Happy Hour in Hell

twenty-two: sweet lady zinc

“YOU DEAR man,” she said. “You must tell me who did this to you. There was blood everywhere!”

My eyes, which had been sending me nothing useful for some time, just a vague sensation of light and shadow, the kind of thing even a snail can accomplish, finally began to focus on the moving shape. Considering all I had seen and been through, the object slowly coming into view was strangely human. And not just human but quite lovely—a woman in the glowing prime of adult life, with dark, curly hair that turned into a spreading cloud down her shoulders where it had worked loose from her hairpins. Her face was heart-shaped, her cheeks plump and pretty, and even in my pathetic state I couldn’t help but notice that she had some serious decolletage (an old-time word for cleavage) going on. Her bright eyes took in my own wandering gaze, and she colored a little with a flush that not only touched her pale cheeks but her breastbone as well, like a dusting of rouge from an invisible brush.

“Who?” I said, then, “What . . . ?” My brain was, I swear to you, prickling like a limb that had fallen asleep. I figured it could be my thinking tissues regenerating after all that oxygen starvation, but it was also possible I’d been so damaged that I was going to be permanently fucked in the head.

“You are safe. I am Lady Zinc, but you may call me Vera.”

I suddenly remembered why I had been losing consciousness before I was struck and darted a look at my injured right arm. The hand was still missing, of course, but it had been carefully bandaged, and the blood had been scrubbed away. What was weird, though, is that I could feel my hand at the end of my arm as though it were still there; I chalked it up to “phantom limb” or whatever they call that syndrome. I was even dressed in clean clothes, some kind of old-fashioned nightshirt of flimsy material, the kind of thing the Sheriff of Nottingham might have worn to a slumber party.

“How did I get here?” I managed all five words without coughing, but it felt as though I hadn’t spoken for years. My head was a little better, though. Either I was learning to ignore the prickling in my brain, or it was going away.

“You ran into the street in front of my car, dear man. I thought I’d ruined you, but you’ve cleaned up very nicely.” The dark-haired woman smiled. This couldn’t be happening, I thought. Not in Hell. Nobody did anything for free in Hell. Still, I was definitely one of those beggars who couldn’t afford to be choosers, so I did my best to smile back and look properly grateful.

“Thank you, Lady Zinc.”

“Oh, Vera, please. After all, you’re a guest now!” She laughed and stood up. “Which means I really should know your name. Do you mind telling me?”

For just about a half second I couldn’t remember—not my Hell-name, not my real name, as though I had just dropped out of the sky into this crazy dream without bothering to bring along any baggage. How much blood had I lost? How close had I been? Then both of the names came to me. I gave her the right one. “Snakestaff of the Liars Sect, my lady. And I’m in your debt.”

She laughed again with what sounded like genuine pleasure. “No, no, I am in yours. It was a filthy morning, and it’s been a miserable, pointless week. You have cheered me up hugely.”

It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone in Hell use a term like “week,” and I wondered if that was just Vera’s way or something peculiar to Pandaemonium. “Where am I?”

“My house in the Trembling Heights. Now rest. We will have plenty of time to talk as you recuperate. If you need anything, ring the bell for Belle.”

It took me a moment to realize the second bell was a name. I was distracted, because Vera had been sitting at the foot of my bed but now stood, and I could see her whole. There was a lot to see. She was curvy but slender-waisted, with a graceful neck, and although she wore a long dress that covered her legs I suspected they were nice, too. Yes, even nearly dead guys notice things like that, even when they’re angels in demonic bodies. It had nothing to do with Caz, and it didn’t really have anything to do with sex, since I felt so weak I couldn’t have put up a convincing tussle with a ball of yarn. That’s just the way the male eyes and brain are hooked up. Go sue the Highest if you don’t like it.

