Happy Hour in Hell

by Tad Williams

  “So? I already figured that out. What does that have to do with us? It’s not like I fell for you because I thought you’d be a load of laughs.”

  At another point in our relationship she might have at least looked amused, but now she was too tired, too sad. “Don’t, Bobby. Don’t make fun. What this is all about is goodbye.”

  It was the one thing I hadn’t expected to hear, at least not quite so baldly, and it took me off-guard. I walked a few yards ahead, stepping out of the trees to stand on the lakeshore. Parts of the black surface steamed, while other parts were lively with the movement of slippery shapes just below the surface, rolling up into the air only long enough to make the waters splash and ripple. I had no idea what they were; something that could have happily eaten a plesiosaur, judging by what I could see, slippery bodies big around as redwood trees. I stayed several yards from the water’s edge.

  “Goodbye?” I said at last. “Look, it took me a long time to get here. Do you really think I’m just going to turn around after all this and go back without you?”

  “Yes.” She had stopped a little behind me. The dusty gray soil had already made a mess of her white stockings where they showed beneath the hem of her old-fashioned dress. Dinosaurs and pinafores. Hell was the craziest place. “Yes, Bobby, that’s what I think. That’s why we’re here. Love me one more time—leave me one more memory—then go away. I’ll never be happy in your world. Not in either of them.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you’re happy here?”

  “Of course not. I’m trying to save your soul, you fool, something you never seem to think about. So just go.”

  Now I was really angry. Now I was the one grabbing her, clumsy because of my still-regenerating hand. I wasn’t planning to let go. “No, Caz! And it’s not just because I went through all this bullshit to find you. I’m not that shallow. No, we belong together, and just because you’re . . . too frightened to believe it doesn’t mean I’m going to let you talk me into giving up.”

  She was crying a little, the tears becoming spots of frost almost as quickly as they leaked from her eyes. “Stop it, Bobby! Stop it! It’s . . . cruel.” She slumped so suddenly, so bonelessly, that for a moment I thought something bad had happened, but she was just overcome with exhaustion and emotion. “Don’t you understand? Don’t you know what you and your so-called love are doing to me?”

  “What I’m doing to you? I’m not holding you prisoner—that’s your arch-shitheel of an ex, sweetie.”

  “Do you think I care about Eligor? Do you think I even care about what he does to me? I just told you how Hell works. Why don’t you get it? I finally learned to live with the pain, or at least how to exist with it, but ever since I heard your voice at the Circus . . .” She choked a little as she fought for composure. “Since that moment, I have truly been in Hell. Because you brought it all back. Not just yourself but everything. What we had, what we pretended we had, even what we could have had if the entire universe had been different. Yes, I thought about it too. For a couple of seconds I almost let myself feel it. But it was always a lie, Bobby.”

  “I’m not just Bobby,” I said quietly. “I’m an angel, Caz. I’m Doloriel, too.”

  “Yes. And you always think the glass is half full. But even if that were true, the glass is half full of poison.” She extended her other pale hand toward me. It trembled. “Just love me, Bobby. One more time. Then go back to your angel games and your pretend-people friends. Let me grow some scar tissue, because that’s all I’m going to have.”

  “No.” I had been waiting ever since we’d parted in the dress shop to make love with her again, but I was too angry, too hurt. “No, I’m not doing it. I’m not saying goodbye and neither are you, and I’m not having one last isn’t-this-sad pity fuck, either. I’m coming back for you tomorrow, Caz, and I’m taking you away. If you can get out on your own you can meet me in front of that old temple in Dis Pater Square where I met your soggy friend today. If not, I’m coming right into Eligor’s place to get you, and I don’t care how many of his guards I have to cut into little pieces to do it. Got it? Tomorrow, just after the last beacon goes out.” Then I turned and walked away along the edge of the lake.

  “Bobby, no! That’s just crazy!”

  I heard her but I kept going.

  “Bobby! You can’t go down that way! Take the tram!”

