So the next day I announced my new plans to the crew, and got a variety of reactions ranging from plain old “who-gives-a-fuck-why-are-you-even-bothering-to-tell-me-this?” to “way-awesome-dude!” None of the swabbies objected, since one quiet spot in Hell for their labors was as good as any other to them, they being mostly rootless, non-family types who had chosen this way of life precisely for its permanent migratory nature. And in fact, two thousand of the nine thousand miles to Dark Epcot were familiar territory, my last regular stop being Saliva Tree Hill.
The river beyond that, natch, was an unknown quantity to me. But how different could it be? I thought.
Jad of course stood assembled with the other hands to hear the message, and, having had one taste of my double-edged “favors,” mustered up enough wits to look dubious at this large-hearted gesture. He hung back when the crew dispersed, so’s he could pester me with his questions. He kept rubbing his crotch like some hip-hop star, and I almost took offense until I realized it was an unconscious reaction to being sore.
“So, uh, Karen, why the change in plans? You figure maybe that once I’m on the good side of that pissant demon canary-dog I can repay you somehow? Is that it?”
“That’s exactly it, Jad.” Some evil whim shaped my next words—not too uncommon a perverse happening here in Hell. “But I’m actually holding out for even more. I think you can kick Glasya-Labolas’ butt and take his place.”
This was exactly the kind of impossible ego-boosting bullshit Jad was primed to accept at face value. After all, his default inclination was to picture himself as the magnificent, alpha-dog center of the universe wherever he happened to be, on Earth or in Hell. That notion had just taken a little posthumous beatdown, but it was plainly bubbling under, ready to be stroked and revived.
“You really think so?” The agreeable idea took hold of Jad’s whole brain, which was a process like a rising creek spilling over into a shallow ditch. “Yeah, what’s that Glassy-assed Labia Lips got that I ain’t got! After I learn the ropes here a little more, I can beat him at his own game, and get Scamp back. Gee, thanks, Karen, you showed me the light.”
Jad limped off for his stint in the Black Gang, and I shook my head in amazement and took my own place in the pilothouse.
The next several months went by in regular, business-like fashion, as the Shadows slipped greasily down the Styx, from one steamy, heaving, maggot-mound burg to another. Pinchbottom, Gallbreath, Cracked Moon, Furnace Heart, Zezao, Outcast Flats, Gringo Guts, Bloody Albion, Sidereal City, Nopalgarth….
Pardon me if I get downright poetic for a minute. The lack of any kind of weather or heavenly bodies (ha!) contributed to a timeless and uniform existence, filled with an endless cycle of deeds and thoughts, just variable enough to foster some sense of living. The routine daily rituals of piloting. The steady stream of embarking and disembarking weird chittering, crawling, gesticulating passengers, so that the gangplank seemed at times like a conveyor belt with its source in some crazy deity’s fevered brain and its outlet in some universal maw of destruction—which pretty much described matters as they actually stood. The occasional bouts of shore leave, when me and my crew gambled, got drunk, got laid and lost all our chancres, not necessarily in that order. The continuous transhipment of stuff, stuff, stuff, so that sometime it seemed like the hold of the Shadows held merely X number of stationary pallets whose transient contents morphed like a mirage.
Such was life in Hell, a hazy, lazy, crazy, dazed damnation.
About the most you can reliably say is, shit happened.
So before you knew it we were down to the outpost at the end of my usual reach, Saliva Tree Hill. About the only incident that really stood out in my memory of that time was when we carried two bounty hunters for a few hundred miles, until they caught up with their quarry.
At the dock at Cornhole two beings came on board and sought me out to present their credentials. They called themselves Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones, after two human detectives outta some books by a guy named Hymie or something. Coffin Ed was pretty much a crayfish as big as a man with some kinda helper seaweed and clams attached all over him. He walked upright on his tail somehow. I didn’t care to look too closely. Grave Digger Jones looked like some critters I saw in a comic book my nephew Cooter showed me once: stone men from outer space, fighting that long-haired guy with the hammer. Grave Digger did the talking cuz I’m not sure Coffin Ed could.