Lady Zinc went out. I spent a moment surveying the room, which looked like Old Hollywood’s idea of the Middle Ages, including stone walls and a high window with no curtains, but I was too exhausted by the short conversation to even think about getting up and finding out whether the door was locked from the outside—whether I was a prisoner—because at that moment, I couldn’t have cared less. Some of the higher demons liked to play-act, I knew. Maybe this was all some elaborate game. It couldn’t be real, could it? I couldn’t actually be safe, at least for a while? Could I?

Safe or not, I was still exhausted by what I’d just been through. I sank back into the richness of a bed and the fuzziness of my wits and let sleep take me.

I woke up to find a very different woman in the room, this one tall and heavyset. I groggily remembered that dark-haired Vera had mentioned someone named Belle, and this woman did seem to be dressed in the plain style of a servant. Unlike her mistress, though, Belle was visibly demonic, with rough gray skin and spurs of horn or bone jutting through the hide at her shoulders, elbows, and other visible joints. I’d seen lots worse. I rasped out a request for water and she brought me a cup; when I had finished, she refilled it for me and set it on the stand beside the bed. She looked stronger than me, especially the weakened version of me lying in the bed, but she seemed kind enough, showing me a sort of smile and squeezing my hand when I handed the cup back to her.

“Don’t worry, sir. You will be well soon,” she assured me as she went out.

The prickling was definitely almost gone. I felt less dizzy than before, as though I had slept for some time. I wondered how long I’d been out. I literally had no idea if I had been in Lady Zinc’s house for hours or days, and I couldn’t see a clock. You’d think, considering how much of a curse of modern civilization clocks are, that Hell would be full of them, but no. In fact, they don’t have calendars either, although they kept dates and even seasons of a sort. I guess when you’ve been condemned to infinite punishment you don’t want to dwell on how slowly time is passing. Not to mention that if it was anything like Heaven, time didn’t pass, at least not in any normal way.

As my wits came back, I also realized that I couldn’t trust any of this apparent kindness. Even if it wasn’t some trick, even if Vera herself was the Riprash of her upper-class demon set, that didn’t mean everybody she knew wouldn’t happily eat me or turn me in. I had to be careful.

I staggered toward the window, which to my happiness didn’t look barred or defended in any unusual way, as if I truly was a houseguest. I was hoping a view of the outside might give me an idea of what time of the infernal day it was, which would be a start at orienting myself. It seemed to me that I had been in Hell for months, and although I didn’t have a formal deadline on leaving again, I knew if I didn’t find the Countess of Cold Hands and get out soon I’d never get out at all. The crushing weight of the place, the sheer, dull horror of it was wearing me away. Only the memory of Caz was keeping me moving, the knowledge that if I didn’t do anything, her lot was going to be the same as all these others: eternal misery. In fact, I had probably made it worse for her, and not just by exposing her to my sparkling, charming self. I doubted Eligor was going to let her get back to the real world ever again, so even that small solace was denied her.

No, I couldn’t worry about that now, I told myself: it was too far away, too unlikely. One thing at a time.

I reached the window by standing on a heavy chair made of some kind of animal bones. But even when I got to the windowsill I still couldn’t tell anything about the time. We seemed to be at the bottom of one of the soaring towers, a few hundred feet beneath the tangled forest of spires and connecting bridges I’d seen when I came out of the Terminus. One of the city’s massive black walls loomed nearby, effectively cutting off my view of anything but the giant stones themselves, as though a starless night had been tipped on its side and shoved up next to the window. The light that painted the courtyard in red could have been anything, a day beacon, a dangerous fire nearby, or even just the glow of one of the open lava pits that pocked Pandaemonium like titanic gopher holes.

