Happy Hour in Hell

fifteen: riprash

I COULD ONLY watch helplessly as Commissar Niloch approached the cage. His bony spurs stirred and scraped as he walked, like wind shifting dead leaves, and he examined the crush of damned souls with eyes as unfeeling as two shiny red buttons. If I tell you that I could smell him even through the various stenches of being locked in a slave cage in the middle of Hell, you’ll have an idea of how pungent his scent was, sweetness and rotten meat combined, like one of those corpse flowers that lure flies to their doom. It was all I could do not to vomit, and I probably gagged a little, which may have been what drew his attention. I was mostly hidden by the slaves splayed against the bars in front of me, but those tiny eyes suddenly fixed on mine, and he moved closer. His smell rolled over me in a nauseating wave, then he opened his weird mouth and things got a lot worse.

The two bits of his lower jaw clashed together like a crab applauding. I hoped it wasn’t what he did when he was hungry. He was staring straight at me. My demon heart was going like a jackhammer in my chest.

“Are you interested in purchasing more slaves, Commissar?” Riprash came forward. “I’d be happy to find you some healthy ones. I haven’t sorted these yet.” Niloch turned and looked at him, saying nothing, but when Riprash spoke again he had a slight tremor in his voice. “Or, if you’d like, I can clean these up so you can inspect them.”

The commissar laughed, I guess, although the thin whistling didn’t sound much like laughter. “Oh, would you? Perhaps dress them up, too, so they look like little lords and ladies. That would be merry.” He turned back to the cage and, just to make sure my heart kept crashing against my ribs, found my eyes again. “But I must say, I’ve—”

“What’s going on here? Oh, Commissar, it’s true, you’ve graced us with a visit!”

“He’s expecting something,” said another voice almost immediately.

“Shut up or I’ll have you removed,” said the first voice. “Thank you, Lord Commissar, thank you!”

The tubby, two-headed figure of Gagsnatch, the slave-stall’s owner, bustled toward Niloch. One of his heads showed the commissar a wide, ingratiating smile, the other stared with a look of open disinterest. “You do me too much honor!” said Happy Head.

“Any is too much,” said the other head, sullen as a teenage boy.

“Ah,” said Niloch. “At last you favor me with your attendance, slave trader.”

Happy Head immediately screwed his face into a frown of remorse. “I did not know it was you, Commissar! Rest assured that as soon—”

“Shut your mouths,” said Niloch, not much louder than a whisper. “Both.” Silence followed. “Yes, as it happens, you can do something for me. I do have need of more slaves. Send me this crate, just as it is.” Niloch turned back, but this time his gaze only touched me briefly, then swept across the other poor schmucks in the cage. “Yes, this should do. Dear me, don’t bother to clean them. Waste of sand. They’ll serve just fine the way they are.” He paused. “Ah, yes. I see my men have finished here, and I have a long way back to my quarters. Draw up the bill and send the slaves to Gravejaw House immediately.” The commissar rattled out of my line of sight, back the way he had come.

“Thank you, Commissar!” cried Happy Head. “Your custom is the most generous gift you could give me! You are the best lord in the land!”

“But you said he was the worst,” chirped Unhappy Head. “You said he was stupid as a turd and smelled like—”

I had the novel experience of watching someone slap one of his own heads across the mouth hard enough to draw blood. Punishment delivered and Unhappy Head at least temporarily silenced, Gagsnatch hurried after the commissar, spouting words of praise and gratitude.

My heart was finally slowing to a level more like ordinary terror when the door of the slave cage clanked open. “You,” Riprash told me. “Out.”

The other slaves had no real way to make room for me, so he yanked several of them out, causing at least one or two serious injuries, I’m sure. I fought my way toward the opening, only remembering as I got close to it that Gob was in the cage, too, but when I looked back the little hairy kid was slithering his way after me through the other slaves.

Before I could ask Riprash a single question he picked me up under the arms and carried me like a puppy into the back of the stall, into a little area blocked by a screen made of hide and dropped me there. Gob curled up just behind my legs, watching Riprash with an impressive level of concentration, no doubt fermenting half a dozen plans of escape if things went sour. A survivor, that’s what the kid was. That was how I used to think of myself, too, but after meeting Gob I realized now how pathetically easy I’d had it by comparison.

