leave me alone. And you knew I’d made it into Hell because Smyler followed me here, so don’t pretend you’re surprised to see me.”

He looked at me for a long moment, his face as blank as a weathered statue of some ancient king. “Yes, Smyler,” he said. “Of course.”

“You don’t need to play games, big man. You hold all the cards. Do what you’re going to do. I’m not giving you the feather, and I’m not going to tell you where it is. You’ll just kill me anyway, so why should I make it easy on you?”

He smiled, his lips curling slowly back, an unhurried predator with a staked-down meal. For the first time, I could see that he was probably as old as the planet, if not older. “Very good. The hero speech. But I think you’re supposed to say that after I’ve tried to soften you up a little. Has more resonance that way.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Take your best shot. What are you going to do with this—” I gestured to the conference table and the bad oil paintings, “—make me sit through a sales pitch for a time-share condo?”

“Oh, you don’t approve of the decor?” Eligor looked around. “I requested it just for you. I thought it would make a small-timer like you feel at home. We can do something else if you’d rather—”

And just that suddenly the room was gone, and I was falling through whistling blackness, grabbing at nothing, helpless.

“How about this?”

Watery light all around me, dirty glass, stainless steel tables striped with old blood, ancient linoleum brown with the dried scum of countless vile fluids. Hanging above the operating table on which I was strapped was a gallery of machines that would have made Torquemada flinch: drills and bone saws and claspers and graspers whose purposes I couldn’t even grasp, but whose rusted, stained surfaces spoke volumes.

“Or if you’re more of a traditionalist,” said Eligor’s voice, “we could try this.”

The light dimmed. Now there was only a single torch, just bright enough to reveal that the ancient stone floor around me boiled with crawling things. The walls, too, were alive with moving, clicking shapes. I gasped and jerked, but I couldn’t get up, let alone away.

“How about Surrealism? You like all that 20th century stuff, don’t you?”

I was stretched in a dozen directions, my eyes impossibly far apart, binocular vision in two separate directions. A vast mouth had replaced the pale ceiling above my head, lips as big as the front end of a car that giggled and made kissing noises and murmured things I couldn’t quite hear while a fine mist of saliva fell down onto my face. Spiders with the heads of birds and birds with the heads of medieval harlequins hopped and fluttered all around me. The lips made a choking noise, then rounded into an “o” and something gray and ropy and as big as a gorilla began to climb down from between the teeth, eyes floating around in its body like bubbles in a bag of liquid.

“Or maybe you’re beginning to appreciate the original theme,” Eligor said, and suddenly the hotel conference room snapped back into being around me. “You see, it doesn’t really matter. You’re not in a place, Doloriel—you’re in my place. And you will tell me where the feather is. It’s only a matter of time, and we’ve got . . . forever.”

Great roiling, billows of crematory flame leaped from the walls, red and yellow and orange, the same hideous orange as Eligor’s eyes. I couldn’t see Eligor anymore, though. I couldn’t see anything but the flames.

I felt my skin charring. I felt it dry and then crack, then burn away. I felt my nerves become blackened wires, my muscle tissues shrivel and catch fire, my very bones burst into flames. I felt just what you would feel as you burn to death, a level of shrilling pain in every fiber that cannot even be described, agony beyond anything I could have imagined. And I kept feeling it. It went on. It went on, and on, and on.

I don’t know when it stopped. Hours later. Days later, maybe. I was somewhere else by then. I was someone else. The person who had been burned that way, that Bobby, that Angel Doloriel, was gone now beyond retrieval. That person could never exist again. And the thing that remained behind would never stop screaming, I felt sure. Never stop burning.

Eligor carefully picked out a donut. “The last powdered sugar,” he explained. “So, where’s my feather?”

It took a while to form words, although from what I could see of my trembling hands I was whole and unburnt again, as though I hadn’t just experienced a lifetime’s worth of scorching, unholy agony. “Fuck . . . you.”

“Right, then!” he said and saluted me with his World’s Greatest Boss mug as the flames blazed up once more.

