Happy Hour in Hell

by Tad Williams

  I could only hope Vera’s jewelry was good quality. I hung onto one necklace of lumpy, lagoon-grown pearls (I’ll explain why later) but dumped all the rest of the stuff on Saad’s counter and let him piss all over me in the guise of “bargaining.” I didn’t want to give in too easily because he’d remember that, but I also didn’t want to be there so long that Smyler or some other survivor from Vera’s house found me. At last I got a price I could live with, spent a little on the spot purchasing some of Saad’s other goods, including some clean clothes which I didn’t put on right away and a long, sharp, well-made knife with a backward-curving guard; the kind of thing I wanted to have in my hand the next time I wound up fighting for my life.

  I’d made two gold weights, three copper handfuls, and a couple of iron spits in change from the stolen stuff, plus the coins I’d already taken from Vera’s jewelry box, so I was pretty much wealthy, at least for a while. Jewelry dumped and pockets jingling with money, I picked the inn with the least horrifying reputation I could find, a place called the Black Ostrich, that overlooked the stinking backwater where the Styx bellied out into Sulfur Lagoon. I probably looked pretty beat up already, so as I paid I showed the innkeeper my knife, informed him I wouldn’t be sleeping during my stay so there was no point trying to rob and murder me, and suggested strongly that he and the rest of his employees would be happiest if they avoided my room entirely. Then I dragged myself upstairs and went to work.

  One of the things I’d bought from Saad’s bazaar was a jug of firewater. Yes, that’s what it’s called, and it’s not the Dodge City kind. It’s made from the waters of the burning river Phlegethon, it’s uglier in the mouth than Riprash’s rum, and you don’t need to drink much before you want to go out and beat some people to bloody pulp. I drank a bit more carefully than that, just enough to kill the worst of the pain from my long captivity and dull what I was about to do to myself.

  I’d bought one more thing from Saad’s place, a cracked hunk of mirror glass: very few people in Hell want to own mirrors, for some reason, and there certainly wasn’t going to be one in a cheap hostel like the Black Ostrich. Now that I could see myself, I went to work, slicing lines in the skin of my face and liberally dousing them with firewater, pausing every few minutes to stick my bloody face into the filthy mattress and scream, because it hurt really fucking bad, let me tell you.

  Once I’d cut myself along the brow line, forehead, cheeks, nose, and jaw, I dabbed away the slow-moving blood, then sliced the cord on Vera’s pearl necklace and began tucking the individual pearls into my bleeding weals. I’d seen a ritual like it on a National Geographic TV show; young guys in Africa or New Guinea or somewhere stuffing their sliced skin with stones and ashes to make impressive scars. I didn’t care about impressive, I just wanted to change the look of my face. I had almost vomited out my own heart when Caym the President seemed to recognize me. Ultimately I might wind up trying to fool Eligor himself, but as I had discovered to my surprise and shock, whatever process Temuel had used to get me into this body had left me looking a lot more like my Bobby Dollar self than I could risk. So, self-mutilation.

  I kept drinking little nips of the firewater, and that blotted out the worst of the agony, but there was so much blood that I quickly soaked the few rags I’d lifted at the bazaar. No point in putting on my new, clean clothes until the bleeding stopped, so I dabbed my wounds one last agonizing time with Phlegethon-liquor, then laid myself down to sleep through the worst of the pain.

  I dreamed of Caz, of course, of our last night together in Eligor’s hotel before he blew the fucking thing to kingdom come, but in my dream we couldn’t make love because bits of me kept falling off and crawling around on a floor slippery with blood. At one point I roused myself from the mattress long enough to douse myself in the burning liquid again, then did my best to fall back asleep, but I could actually feel the skin knitting together over my new scars—a disturbing, tingling sensation like ants dancing in little white-hot metal shoes. After awhile I just gave up and lay with gritted teeth, waiting for the pain to subside enough for sleep to come.

  It took more than a few hours. I was beginning to feel right at home in Hell now—angry, miserable, hurting, you name it. Cheated, too. Like everyone else here, I was having trouble understanding what I had done to be suffering this way.