  But I was too angry. If I didn’t burn off some of the rage coursing like napalm through my veins, I was going to strangle something. Not that random strangling was such a no-no in Hell, but it might attract more attention than I wanted. Still ignoring Caz’s calls, I reached the nearest end of the lake and headed off the path, down the slope through the black trees. My brain felt like a wasp’s nest that someone had kicked.

  I had made it perhaps a mile downhill, dusty gray dirt filling my lungs with grit, thorny branches scratching my exposed skin, when the worst of my anger began to wear off. In fact, I was just beginning to wonder if I had been a little hasty (or, God forbid, overly dramatic) when I stumbled out into a clearing and realized I was face-to-face with Caz’s two bodyguards, still waiting by the parked Hell limo. They stared at me for a second, not so much recognizing me as recognizing that I probably didn’t belong there. I had just realized the same thing when one of the two ugly bastards shouted, “Oy! You!” I turned and ran back into the trees, cursing myself for the self-absorbed idiot that everyone always says I am. Everyone is right, of course, but shut up.

  Now it was a race. They weren’t coming after me as hard as they would have if they had recognized me, but names aside, Candy and Cinnamon were strictly the snips and snails and severed puppy-dog tails sort of guys—military-grade weapons in hypermuscled, vaguely human forms. They didn’t have to go around trees the way I did, just through them. The sound of shattering trunks and exploding branches followed me down the hillside like artillery fire.

  Judging by the noises, I seemed to have pulled ahead of at least one of them, but his ugly brother was right behind me. I followed the tramway cables as best I could, half the time sliding down the slope on my ass because the loose black soil was treacherous under my feet. The much heavier Sweetness Twins didn’t seem to have the same problem: When I looked back, the nearest of the two was only about ten yards behind me. He was holding something in his hand that looked like a short whip made of loops of glowing barbed wire, and I decided that I really, really didn’t want to find out what that would feel like. Sadly, it didn’t look like I was going to have much choice. A couple of dozen yards in front of me the slope fell away sharply, the tram cables swaying in midair above a drop of at least a few hundred feet. I had to slow to a stop.

  I was pretty sure the one thundering down behind me was Cinnamon, although there wasn’t a huge amount of difference between the kinds of ugly the two of them wore, but even in demonic form Caz’s driver retained a sort of mustached look, a greater thickness to his leathery upper lip. I was tempted to remind him of my many humorous comments about his porn career in the hopes of making him angry and reckless, but I figured since we were both wearing different bodies and he hadn’t recognized my new one, that would definitely count as asking for trouble. Instead I took a few steps back up the slope toward him and lowered myself into a kind of wrestler’s crouch, my arms spread wide.

  “Hold up, you,” he growled at me, slowing down a little as he saw me ready to fight back. He lifted the glowing, rattling wire whip. “Tell me what you were doing . . .”

  If I was any normal idiot he would have caught me off-guard, because halfway through that sentence he suddenly swung his flail, with every clear intention of swiping my head right off my neck. Luckily for me, I already knew that neither of us meant the other well. I ducked the weapon and then scooped a handful of black dust from the slope into his eyes.

  He screamed in fury, but he wasn’t anywhere near as angry as I wanted him to be, because instead of charging down the slope in an insane rage, he groped toward me with small steps, sweeping with
the glowing flail, angling himself so that I would find it hard to get back up the slope past him while he was momentarily blinded. I’ve faced off against more good fighters over the years than I ever wanted to, and Cinnamon was definitely one of them.

  However, he was a fighter, and I wasn’t, which was my only advantage. I’m just a survivor. I kept throwing things at him, making enough fuss and ruckus to keep him staggering downhill toward me, wiping at his streaming eyes while also trying to keep me in front of him. Another few steps and I stumbled and fell back, ending up in a crouch. I tried to look exhausted, which wasn’t hard since I was. Cinnamon could see just enough of me to know that he had me, so he hurried to reach me before I could get up again. And that was the mistake I’d been hoping for.