“Captain Karen, your gentleness, we are seeking a miscreant named Brian Passwater. We have reason to believe he is hiding downriver from Cornhole. Travel by your vessel will allow us to search for him circumspectly and relatively swiftly, as opposed to making arduous and flashy quarry-alerting peregrinations by land, up one shore only. Will you accept payment for our indefinite passage?”
“Well, lemme think a minute. How long you gonna take in each port? I can’t screw up my schedule too-too much.”
“No time at all, practically speaking. Coffin Ed has very acute and instant remote sensory abilities.”
The big crayfish bowed toward me and waggled his antennas significantly.
“Well, okay, I guess. But I can’t change my circuit to bring this perp back up here to Cornhole for justice, once you catch him.”
“Do not trouble yourself over justice, Captain Karen. We are equipped and authorized to dispense it in situ.”
Coffin Ed clacked his big serrated claws like castinets. Probably a lotta good eating in those grabbers, I thought, but I for one did not intend to get near enough to learn for sure.
So for a week or three the two bounty hunters stood like some kinda figureheads at the prow of the Shadows, a half circle of deferential private space always surrounding them, no matter how crowded the ship got, silent and unmoving until we approached land. Then Coffin Ed’s antennas would start thrumming and vibrating like Butch Robins’ banjo strings. Once or twice they got an interesting reading and went ashore while I waited, but they always came back empty-handed. Until we hit the metropolis of Crocodile Crater. Then, with Coffin Ed’s crayfish deelyboppers vibrating too fast to see they raced off into the twisty rubbish streets of the city before the gangplank was even firmly lashed down.
They returned just as I was getting ready to leave them behind, and in fact they were done with my services and only wanted to say thank you and goodbye. In his big pebbly paw, Grave Digger Jones was carrying a double-layered paper shopping bag that showed the store logo for the Hell branch of Whole Foods: a radioactively glowing tomacco fruit. The bag was dripping, and one of Coffin Ed’s lethal pinchers was smeared the same color as the drippage.
“Captain Karen, we wish to inform you of the success of our venture, and hope that the unutilized chancre-redeemable portion of our tickets will serve as sufficient emblem of our gratitude.”
“Uh, sure, right, boys… Happy hunting!”
I never did learn what crime poor Brian Passwater was guilty of. Probably not something really major, like offending one of the Lords of Hell. That would’ve brought a more vicious supernatural punishment. He musta just got on the wrong side of some powerful Hell citizen, one probably involved in some less savory line of business.
Like I say, that was pretty much the most exciting thing that happened in two thousand miles of travel. And as we pulled into Saliva Tree Hill, I wondered if the rest of the journey would be as boring. But we wouldn’t begin to find out until tomorrow, because we had to wait for the arrival of Captain Nance Piebald and his ferry, Satan’s Inglorious Rapture, in order to swap routes.
That night I had a confab with Jad. I had to say I was mighty impressed, despite our past track record of mutual hostility and incomprehension, with his new look and attitude. Work in the Black Gang had trimmed off all his excess poundage and muscled him up plenty. He seemed more self-assured and even a whit more considerate of others. I was guessing that maybe some ogre gal had objected to aspects of his callous and selfish lovemaking and undertaken to teach him some manners and perhaps even th
e meaning of the word “foreplay.” In fact, I detected a hickey on his neck exhibiting the unique tusk patterns of that species of female. Half of my objections to Jad as a husband had been to his egotism and unthinking brute ways, and those seem to have been smoothed off, making him a halfway attractive prospect again. Of course, as I soon learned, there had been no alteration in his intelligence or tastes, which were fixed solid as the Mason-Dixon line.
“So, Jad, we’ve come two thousand miles so far, with another seven to go. You had any change of heart during all that time? Maybe fancy sticking on as a member of my crew? It’s not a bad ol’ life, is it? Why not give up Scamp and the notion of hitting back at Glasya-Labolas?”
“Nuh-huh! That jumped-up cocker spaniel has it coming to him, and I’m just the bangtail roarer to hand him his head on a platter!”
I pondered telling Jad about some of the more excruciating tortures that the Lords of Hell reserved for upstarts like him, but his next words decided me against handing out such sensible advice.