  Now that I was comparatively safe I gave the scars a full day to heal, going out to the Night Market only long enough to grab something disgusting to eat before slinking back to my room at the Ostrich. When the pain of my self-surgery had dwindled to a dull ache, I got out the broken mirror and examined my handiwork. It was a strange look: my bumpy new brow and the lumpy lines along my cheekbones and jaw made me look like some kind of desert lizard. I used a little carbon from the candlewick so my eyes would seem more deep-sunk beneath the knobby shelf I’d created. It made me even uglier, but that was fine. There’s no right or wrong in Hell as far as how people look, and my only goal was to look less like Bobby Dollar, Enemy of the State.

  I lay down again to think, because I had a lot to think about. How had Smyler found me? Had Eligor brought him back here from the real world like recalling an employee from a field office? It was the only thing that made sense. But if the grand duke could find me to set Smyler on me, why hadn’t he done it sooner? Why hadn’t Eligor sent the Murderers Sect instead? And why hadn’t any of my enemies showed up here at my new hiding place?

  Commissar Niloch and others had mentioned someone the authorities were hunting, an intruder, and I’d assumed that was me. But what if it was Smyler all along? What if he’d somehow followed me into Hell and only caught up to me when I was stuck at Vera’s house?

  That was about all the thought I could give it, since there wasn’t much point in trying to figure things out from so little information. I was here for Caz, that was what mattered, and I had a lot to do, some of which was going to be downright terrifying. Putting it off would only make things worse. Only the Highest knew how long I’d already been in this horrible place, but it felt like half a year or more. For all I knew, there was already a heavenly APB out for me. In many, many ways, I was running out of time.

  The Ministry of Justice, also known as the Chancery, was in the deepest, most overbuilt section of the Red City, a crooked maze of close-leaning towers and guarded doorways behind Dis Pater Square. I had been praying I wouldn’t have to see Chancellor Urgulap again, the hideous giant-beetle-thing that had interviewed me back on Earth about the death of Prosecutor Grasswax. Luckily, as a member of the minor gentry Snakestaff of the Liars Sect was far too unimportant to get a meeting with the chancellor, and was instead fobbed off on a (literally) very sharp young woman, who seemed to be made entirely out of scissor parts. Urgulap was present only in a portrait that hung on the wall, watching over the dark office, his shell buffed to a gleam and his inhuman face frozen in a glower of determined leadership.

  “We cannot give you that information, Lord Snakestaff,” the Scissor Sister told me. “The chancellor has not completed his investigation, which he will present to the Senate and Council soon.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, trying to imagine how reckless a guy would have to be to go to bed with a woman whose thighs were sharpened blades. “I just need to do something with this thing.” I tried to hand her a piece of vellum, but only managed to knock several of the files off her desk. She gave me a look of shiny distaste, then her metal surfaces rasped as she bent to pick them up. When finished, she examined the writing on the piece of stretched, smoothed skin. “What is this? Some sort of debt?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Grasswax owed me almost two weights. Gambling debts.” (The real Grasswax had indeed liked a wager, and lost pretty frequently from what I’d heard. But not only hadn’t he lost to me, I didn’t even know what contests or games he liked.) “So, could I get, I don’t know, paid out of his estate? When the investigation’s over?”

  “Doesn’t your sect allow you to pursue these matters out of Grasswax’s
redenture?”

  I did my best to look embarrassed, which wasn’t that hard since I had no idea what a redenture even was. “Yeah. They sort of . . . kicked me out. I’m not in the Liars Sect any more.” I shrugged. “I caught on with the Thieves.”

  She rubbed one of her blades down her nose, which was also a blade. Skrrkkkkkkk. “All right,” she said at last. “Fine. Leave this with me, and I’ll put it into the files. With an explanation.” She frowned, which looked pretty odd, I can tell you. “But don’t expect too much.”

  I stood. “Why would I? This is Hell.”

  Outside, I stepped into the dark space of a tower doorway to make certain I’d grabbed the right thing while Scissor Sister was picking up the stuff I knocked over. I took a quick look at the out-basket files I’d stolen, a few pieces of vellum with official Chancery letterhead. More important, though, was the other thing I’d lifted, a wooden stamp that looked like it might have come right off Ebenezer Scrooge’s desk, except instead of “Scrooge & Marley” it said “Ministry of Justice.”