  Just before he got to me, I jumped as high as I could. The Highest was with me, or at least not actively trying to kill me at the moment, and the tips of my fingers just curled over the tramway cable. I pulled my legs up as Cinnamon lunged at the place where I’d just been, then as soon as he had tottered past I twisted around and shoved him in the back of the shoulders as hard as I could with both feet, sending him stumbling down slope. I wasn’t strong enough to hurt him much, and he would have recovered his balance within a few more steps—he was massive, at least twice my size—but he didn’t have a few more steps. I had lured him far enough back that we were at the edge of the drop-off, a near-vertical, and by the time he tried to put his second foot down there was nothing beneath him. Even in Hell they don’t tread water in midair like they do in the cartoons. He dropped out of sight like a big bag of rocks. Unluckily for me, when he threw his hands up in astonishment at the complete lack of anything solid beneath his feet, the wire flail brushed me before it disappeared with Cinnamon into the emptiness below.

  It wasn’t like electricity, and it wasn’t like fire, but whatever was in that flail combined many of the least pleasant parts of both. I don’t even remember letting go of the tram cable, and if I’d been a little closer to the edge I would have gone over right behind the big gray guy, but I dropped to the ground so limply that instead of rolling I lay at the edge of the hill like a half-filled sandbag.

  I was wondering idly how I kept winding up in situations like this when the streaky reddish light of Hell’s late afternoon was blocked by another large, dark silhouette.

  “You little smear of shit,” said Cinnamon’s buddy, Candy. He leaned forward, and I felt his knee come down on my chest like someone had parked a truck on me. He shoved something like an oversized flintlock pistol at my face, a huge thing of cast-iron, brass, and wood. I had no idea what level of pit technology it represented, but I was pretty certain it would blow my head off. Candy’s finger was so huge I was astonished he hadn’t already pulled the trigger by accident. He was breathing hard, and what little I could see of his big, ugly face looked pretty unhappy. “You messed up my partner,” he growled. I could swear his knee was touching the ground, even through my chest. “Oh, yeah. You’re going to be screaming for years.”

  thirty-two

  lifted

  IN MORE normal circumstances I might have tried to talk my way out of it, not that Candy was going to let me walk away, of course. It was far too late for that. But I would have tried to bullshit him long enough to get some distance between us, then done my best to outrun him. For some reason, though, I had been getting angrier and angrier for most of the last hour. Perhaps getting dumped had something to do with it. Also, I’d just kicked Candy’s partner over a cliff, which meant he probably wasn’t going to listen to me very carefully. So instead of trying to find a less violent way to deal with an elephantine knee in my chest and a gun in my face, I ducked under the gun barrel and yanked the long, curved knife I’d bought at the Night Market out of my boot. I did my best to hamstring him as I pulled it forward, but didn’t spend too long worrying about whether I’d succeeded or not, because the main thing I wanted to do was drive it into his groin, which I did about a quarter second later. Candy screamed and fell across me, fountaining blood, but I was already rolling; I managed to kick my way out from under him, but not before getting covered in sticky red stuff. If he’d sunk his thick fingers into me with his weight on top of me, I’d still be there.

  To his credit, when he realized how badly I’d cut him and that I’d slipped out of his grasp, the big fellow didn’t spend a lot of time cursing or shouting in frustration, just levered himself up off the ground and came after me, lumbering like a lame elephant. I was already scrambling sideways, trying to find a less dramatic way down the slope than Cinnamon had taken, but couldn’t see one. Candy still had his gun, and he squeezed off a shot so loud that my ears popped. If he’d hit me, my head would have popped, too. As it was, a tree about two feet from my head exploded into flying, flaming shreds of wood.

  I had literally no idea whether his gun was a single-shot or some kind of repeater, and I didn’t know how to find out without letting him fire at me again. Candy’s gray, heavy-boned face, never pretty at the best of times, was now a mask of snarling mouth and smeared blood. He was bleeding heavily from the crotch, but from the way he smashed his way through everything I tried to put between us, he wasn’t going to bleed out until he’d had time to unwind my guts like a tangled yo-yo. As I ran along the edge of the cliff, I scooped up a jagged rock the size of a cantaloupe.

