Happy Hour in Hell

thirty-one: snips and snails

I WAS ABOUT halfway up the slope, the black and tangled vegetation of the valley falling away beneath me, when I saw Eligor’s car parked in a cleared space below me. It looked like a cross between a steam-powered Duesenberg and a Humvee, except it was covered with ornate lanterns and the bumpers were studded with long spikes. It was also heavily armored and probably full of weapons. Leaning against the car were two big demon dudes, their bald, gray heads perched on grotesquely muscled bodies—Candy and Cinnamon, the Countess’s former bodyguards, keeping an eye on their boss’s property.

So, the sugar and spice boys were here. The good thing, though, was that I saw no sign of Caz herself in the crude clearing that served as a parking lot, and no obvious way to get the grand duke ‘s car farther up the mountainside, so it suggested they were going to wait there for her. I ducked back into the rusty gondola in case one of them decided to look up.

The sudden thought of having Caz alone was enough to make me almost breathless, but the cable car still crept slowly as a caterpillar, leaving me with nothing to do but look at the scenery, which by Hell’s standards was pretty interesting. I could see now that Pandaemonium was actually built on a series of hills, with the great black city walls around the outside. I was traveling up the tallest hill, Mount Diabolus, which showed bones of black obsidian and a variety of plants and trees growing on it, mostly in shades of red, black, and gray. (One thing I had begun to understand is that absence of color itself could be a punishment, and I was certainly getting tired of those colors. No wonder the infernal gentry liked to dress up.)

But it was only as the tram car shuddered its way into the uppermost reaches of the peak that I saw the true glory of the place, such as it was. Nestled between the peak I was ascending and the dark jut of the nearest of its neighbors was a saddle in the hills, and in it, surrounded by wiry trees and black grasses, was a lake, flat and shiny as an irregular mirror.

The tram ground to a halt in the rotting remains of the hilltop station. I got out.

“I almost didn’t believe yesterday had really happened,” she said.

Caz stood at the edge of a path between the dark trees. I hurried toward her, but although she let me take her in my arms and kiss her, after a moment she wriggled free and not too gently.

“What’s wrong?”

“Walk with me,” she said in a flat voice. I took her chilly hand as we stepped under the trees, which looked like the scorched remains of a pine forest. It was clear, however, that underneath the black char, beneath the gray soil, the trees were still quite alive.

We walked down the slope, the lake always before us, gleaming in these last hours of the second beacon like a red gem. I wondered how dark it got up here when only the afterlights burned. Caz broke our silence to point out a winged, long-beaked creature sitting on one of the black branches. “They call it a shrike here,” she said, “but it’s not really a bird. Not the kind with feathers. If you look close, you can see that it’s more like an insect.” She shook her head. “They call it ‘shrike’ because it impales its kills on tree branches, just like the bird. The difference is, the birds do that to eat, but these creatures do it to lure a mate.”

“Are you telling me that I should be building a wall of corpses if I really want to impress you?”

“Not funny, Bobby. I’m trying to make a point. Evolution works differently here.” I raised an eyebrow. She scowled. “What? Are you surprised that I know about evolution? I might have grown up in the Middle Ages, but I’ve seen a lot since then, and read a lot too. I actually met Darwin once, you know.” She let go of my hand and waved her fingers in dismissal. “No, forget it. Another time. I’m trying to make a point.”

“And what point is that?”

“We’ll never work, Bobby. We’re too different. I’m like one of those shrike-insect-things. I was only alive for a few years on Earth. This place made me what I am, Bobby. No matter what I feel about you, and no matter what you . . .” She shook her head, unable for a moment to speak, but she kept walking. “No matter what else is between us, we just don’t have a future.”

I considered this for a second or two before sharing my thoughts. “Bullshit.”

“It’s not. You can’t just make it all go away by disagreeing—”

“I didn’t say everything you said was bullshit, Caz, just your conclusion. How do you know? Look, you pointed out that this place evolves. But here’s the interesting bit—Heaven doesn’t, at least as far as I’ve been able to tell. Nothing ever changes there, and that’s the way they seem to like it. But here? Everything’s changing all the time. It’s like . . . some kind of crazy experiment or something.”

“And do you know why?” she demanded. We were nearing the edge of the trees now, the lake stretched just beyond like a mirror set down by a titan hand. Caz grabbed both my arms. I’d almost forgotten how strong she was. “Because it’s worse that way! That’s how everything works here. It’s about punishment. It’s about suffering.”

“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.”