As I shakily climbed down from the window, awkward with only one hand and my whole right arm still throbbing with pain, I noticed something lying on top of a broad chest at the foot of the bed. Facedown in the middle of a gentleman’s grooming assortment, tweezers and brushes and such, lay a heavy hand mirror. I hadn’t seen my own face since I’d been in Hell. I’d grown quite familiar with my gray-and-black skin, patterned like some creature of the African Veldt, even fond of it (because it was tough as buffalo hide) but my features were still a mystery to me, except that they felt human to the touch. Hell was very short of reflecting surfaces; almost no clear standing water, of course, and most metal too defaced by rust and corrosion to show a reflection. I lifted the mirror with a mixture of unease and curiosity.

I got a shock, too, I can tell you.

It wasn’t that the face didn’t match the skin, because it did. The dark gray and light gray had the same streaky pattern, and black stripes rose from my jaw on either side of my mouth, over my eyes, and up into curls that looked a little like Maori tattoos across my forehead. The mouth was fanged, but I knew that already, and even the eyes were pretty much par for the course: a pale, goatish orange with vertical slits like a cat’s. But the astonishing part was that it was my face under it all; Bobby Dollar, immediately recognizable, like a hastily painted stolen car. No shit. The demon-body amounted to no more than camouflage, and I had real doubts that it would fool anyone who had met up with my earthly self—a group that included Grand Duke Eligor, the monster I was planning to rob.

Panic swept over me. I had been walking around in more or less my own face the whole time I’d been here. How could that be? Had Lameh failed me? Or had Temuel betrayed me somehow? But why would he go to such elaborate lengths when all he needed to do was report me as AWOL and let his superiors do the rest? The Ephorate investigating my buddy Sam’s Third Way movement had seemed to be only a moment’s irritation away from condemning me anyway.

I’d been walking around Hell wearing a huge “KILL ME” sign for weeks without knowing it.

I tried to calm myself. Perhaps it wasn’t anything to do with Temuel betraying me, but some effect of the body transfer. After all, I’d never heard of any angel using a demon body before. Back on Earth, my bodies always looked kind of similar. Maybe this was the same process at work. But did that mean that our souls had built-in facial features? That seemed crazy to me.

The door opened, startling me so that I dropped the heavy mirror. I tried to grab at it with the hand I no longer had, but only kept it from breaking by flinging out my (bare) foot and letting the mirror fall on that instead.

“What are you doing, my lord?” said Belle. “You will hurt yourself!” The servant hurried to me, picking up the mirror as though it were light as a playing card, then used her other strong hand to guide me back toward the bed. “Too soon! Too soon to be getting up!” She shook her head like a mother gorilla with a wayward youngster and gave me a gentle push that almost flung me across the mattress and off the other side. “Back you go. My lady will be angry with me if you harm yourself. Do you want me to lose my position?”

I assured her that I didn’t, and in truth it was rather nice to settle back into the sheets, but I still couldn’t figure out what was happening. Why was Lady Zinc treating me so kindly? I was at best a very minor member of the demonic nobility. My hostess, by comparison, clearly had an awfully nice thing going here. Did she want something from me?

And now I had to worry about my treacherous face, too. Worrying is hard work, though, and my body was still very weak. Sleep soon chased my thoughts away.

I woke to find Vera and her servant tenderly changing my bandages. The wrist had almost completely healed, the ragged marks of Block’s teeth now covered with new, pink skin, but what was astonishing was that my wrist seemed to be growing new bone already. I don’t know what they put in these Hell-bodies but they heal faster than the ones Heaven provides, and at that moment I wasn’t complaining. The worst of the pain was gone, nothing left but a mild throb, and although my brain still prickled when I first woke up, I had a sense of physical well-being I hadn’t felt since beginning my infernal adventure.

“You are doing so well!” Vera said when she saw I was watching. She got up quickly, as though sitting on the bed of a man awake was different than sitting on the bed of a slumbering invalid. “I think you are ready to go outside. Would you like that?”

No shit. I was feeling surprisingly well, and although the timer in the back of my thoughts was still ticking, I nodded. A chance to reconnoiter could only do me good.