  The next time he staggered and slowed for a second, I was ready for him. I didn’t bother to wind up, I just set my feet and pegged it at him hard, like I was making the turn on a double play. I actually have a pretty good throwing arm, and I’ve often wondered whether that and my inexplicable love of baseball are traces of my unknown past, but at that particular moment all I was thinking about was trying to heave a large stone through Candy’s even larger skull. It hit him in the forehead with a godawful loud thud, hard enough that I saw the bones of his skull crunch inward beneath the skin like somebody had dropped a hard-boiled egg on a tile floor. He let go of his gun and fell to his knees, blood now gushing out of him top and bottom as he raised shaking hands to his face.

  I could have just kept running—he was going to be in no shape to follow me for at least a few minutes, no matter how fast he healed. I could also have picked up his gun and given him a few rounds in the head or chest, enough to keep him down so long that I could have walked the rest of the way to the bottom in peace, stopping to pick flowers along the way (if any flowers grew on that miserable shitpile of a mountain). But as I said, I was in a crazy, violently angry mood, so instead of doing any of those things, I ran back to him and began to stab him over and over in the neck, face, and chest with that big old demon-sticker. He roared—actually, it sounded more like gargling, which I guess in a way it was—and did his best to get his hands on me, but I kept dancing back out of reach after each stab. When he eventually did get his big hands on me I’d already made a tattered, red, and soggy mess out of his upper body, and because I was behind him all he managed to do was pull me toward him. I jumped up onto his back, wrapped my legs around his neck (which was at least as thick as my waist) and started sawing away at his throat.

  It was horrible. I barely remember most of the end, to be honest with you. Every now and then above Candy’s rasping bellows I heard my own voice, and I was making the same kind of incoherent noises, just in a higher register. I wasn’t thinking of those good times when I’d threatened to shoot his dick off, and he’d promised to smash me like an insect on a car grill. I didn’t even realize until it was too late that for long moments he hadn’t been pulling at me with his hands but had been trying to signal his surrender. By that time he had tipped forward until he was on his knees and elbows, and the ground all around him was a churn of mud and pooling scarlet.

  “Stop.” It was the only word from him I’d understood, and it was the quietest by far, a mere gurgle, but it came just as I was sawing through the last of his neck. I yanked his head free, and held it up in front of me. It was so heavy I could barely manage, but I saw his filming eyes go wide
with surprise, then saw his mouth move, silently this time, forming the word, “You . . . ?” and then I threw his head as far as I could. It bounced heavily down the slope a couple of times, then rolled over into the void and was gone.

  I fell down right on top of Candy’s headless body, my insane rage suddenly gone.

  When my brain finally rebooted itself, I sat up and looked around. The light hadn’t changed much, so the last day lamp was still burning. It was never easy to guess how much time had passed in Hell, but other than the corpse of Caz’s bodyguard (made considerably handsomer by the removal of its head) I was still alone. I was very grateful for that, believe me, and not just for the obvious reasons. I’d lost control so completely that I would actually have been ashamed—yes, even in Hell—for anyone to have seen me, especially Caz.

  I was completely soaked in blood. I did my best to clean the knife, then slipped it back into my boot. I knew that Candy and Cinnamon’s car had been just a few hundred feet above me, but I didn’t want to risk going back to steal it, which would force Caz to walk all the way back to Flesh Horse by herself through some of the worst parts of the Red City. I didn’t want to put her in that kind of danger. This led to another Bobby Dollar Special Moment: I was actually leaving her the car so she could get home faster and report the disappearance of her bodyguards sooner. And she’d have to, of course. You didn’t just go out for the afternoon, misplace about a half ton’s worth of demon-gorillas, and then not mention it to their employer.

  I probably should have tried to find Caz then and take her with me, but I didn’t know how long I could hide her from an angry grand duke and his soldiers. Riprash wasn’t leaving until the next day, and the last thing I wanted was to have them start checking the ports. If she went home now, Eligor would be alerted to what happened to her bodyguards, but I hoped Caz herself wouldn’t be suspected of anything. Of course, it was going to be more difficult now for her to get out to meet me at the temple. (And yes, I know she’d never even hinted she would, but I needed to believe it just to keep myself going.) I had my own bad decisions to blame for that.