“You lot stay here.” Riprash peered at us over the screen, which I couldn’t have done standing on a box. In the dark his ruined face looked like it was carved of stone. Ugly stone. “No noise!” Then he went out. After a few comparatively quiet minutes I heard him talking with both of his boss’s heads for a while. If Unhappy Head had been cowed by its recent smacking, it had gotten over it; I heard it sniping at almost everything the other head said. At last the three-way palaver ended, and I heard Riprash’s heavy tread returning.

“And now I have to find two more slaves, because that’s how many Niloch counted and that’s how many he’ll expect.” Again the big hands closed on me and lifted. He set me down and looked me over. I swear, if he had said “Fee Fi Fo Fum,” I wouldn’t have batted an eye. Instead he pulled over a large stone, which I couldn’t have moved with a pickup truck and a tow chain, then sat on it.

“Well?”

I stared at him, my head just about emptied by all the kinds of scared I was. “Well, what?” I said at last.

“You said you had something to tell me. We’re alone. I’ve got the others taking that drift of slaves down to the dock. So tell.”

I closed my eyes for a second in a silent prayer of gratitude. Now I only had to hope that Temuel’s seemingly innocuous message wasn’t some kind of code for “kill the guy who tells you this.” I tried to look Riprash in the eye to show him my sincerity, but I just couldn’t do it. All that exposed meat, and the chunk of ax still in there . . .

“I’m not from here,” I said, looking attentively at his massive feet. “I’m from . . . somewhere else. Do you know what I mean?”

Riprash made a low noise. “Could be,” he said at last. “Could be I don’t. Say what you got to say.”

“A friend asked me to find you and give you this message. He said, ‘You are not forgotten.’ That’s all. Just that.”

Nothing happened, or at least nothing that registered down in the area of Riprash’s size sixty-three tootsies. I looked up. Not all at once, but I did it.

He was crying.

I’m not joking. He was. A single glowing tear like a streamlet of lava had made its way down from his good eye across his cheek, and now dangled like maple sap from his chin. “All thanks,” he said, almost whispering. He sagged forward like an ancient redwood collapsing, and to my astonishment he landed on his knees, then lifted both massive arms above his head. “All thanks. I am lifted.”

You can guess what I made of this, which was nothing useful. Riprash stayed that way for a while as more tears dripped from his face and made bright little splashes on the floor before they cooled and faded. I was beginning to feel less terrified than embarrassed, he was so clearly in the grip of something deep and personal. Since he hadn’t smashed me into jelly over the message I’d just delivered, he was still the closest thing Gob and I had to an ally, so I sat tight as it went through him like a storm and made him shake all over. At last it was done. Riprash wiped his good eye with the back of a massive hand then climbed back onto the rock again.

“Ah,” he said. “Ah. That was good to hear. All thanks to you—” He paused, his brow fissuring as he realized. “I don’t know your name, master.”

“It’s Snakestaff.” This was the first time I’d told my demon cover-name to anyone but Gob, and I was watching to see if it meant anything. I only had Temuel’s word (and Lameh’s silent memories) that it hadn’t been used before. But the ogre didn’t seem to find it either surprising or familiar.

“My thanks, then, Snakestaff. May you be lifted.”

Which sounded better than most things that had been happening, so I nodded. “Okay, now what?”

He looked at me like a man woken up too quickly. “What? What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you mind if we get on our way? My servant and me? Thanks for hiding me from the commissar, but I have other errands I need to do in Pand—in the Red City, and that’s a pretty long walk.”

“Other errands?” He looked interested, but not in the cruel, hungry way you usually see demons look interested. “Others like me?”

“No.”

“Too bad that you have to go. You should meet some of the other Lifters. Your message will mean a lot to them.” His terrifying face grew almost cheerful. “Wait! I am bound to deliver those slaves to the commissar at Gravejaw. If you go with me on the Bitch you’ll travel much faster, and you can find a lifter when you get there. That should speed your journey to the Red City.”

All this talk of lifting and lifters and bitches had me boggled, but I was not going to look this particular gift ogre in the mouth. “You mean you’d really help me?”