He had lots of other ways to hurt me when he got bored with hellfire, some of them quite inventive. I had to watch Caz tortured and raped by Eligor himself and various demons, or at least something that looked like her. Then later I had to watch another version of Caz participating happily, even enthusiastically, in all the same activities, even as my own nerves were stretched and burned and scraped and tormented. Eligor liked to cover all the bases.

I talked, of course. Fuck, yes I did. I told him everything I knew about the feather and everything else. Pain hurts. Pain in Hell hurts even more. And this was personal pain that Eligor wanted me to feel, and he made sure I got every last drop. I don’t think it had as much to do with Caz as it did with me being an annoyance. The fact that unimportant me had managed to waste so much of his precious, infinite time. You’d think he’d have thanked me for the diversion. But no.

It didn’t seem to matter that I was vomiting out every secret I had, though. Eligor went right on hurting me. After the flames I found myself in a place bright and white as an industrial clean room, where men with faces featureless as thumbprints pounded on me with iron hammers, smashing every bone in my body, flattening me like a cutlet. Each blow forced more screams out of my mouth, which changed shape with each strike, so that it was almost impossible to form words. But still they kept hitting me, and I kept screaming out what I knew.

Dark, oily liquid. Writhing things sinking their teeth into my flesh and wrapping around me like sex-crazed eels to pull me down. I managed to kick free just before I drowned and made it back to the surface, gasping out foul, poisoned air and taking in lungfuls of something not much better, only to be yanked down into the darkness again. And again. And . . . you’ve got it by now, right?

Packs of rotting skeletons trying to eat my face as I struggled to escape over mounds of garbage. This was less fun than it sounds.

My skin trying to tear itself loose from my body. Exactly as fun as it sounds.

A chamber full of stinging ants and biting flies the size of pigeons. Me with no arms or legs.

An all-black room, where nothing happened except an excruciating pain blooming right in the middle of my skull, like an insane sea urchin with thumbtack spines trying to shove its way out through one of my eye sockets. It got worse and worse until I finally tore my own head off my neck, at which point my head grew back and the process started over.

And every now and then, just to remind me why I was literally suffering the tortures of the damned, I would be back in the original conference room with Eligor. He would ask me a few more questions, or the same questions again. Sometimes he just looked at me and laughed, then I went back into the acid bath or dangled on the electric fence again. A couple of times he was reading emails on his cellphone and didn’t even look up. Once I saw Caz, standing straight and silent as Eligor held her with one hand around her neck, like a chicken going to the chopping block. Her eyes were wet and her lashes frosty with crystallizing tears, but she didn’t move, didn’t speak.

Back to the crematory flames again, but this time all my friends from the Compasses were there with me—Monica, Sweetheart, Walter Sanders, all of them shrieking as they burned, begging me to help them.

The next time I came back to the conference room, Lady Zinc was waiting for me, eyes bright with madness. While Eligor watched and drank his coffee Vera raped me again, just as she had before. Then she took me in ways she hadn’t been able to do before. It all hurt worse than you can imagine—merciful God, a lot worse.

Vera disappeared after a few thousand hours.

“Little man,” said the grand duke, grinning. “You’ve had a busy day.”

He sent me to a room whose floor was wire mesh painted with acid. The flesh kept melting off my bones and dripping through, and as determinedly as I crawled, the door remained just as far away.

An endless desert of broken glass and salt.

A dim forest full of predatory birds with teeth. They laughed like demented children.

More fire. Needles. Filth. Innocents suffering. Over and over and over.

Over and over.

As kind of a break between bouts of indescribable agony, Eligor would pause the torture ride to explain how things in the universe really worked. Kind of like those old educational fillers they used to run between the Saturday morning kids’ cartoons.

The first time, he appeared as I was screaming helplessly and said, “You know, you’ve got it all wrong.”

I didn’t answer, being too busy spitting out blood and bile.

“You see, Heaven has you suckered. They’re not against what we do—they ordered us to do it. We’re the official alternative. We’re as much a part of God’s system as the guards who work in a prison.”

I spat again, and mustered a single, “Bite me.”

“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.