“Besides, I want Scamp in my arms again. She is the only woman for me. She’s always stood by me, and she is the best piece of tail on Earth or in Hell. That girl could peel the skin off a cucumber with that educated pussy of hers.”
I blew up. “Stood by you! She ran off with the first demon she saw!”
“I been thinking hard on that. I’m sure she did it just to protect me. After all, the Earl Rampant musta known from my Earthly career how threatening I was gonna be to him, once I got my feet on the ground here. She sensed I was in danger, and so she sacrificed herself to divert him, and now she’s just waiting for me to come rescue her.”
I threw my hands up into the air. “You’re just impossible! Go back to your green-skinned bilge trolls, you asshole!”
Jad grinned. “Sounds to me like somebody’s not getting laid regular. Maybe you can get your hands on some incubi ingots.”
He left laughing and I went fuming to bed.
Nance Piebald and I had met once before, but his appearance always knocked me out. A pure African black dude from some vanished kingdom called Opar, a smidgen over seven feet tall, he suffered from that disease what Michael Jackson always claimed he had, where his skin was patchy all over, fishbelly against coal. He proudly wore his native costume, which left most of his appaloosa acreage exposed, so’s you could hardly miss his condition.
We shook hands at a grog shop named Ginza Joe’s right on the dock at Saliva Tree Hill. Over a regular Johnstown Flood of Mount Etna Lava shots with Black Ram Ale chasers, we caught each other up on our respective beats.
“You’ll want to be careful downriver from Dumpster Town,” said Nance. “Prince Malphas and Queen Onoskelis are at war again.”
I shuddered at that. The domains of Malphas and Onoskelis sat directly opposite each other on the Styx, and the rulers were given to lobbing bundles of flaming typhoid victims and other less pleasant material at each other’s burgs, whenever they got their Irish up. Getting past them intact would be a bitch.
“Well,” I said, “just have to try some of my best broken-field sailing under a flag of truce.”
“Perhaps they will have ceased hostilities by the time you arrive. They are over three thousand miles away from here, after all.”
“Anything else I should know?”
“There have been several incidents involving Typhon and Echidna near Hooftscarrow. It is believed the pair were mating on the river bottom—or perhaps just shifting in their sleep. Several ferries lost.”
“Oh, well, we all gotta go sometime.”
Nance and I clinked glasses, and then parted to assume each other’s routes.
Now, to be sure, I’d like to fill up the rest of my story with all the many scary and funny and creepy and boring stuff that happened to me and the Shadows on our seven-thousand-mile journey downriver. But truth be told, none of it was very exceptional or interesting, at least by Hell standards. The voyage had that same kinda not-all-there quality I described earlier, like a dream of a dream. And if I’ve learned one thing from my friendship with Mark Twain, it’s to cut to the chase.
So we steamed past Malphas and Onoskelis with no worse damage than a busted smokestack that intercepted a missile of frozen demon shit, and rode the tsunami caused by Typhon’s buggery of Echidna for a quick thousand mile surfer’s shortcut, and dealt with a hundred-hundred other happenings, morbid, dumb and funny. And before you knew it, we were tieing up at Dark Epcot.
Glasya-Labolas had been particularly taken with the philosophizing of Walt Disney when they met, and so had remodeled his domain along the lines of Disney’s theme park. But whereas the Earthly Epcot featured pint-sized models of famous landmarks, Dark Epcot boasted recreations of famous Hell landmarks that were even bigger than the originals, to testify to the President Supreme’s exalted status and cheese off his rivals.
Paimon’s Pit of Perverted Passions. The Ninety-Nine Gibbets of Ninurta. Haagenti’s Mansion of Horrors. Trump Palace. Stolos’ Kitchen. Furfur’s Arcade of Screaming Souls. Ziminiar’s Car Wash. Okay, I know that last one might not sound so deserving of being immortalized, but take my word for it: the original was one Hell of a car wash!
With an enormous frontage, the domain stretched for hundreds of miles backwards from the Styx, like some kind of demonic Washington, DC: all monuments, all the time, with thousands of citizens being screwed every minute.