“I would do any service I could.” He spoke with a strange weight to his words. “Can’t you guess what your message means to me and mine?”

I couldn’t, not really, but clearly it meant a lot, and I was going to do my best to ride that wave all the way to the beach. “Yes, of course.”

“I ask only one favor in return.”

Shit, I thought, here it comes. Does he want to drink some of my blood, or eat one of my eyes? “And that is . . . ?”

“Tonight you must come with me to fellowship.”

Not quite as bad as I’d feared, obviously. “Certainly. But I still don’t understand. How will you get me to Gravejaw so much faster than I could walk?”

He laughed. “By boat, of course—my ship, The Nagging Bitch. Otherwise it would take you a hundred lanterns or more. But on Cocytus’ broad back, we’ll be there in nine.”

Well, thank you, nasty, foul river, I thought. I guess you’re not all bad.

Obviously, I still had a lot to learn.

The fellowship meeting, as Riprash called it, took place in a spot so disgusting it’s a miracle I remember the actual meeting at all. You’ve never really been in a sewer until you’ve been in a sewer in Hell. This one was made of what looked like mud brick, and smelled like . . . well, there just are no words for it. If I hadn’t been wearing a demon body, I suspect my sinuses would have committed suicide on first contact with that nose-scorching odor of death and shit and shit and death.

Still, bad smells were nothing compared to being caught by one of the gangs of Murderers Sect guards who patrolled the waterfront, so Riprash’s fellowship meetings were always held deep in the tunnels. It was ridiculously crowded with two dozen of us perched on the edge of a drainage culvert, but everybody just squeezed up as close as they could, because even in Hell, even among those being punished for all eternity, nobody wanted to go splashing around in that stuff.

I really did find it kind of touching that all these condemned souls as well as the demons meant to torment them (damned only outnumbered demons in that sewer about three to one) should come together in search of something bigger and better than what they knew. And Riprash himself, as it turned out, impressed me even more.

He was clearly the main dude, at least here in Cocytus Landing, and it showed. When he began to speak, even the poor damned guy covered entirely in shivering porcupine quills did his best to be quiet and listen.

“Once upon a time, back in the World, there was this fellow named Origen.” Riprash pronounced it like an Irish name—O’Ridgeon. “And he had a big idea: Nobody has to stay damned forever. Nobody.”

A few of what must have been the newer members of the congregation looked startled and whispered to each other.

“That’s right.” The ogre spoke slowly, as if for children. “Not even the Adversary himself has to remain in Hell for eternity. Even he can lift himself up. Lift himself up! And so can we.”

“But what good will it do?” demanded a creature with a head like a skinned donkey. “Those angel bastards will just push us back down anyway. They’ll never let us out!”

A few others murmured their agreement, but Riprash was clearly an old pro at this sort of thing, and tonight he had a better than usual answer.

“If you think so,” he said, “then you’ll be very interested to hear the message this fellow brought to me today.” He pointed at me and several of the creatures in the sewer turned to look. “He brought me a message from,” he dropped his voice to a near-whisper, but even an ogre whisper was pretty loud, “from that other place. The up-high place. Where those angels live who you think only want to push you back down. And what did the message say? What did the message sent all the way down here from the other place say, Master Snakestaff?”

He was clearly waiting for me. “‘You are not forgotten,’” I quoted.

“That’s right! So think of that. I don’t say that all the Halos love us, because they don’t. But there are some as know what’s done to us wasn’t right. And if we keep trying to do it, well, we can lift ourselves up, just you wait and see!”

Riprash went on like this for a while more, then asked if any of the fellowship wanted to give testimony. I had thought I would be bored and restless, as I would have been in any religious meeting back on Earth, but instead I was fascinated. The first one to speak was a damned soul that looked more than a bit like a gingerbread man made out of moldy, ancient paper. He explained carefully that when he had lived on Earth he had been a thief in Antioch, and that although he had only stolen food to feed his starving family, he had been put to death by the Roman overlords and condemned to Hell.