“Wonderful,” she said, and the look of pleasure on her pretty face was girlish. Why was this woman in Hell? Did I even want to know? “Then we shall go out tonight. Francis and Elizabeth are having a party, two of my very closest friends, and you shall be my escort, handsome Snakestaff.”

I suffered getting dolled-up by the two women with as much good grace as I could muster, since no matter what secret worries I might have, Vera had done me nothing but good so far. Eventually they rigged me up in what they thought of as suitable clothes, including a tie and what seemed a distinctly Victorian-looking long coat. A pretty damn fancy outfit. Once I was dressed and seated, Vera herself very tenderly tied the tie, a narrow affair more like a ribbon than anything I was used to. I thought it made me look a bit like a posh Old West gunfighter (with a skin condition and yellow eyes). “It’s the climate, of course,” she told me, breathing on my ear. “Too hot for an ordinary tie.”

“Do I have to wear one?” I’ve never liked the things.

Vera gave me a look of undisguised horror. “Do you think I could take you to meet my dearest friends without you being properly dressed?”

While I waited for her to finish her own preparations, I sat stiffly in a chair and watched brawny Belle tidy my room. “She likes you,” the big woman said with a distinct twinkle in her eye. She pushed heavy furniture around as if the pieces were made of balsa, then swept beneath them. “She thinks you’re handsome.”

I did my best to smile, but felt a little as if I was betraying Caz—not that I’d done anything or planned to, but this sudden emergence into a life of parties and fancy dress didn’t seem exactly in line with my mission, either. Still, it made a welcome change.

I just need to get the lay of the land, I told myself. I’m a spy, after all—an enemy agent. Nobody blames a spy for trying to blend in.

We were driven in a chauffeured car—Vera called it “the motor”—which was my first chance to see the vehicle that had run over me in front of the Terminus. It was long and low, but the front grille was armored like a train’s cowcatcher, so it was something of a miracle (if those were available here) that I’d survived the collision. The chauffeur was a thickset, nondescript man named Henri, silent as he opened the door for me and ushered me into the luxurious interior. He had a distinct, sickly odor to him, like formaldehyde. Also, I had stopped noticing the deformities in even the most ordinary looking citizens, but I couldn’t help noticing that Henri’s wide-set eyes were filmed over with milky cataracts. Not the most inspiring thing to see on your driver. Still, we zipped across town quickly and without incident. I was getting my first proper look at the Red City, and although we seemed to be traveling mostly through the richer neighborhoods, where wide streets were hemmed in by the tall walls of rich tower houses, there was still plenty of horror on display, a carnival sideshow of freaks and monsters staggering along the muddy streets. When we slowed at intersections clogged by heavy traffic—there are, of course, no traffic lights or stop signs in Hell—some of these street-folk looked as though they were considering approaching the car, perhaps to beg, perhaps with something more sinister in mind, but none of them ever did. A couple of times I actually saw someone pull a companion back, as if warning them that we were a bad target for whatever they planned.

“Sometimes when the fires are hot, the streets are simply unbearable,” said Vera, almost dreamily. “We are lucky, darling man, that the weather is mild tonight.”

“Mild” meant the heat and stench were manageable, but only because I was wearing a body made for Hell. Pandaemonium’s air felt so thick that I wanted to wave my arms as I walked to cut a path through it, and I never completely learned to ignore the acid stink. It was like standing over a boiling pot of urine.

Things were a little better once we were inside Vera’s friends’ house, a magnificent, shambling series of castle towers connected by horizontal branches like a coral formation. The angular rooms had been decorated in extreme rococo, gold leaf everywhere, fabulous wealth on display in every corner, but just in case I was tempted to forget where I was, the sculpture and paintings all portrayed brutal suffering, contorted figures and famous scenes of terror, including a detailed series of engravings of Joan of Arc being burned at the stake, which showed her body being eaten by flames even as she prayed and wept.