Jad and I walked up to one of the gates of Dark Epcot. I had instructed my second-in-command, Cheb Moussa, to leave with the Shadows if I didn’t come back in 24 hours. I figured my chances as a simple observer of escaping the shit that was gonna fall on Jad’s head were slightly better than even. Jad’s odds for survival I pegged at about a trillion to one.
My ex carried one of the smaller pieces of artillery from the ferry in his arms, looking like some kinda Redneck Rambo. He kept tripping over the dangling ammunition belt, and eventually I just picked up the end of the sucker and carried it like the train of a bridal gown.
“You sure you wanna go ahead with this now?”
Sweat covered Jad’s brow like brine on a freshly netted shrimp. I had to give him points for courage. If only he weren’t so damn stupid and self-centered.
“I’m totally sure. What’s left for me in Hell if I can’t get Scamp and my pride back?”
“Okay, then, it’s your second funeral.”
I banged on the big riveted iron door, tall as two Nance Piebalds, one atop the other. In less than a second it swung open, and we marched in.
We were met by the most metrosexual demon I have ever seen. He wore Topsiders, skinny-leg designer jeans and a pink polo shirt that musta cost about seven hundred chancres together. He had even threaded his eyebrows, an elegant look that was marred only by the enormous pus-filled carbuncles covering every inch of his face and neck.
“Welcome to Dark Epcot. My name is Andras, but just call me Andy. You’re expected, so if you’ll be so good as to just follow me… Oh, you can check your weapon with Shary over there.”
A smiling human woman stood behind the counter of a large open booth. Behind her were scores of cubbies, mostly empty but some stuffed with weapons.
“Better do what he says, Jad.”
Kinda flustered by this pleasant reception, Jad stowed his gun with Shary and got a claim ticket in return. Shary hoisted the huge weapon with one hand, and I was glad we hadn’t messed with her.
Andy walked off at a guide’s measured pace, leaving us to follow. The streets of Dark Epcot were filled with bustling minions, imps and elementals, as well as smiling tourist families. We strolled past one ginormous structure after another. I only recognized a few, chief of which was Vassago’s Chamber of Excruciations. Man, you have never seen so many Stairmasters in one place!
Eventually we got to what could only be Glasya-Labolas’ personal castle, judging by the number of spiked head adorning its walls. Many of the trophies were still talking and weeping, bitching about their fate.
Andy br
ought us right inside, past all the minor Lords and guards and attendants and plain-clothes security types, and before you could say “The pain of his reign stays mainly in the brain,” we were left unaccompanied in the Throne Room.
Glasya-Labolas’ Throne Room was about as big as Tropicana Field in St. Pete, where the Devil Rays played. At the center of it loomed the President Supreme and Earl Rampant’s mighty chair, a seat made all outta bones and sinews. I could suss out Glasya-Labolas, sitting down with his big griffin’s wings enfolding him like a cloak.
Gulping down our scanty spit, Jad and I walked forward.
When we had gotten to within an easy field goal’s distance of the Throne, Glasya-Labolas unfolded his wings and stood up, rearing what seemed like miles high above us, and I wondered how he’d gotten so big.
Except it wasn’t Glasya-Labolas, it was Scamp!
Now I have to admit, all hatred and jealousy aside, back on Earth Scamp the Tramp O’Dell had been one hot mess. Big rack, skinny waist, long legs. Hair black as a crow, heart-shaped face. Eyes that were always daring men to come after her, and challenging women to outclass her. She’d try anything once, then a few more times just to be sure she had the knack of the trick. When I knew her, she was intent on climbing to the top of any heap she happened to find herself in.
Occupying Glasya-Labolas’ Throne, a jaybird-naked Scamp at fifty times her standard size looked pretty much the same as she had on Earth. Except that her knobbly skin was a dozen shades of putrid green, like something you’d find at the back of your fridge, and her nipples had eyes. She sported a mouthful of giant fangs, long thick claws on fingers and toes, a tail that put mine to shame, and gnarly bat wings with the span of what you’d expect on a 747.
When she talked it nearly made my ears bleed.
“JAD! YOU LAZY FUCKER! WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?”
Jad’s jawbone was clacking against his collarbone, and a string of drool crept out one corner of his mouth.
The Paul Di Filippo Megapack Page 39