“It’s good news to hear we might be free again someday,” he said in a slow, serious tone. “Good news. And I will do all I can to behave myself and learn the way to do that. Because I want to be free. It wasn’t fair, what happened to me. And when I’m free again, I will go find that shit-eating merchant who called the guards on me, and my bitch of a wife who didn’t even come to see me executed, and all the bastards who did come, and I’ll cut them all into pieces.” He might have been reading a laundry list. He’d been thinking about it a long time.

“Not sure you really grasp the details of the thing, fellow,” said Riprash gently as the gingerbread thief sat down again on the ledge above the stinking flood. “Not about revenge, this. About making ourselves better than we were.”

“I’ll feel better when that stinking merchant is dead,” the gingerbread man muttered, but already somebody else had risen to speak. This damned soul was female, although that wasn’t clear when she first stood up, because she looked more like a person-shape made of overcooked spaghetti, with eyeballs tucked into the tangle in place of meatballs. For a moment she stood, hesitating, winding her tendrils with equally limp fingers.

“Go on, then, love,” said Riprash in an encouraging tone. “It’s Deva, isn’t it?”

She nodded and seemed to find courage. Several more eyes emerged. “When I was alive . . . well, I was a very bad person. I’m sure I deserve to be here.”

“What did you do, dear?” Riprash asked. If you’ve never seen a ten-foot-tall monster making nice, it’s quite an experience.

“I lost my little babies.” A few of her eyes retracted into the forest of noodles or whatever they were. “No, that’s not right. I didn’t so much lose them as . . . I did away with them.”

I might have made a noise of surprise, but nobody else did. “Why was that, dear?” Riprash asked.

“I’m not certain now. I was frightened, and they were so sick, and I had no money to feed them. They were always crying, you see, even though they were terribly weak . . .” She trailed off. She was down to only a few eyes still showing. “I tried everything, really I did. I sold myself to men, but I could never make enough, and the woman who watched them for me when I was out, well, she didn’t . . . she didn’t take very good care . . .” The creature named Deva curled her fingers and tugged at her tendrils so hard I thought she might break them off. “She drank too much toddy, that one, and one day she let my youngest one wander, and my little girl fell from the window down to the courtyard and died. I came home with the smell of a man still on me and found her there on the stones. The bitch taking care of her had not even known she was gone!” The damned woman shook her head, or the lump near the top that I assumed was a head. “I knew then that I would be going to Hell. And the others were still sick, still crying, getting thinner and thinner.” After a long, long silence that nobody interrupted, she said, “So one night, I took them out when everyone else was asleep, took them outside the village and drowned them in the river. It was so sad, because even as I took them down to the bank I was looking for crocodiles. I was going to drown them, but I was still worried that a crocodile might get them!”

She broke down at this point, and it was a while until she could talk again. The strange thing was that the other damned, and even the demon members of the congregation, all waited for her to continue. In a place where nobody even bothered to look twice at a badly injured person writhing on the ground, or a child being beaten or sexually assaulted, these Hell-creatures were waiting patiently, even kindly, for one of their own to find her way back to herself.

“They stoned me to death, of course,” she said finally. “Even the woman who let my littlest one die threw a stone! I have been here a long time. I cannot even guess how many centuries. On and on and on . . . It will sound strange, but even though I am dead, I did not truly know I had been alive until I heard Riprash speak, heard him speaking of how we might someday be lifted. Since I awoke here, I have been like a mole who lives in the ground, go forward, go backward, every day in the dark, and knowing nothing else. My children—I did not think of them. I could not think of them. I could not remember them, because my heart was burned away inside me. But when I heard Riprash talk of the lifting, I could feel myself again. I knew nothing could ever take away my wickedness, that what I had done would be a terrible curse in the mind of God forever . . . but I could hope that someday, perhaps when Heaven and Hell themselves come to an end, I might be forgiven. One day, no matter how dark and dreadful my act, I might see my little ones, my babies, again, so that I can tell them how sorry I am that they were ever born to such a mother—” She bowed her head, and all the tendrils shuddered together. “Ah, God! I am so sorry! So sorry!”

My eyes were dry as I sat in that crowd of damned, doomed folk and listened to her keening apologies to her dead children, but that was only because the demon’s body I wore had no tear ducts.