Other than the creepy taste in art, I couldn’t immediately spot anything hellish about Vera’s friend Elizabeth, another pretty young brunette, slenderer than my savior, who wore her hair piled high above her pale forehead. Her husband (or boyfriend—it wasn’t quite clear) Francis, did show signs of his citizenship: his bearded face and all visible skin were covered with bumps and pustules. It didn’t seem to matter to Elizabeth, who referred to him several times as “my great love” and “my only man.” They both wore Renaissance fashions that made my Victorian gear look quite modern, and their guests were dressed in clothes from at least a dozen eras, including styles I had never seen. If it hadn’t been for the obvious physical deformities of many of the guests, the whole thing would have looked like any old costume party. It was hard to reconcile the ungodly misery I knew lay all around us, and especially underneath us, with this cheerful happy hour gathering. In fact, for these rich demons it seemed more like an entire happy eternity of partying while the damned slaved for them. I should have been outraged, but I confess I was too worn out for outrage, and it was nice not to be running for my life.

What can one angel do, anyway? I thought. It’s been like this for thousands upon thousands of years. Blame God, not me.

One of the most disturbing guests was a man named Al, who had the look of a months-buried corpse, his eyes sunken and filmy, nose black with rot, and his suit covered in grave mold. Despite the unfestive appearance, he seemed quite at home, and at one point he leaned over to me and said in a confidential whisper, “You’ve fallen in with the best, lad. Couldn’t have struck better. Our sweet Lady Zinc is a wonderful woman.”

I smiled and nodded, but Al didn’t just look like a corpse, he smelled like one too, so I moved on.

I took a drink from a servant. It wasn’t all that much better than Riprash’s demon rum, but the glass was clean, and I could feel my demon body repairing the damage to my throat and stomach after each sip. The guests talked about many things, and as I moved restlessly from room to room I listened in on dozens of conversations, but I didn’t hear a single one mention anything about the past or their lives on Earth. Instead the talk was the sort of things rich people chatted about everywhere—the problem of finding good servants, gossip about their social set, and discussions of the best places to go on holiday. It was like hanging around with a bunch of rich fascists; after a while, I just stopped listening to the cruelty underneath the words and let it all wash over me. I did begin to feel a bit better about my chances of passing undetected, since they seemed like a pretty incurious lot. Nobody asked me a single question about my background or seemed to need any more information than that I was “Vera’s guest.” I was one of the crowd now, it seemed. The in crowd.

I found Vera and Elizabeth again in the main parlor, a candlelit room whose high ceilings were decorated with golden cobwebs. As we chatted, a young man who had been introduced to me earlier as “Fritz,” a handsome fellow in a military uniform, hurried up to us. Other than a ridiculously puffed-up chest under his military tunic, he was perhaps the most ordinary looking person in the room, at least by earthly standards, but there were a surprising number of demons there who looked nearly as human.

“Elizabeth!” he squealed to our hostess, “you’ll never guess who’s arrived!”

“Fritzi, my chicken, do you have to be so common?” Vera asked. “We’re gossiping.”

“Then I have something you’ll really like to gossip about,” he said, grinning. “The president himself is here.”

I turned, half-expecting to see Richard Nixon with a party box of wine coolers or something, but the figure coming through the door with a small entourage of lesser demons was unfamiliar to me, or so I thought, a tall, spare figure in a black tailcoat whose elongated face and sharp, curved nose made him look like a humanoid crow. Then I realized who he was. Even worse, he had actually met me in my Bobby Dollar body and might recognize me.

“Caym, the Grand President of the Council of Hell,” a servant announced loudly. This was the bastard who had run interference for Eligor at the big Heaven/Hell conference in San Jude, just before the grand duke tried to roast me like a marshmallow.

I couldn’t do anything but watch as that infernal raven, black eyes bright as blobs of oil, came toward us. Worst of all, he was looking right at me and beginning to smile.

I didn’t think it was a very nice smile at all.