  Perfect.

  I didn’t sleep very well that night, and it wasn’t just because of the intermittent shrieks of agony from the promenade along Sulfur Lagoon. They weren’t really any worse than the stink of the lagoon itself, and both were easier to ignore than the weird buzzing, gagging sex two or three somethings were having in the room above mine.

  I was finally ready, after all this time, to do what I had come to Hell to do, or at least to begin doing it. If you know me at all by now, you know that I’m not so stupid as to do the same stupid thing every time—I prefer to alternate my stupidities. I had been discreetly checking into Eligor’s setup (loyalty is almost nonexistent in Hell, and bribery is one of the favorite pastimes). I wasn’t going to just charge into his fortress of a house. I knew I couldn’t just saunter in and liberate Caz. I wasn’t even going to make a plan until I knew more. That was why I had been sitting up all evening making fake Ministry of Justice documents for myself, until I had come up with something that satisfied my intention to walk in and out of Eligor’s stronghold with my skin on and my vital organs still in their original places.

  When I’d tackled Eligor in his earthly stronghold at Five Page Mill back in San Judas, I hadn’t known who and what I was dealing with. I did now. I was pretty sure I’d only get one shot to get her away from him, and I’d have to be very lucky to get even that. I needed a real plan, but first I needed to see his castle, called Flesh Horse, up close.

  Just getting near it was difficult, because although the top levels had the same kind of connective branches leading horizontally to other great mansions, they were all closely guarded. Like the Infernal Cabinet House and most other important buildings in Pandaemonium, the base of Flesh Horse sat in a wide park, walled off from its neighbors. The grounds were tangled with blood-colored trees and aggressively guarded by legions of what looked like albino scorpions with wolves’ heads. They didn’t worry me too much, because I was intending to walk right in through the front door, at least this first time.

  Flesh Horse was many acres wide at its base and stretched up so far into the smoky sky that even with the red day lamps burning in the walls I couldn’t see its top. The great, stony castle didn’t actually look like a horse, or like flesh, but it didn’t look like a nice place, either. Still, Caz was in there somewhere, and I desperately needed to get her back. It felt like doing that was the only thing that might keep me sane.

  So I spent several days on my due diligence and lots of money on bribes, gathering information and prepping myself. I had a special set of clothes made by a tailor at the Night Market, and paid another visit to Saad the pink tarantula to pick up a few additional necessities. My scars were all but healed now, the bumpiness of my face still just as ugly but a lot less recent-looking.

  The night before I started my mission, I drank myself to near-unconsciousness with Phlegethon firewater because I was too tightly wound to sleep otherwise. In the near darkness Hell calls morning, I took one last swallow to burn out the hangover and the musty taste in my mouth, then carefully dressed and prepared myself before walking out into the Red City, whistling the theme to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

  Okay, I wasn’t doing that last part. I admit that I was wishing Clint Eastwood could have been there too, but it was only yours truly.

  twenty-eight

  the drowned girl

  HERE’S A tip. If you’re a Mormon missionary or a door-to-door salesman, don’t waste your time and outer skin visiting Flesh Horse. My forged documents got me more attention than I would have liked, but they also got me inside the tower and into an appointment with Eligor’s Chief of Security. The grand duke’s previous head of security, my old friend Howlingfell, had been eaten by a large supernatural monstrosity that was supposed to eat me instead—something I can honestly say I enjoyed a great deal. The new chief, a hideous thing named Snaghorn, resembled a bloody, skinned grizzly bear with snail-stalks for eyes. He’d never seen me before, which doesn’t mean he heartily invited me in, of course: Snaghorn spent a good fifteen minutes just sniffing me. I’m sure he was just doing his job, but he seemed to do it for a very long time. A very, very long time. But at last Snaghorn seemed satisfied. Instead of biting any parts off me, he touched a curving black claw to my forehead. It felt like I’d been branded, and in a way, I had: he’d given me his mark, which meant limited permission to move through the lower levels of the house. Not by myself, of course, and not freely. I had an appointment with someone Snaghorn curtly referred to as “the drowned girl.”

  Fun, fun, fun, any way you sliced it. It’s a wonder more people don’t make Hell a holiday destination.

  Considering we were in a building that looked from the outside like some kind of giant tubeworm had excreted it, and from the inside like a bad acid trip version of a Renaissance tower, the drowned girl’s office was surprisingly ordinary. She sat at an ancient wooden desk, the old-fashioned kind called a “secretary,” with lots of pigeonholes to stash things and a large framed mirror sitting front and central in the middle of the desk surface. The windows of the quiet, dark room looked out over a backwater of the Phlegethon called the Bay of Tophet. The whole expanse of river seethed, flames floating on the black boil and sending curls of steam into the red-lit air; the view out the window seemed like a piece of theatrical scenery. The drowned girl herself looked pretty much the way you’d guess. Although swollen in places, she was still slender, the effect heightened by the lank, dripping hair that hung down to the shoulders of her wet, vaguely medieval-looking dress. Her skin was exactly the kind of blue-white ghastly and puffy-at-the-edges you’d expect. Her pale, bleached-out eyes watched me intelligently (if a bit resentfully), but every now and then they just rolled up behind her lids and stayed that way for a while, which left me staring at a very realistic corpse in an office chair.

  “I am Marmora.” She sounded like she still had some water in her lungs. “And you are apparently Pseudolus of Prespa,” she continued, reading the sheet of vellum I’d handed her. (I’d decided “Snakestaff” had pissed off too many people for me to walk into Eligor’s and use that name again.) “What is your business with the Grand Duke Eligor?”

  Cutting off the duke’s Grand Nuts, I wanted to say, or anything similar that would express my feelings about the huge amount of bullshit I owed him for, not least of which was stealing back the girlfriend I’d stolen from him. “It’s regarding another member of my sect, the late Prosecutor Grasswax,” is what I said instead. “The Liars Sect has sent me here.” They hadn’t, of course, but that was what my forged documents showed. “I just want to ask him a few questions about Grasswax.”

  “That will not happen.” Her sour smile was made a little creepier by the stream of liquid that dribbled from her lower lip. “His Grand Ducal Highness is far too busy to see someone like you.”

  “I understand.” I hadn’t expected to get an audience, and in fact I didn’t want one, I just wanted a chance to get in and e
xplore. “Who else could I talk to?”

  “Nobody.” She pushed the vellum back to me, her fingers so soft, damp, and swollen that they left little shreds of skin on the document. “Grasswax was never in the grand duke’s employ.”

  “But he came here often. And I’ve been told he performed some, well, informal tasks for Grand Duke Eligor—”

  “That doesn’t matter. His Grand Ducal Highness will not see you, and nobody else here can tell you anything about our master’s . . . informal arrangements. I suggest you take your inquiries elsewhere.” She stared at me for a long moment, a strangely intimate moment, although it was hard to look back into those cloudy, ruined eyes. “I would prefer not to have to call Snaghorn and his guards to show you out, but I will if I must.” She said it almost as if she truly meant it, which was kind of her, but it was still bad news. I’d hoped to get farther and stay longer, maybe even work up an idea of where Caz was being held.

  I stood there clutching my forged documents, wondering what to do next. All I’d come up with was either asking for a public restroom or faking a seizure when I heard a harshly musical tone like a long icicle cracking. Marmora turned her bleary stare to the mirror on the desk. “Yes, Countess?”

  Needless to say, I was suddenly pulled as tight as a guitar string. I stepped back from the desk and wandered a short distance away, as though respectfully giving Marmora her privacy, but I was really just trying to find an angle where I could see the front of the mirror.

  It was her in the glass, her amazing face, right there in front of me. I couldn’t hear anything she was saying, although the drowned girl obviously could, but that didn’t matter. It was her, Caz, and after all this time she was actually within reach. All I’d have to do would be to interrupt Marmora, and I would be speaking directly to the woman I loved. I wasn’t going to do anything that stupid, of course, but I wanted to, I really did. There she was, the same beautiful, terrifying vision I’d first met when she appeared at the Edward Walker death scene, blood-red eyes and all. But Caz looked pale and tired now, oh so tired, and even from where I stood, I could see how much effort it was taking her to carry on this domestic conversation with Marmora. God, I wanted her. I wanted nothing but to sneak away from the drowned girl and try to find her, but I knew that would be suicide of an extremely certain kind.