Happy Hour in Hell

forty-three mr. johnson and me

APPROPRIATELY, ROBERT Johnson’s infamous blues song kept running through the back of my mind as I raced the last yards toward the bridge.

One of his very best songs. I don’t know anyone who loves the blues who isn’t fascinated by Johnson; his strange, short life and his haunted voice. And at the moment it was literal truth for me—hellhounds baying just behind me, Hell-soldiers and ratbat-crazy Commissar Niloch behind them—and that made it an odd time to have any song going through one’s mind instead of one of the standard variations on Oh my God I’m going to die run run run fucking run!

Still, even an angel can have feelings of inferiority, and as I sprinted for my life and soul across the ashy, stony ground of the last inner cavern toward the gate and the Neronian Bridge, a part of me was actually pleased that I could finally consider Johnson without feeling like such a white-guy poseur. At last I could say, without reservation, “Yeah, I know just what you’re talking about, Robert—I’ve had those blues. I know just what you mean.”

Stupid, I know, especially at a time like that, but if I hadn’t been stupid I wouldn’t have been in that situation in the first place, would I?

I plunged through the gate tower, forgetting how close it was to the end of the Bridge. A couple of steps later, when I crashed into the first ashy, Pompeii-victim Purgatory creatures trying to force their way into Hell, I almost slid right off the bridge into that unimaginable abyss. Getting past them was like forcing my way through rotting Styrofoam. The silent shapes created just enough resistance to make things difficult and blocked my vision as well, not to mention that any damage I did to them left their soapy scum on the Bridge itself. Now try to imagine fighting your way through literally dozens and dozens of the things on a bridge less than six feet wide, with nothing beneath you for miles except screams floating up from the deeps.

I still had Riprash’s giant knife in my belt, so I yanked it out and began to hack my way through the things. I know I’m an angel, and I’m supposed to be sympathetic by nature, but after having just spent a really long time in Hell, the thought that the only thing these horrible, mindless shapes wanted was to get into the place made me far less patient with them than the first time through. I shredded them like a cluster bomb in the middle of Smurf Village, sending bits flying everywhere like dirty suds. The hellhounds were roaring behind me as they encountered the first of the Purgatory refugees, and I fancied I heard a note of doggie surprise at how difficult it was to get through them.

As the throngs of faceless shapes thinned, I was able to pick up speed, but that meant the hellhounds were able to do the same. I heard their talons clank against the stone behind me, louder and louder, so I pushed my blade back into my belt as carefully as I could while running flat out, then pulled out one of my revolvers.

I still had plenty of loose bullets, but couldn’t think of any foreseeable sequence of events where I’d get a chance to reload, so I slowed just enough that I could make sure every chamber of both guns was full, then dumped the remaining shells back into my pocket. Maybe my luck was turning, because that awkward movement caused me to stumble just a little, which saved me. A harpoon flew past my shoulder, trailing rope that burned the side of my neck before it curved away into the abyss.

I had wondered briefly why Niloch and his men hadn’t been shooting arrows or guns once they were in range, but I realized now that they didn’t want to lose my body off the bridge. They clearly had much more elaborate plans for me than just to shatter me on the rocks impossibly far below, or have me melt away to nothing in a fumarole of molten shit. Thus, the harpoons. Bullied office temps and grumpy commuters, trust me: you haven’t really had a bad day until someone’s tried to harpoon you.

I was already slowing down, exhausted but with hours yet to go, so I decided I should try to improve the odds a little. When I encountered another of the crawling Purgatory-things grubbing its way across the span, I vaulted over the obstruction, then stopped and crouched behind the humanoid shape and aimed both revolvers back at my pursuers. The grubby, wispy little thing wasn’t going to shield me from anything, but I hoped it would at least obstruct my pursuers’ view and create a second or two of confusion.

My old boss Leo used to emphasize taking one good shot over three or four bad ones (in most, but not all situations) but the honest truth was I didn’t have time to take more than one shot: the lead hellhound was only a dozen yards behind me, its two fellows right on its tail, and the closest of Niloch’s harpooners only another ten yards behind them. I braced myself police-style, breathed out, and shot the lead dog right in the face just as its scaly black muzzle retracted, exposing the disgusting pink underneath. I hit it square on and the dog’s head unfolded in a red mist. Somehow, even with its snout exploded like an Imogen Cunningham flower made of blood and bone, the hellhound still managed to let out a shrieking yelp of pain and take half a dozen more steps before it stumbled and collapsed. To my further astonishment, it didn’t die on the spot but got up, staggering, and looked like it might try to pursue me even with most of its head missing, but one of the other dogs ran helplessly into it from behind; both the bloody-mess hound and the second dog got tangled and tumbled off the bridge together.

I squeezed off another couple of shots, hoping to get the last hellhound while it was skidding and struggling in its doggy-pal’s blood, but I missed. Niloch’s men hesitated for a moment at the sound of the shot, but then hurried toward me once more, so I scrambled up and sprinted onward.

I caught a break I hadn’t expected when the commissar’s men tried to get the last hellhound moving again. Looking back, I saw that the ugly beast was refusing to budge, not because it was afraid of me (stop, don’t make me laugh) but because it was so busy licking up the blood and brain fragments spilled by the one I’d shot. When one of the handlers tried to urge it forward with a whip, the hound turned on him, snapping at his face with that toothy snout and pulling off what looked like a good chunk of his nose and cheek.

I managed to reload both guns as I hurried on, knowing that the respite was going to be a short one; I could hear Niloch screeching to shoot the dog if it wouldn’t get moving again. Unfortunately, I fumbled the rest of the bullets, then missed my grab as they bounced into the abyss. The commissar might have only one hound left, but he had about half a hundred armed followers against my total of twelve bullets.

Running as hard as I could, drawing on reserves of demonic strength that were probably well outside the body’s normal factory specs, I managed to put a little distance between myself and the stalled hunters. Hearing Niloch’s angry shrieks getting fainter was the sweetest music I’d heard in a long time.

I don’t know how long I ran before I heard the sound of talons ringing against the stone again. It seemed like a long time, but I’d slid into a kind of unthinking state where not even old blues songs were running through my brain, only the slap of my own feet like a slowing metronome. I heard the hound crashing along behind me, very close now, then the noise suddenly stopped. I knew better than to assume something had distracted it, so instead of turning to look, I threw myself flat against the stone of the Neronian Bridge. A long shadow passed over me like a shark above a startled diver. It seemed to take a long time. Making the beast miss its killing pounce hadn’t really done me a lot of good, however: the hellhound landed and kept its balance. In fact, not only didn’t it slide off the bridge, it managed to spin around a few yards ahead of me, like a Mini Cooper making a handbrake turn, cutting off my escape. Any moment now Niloch and his men would be coming up behind, and that would be that. So I did the only thing I could do. I ran at the hellhound.

Okay, now if I were writing a book of advice for young angels, I would probably start it out with “Never, ever, ever go to Hell.” Then I would add a footnote that said, “However, if for some reason you do happen to wind up in Hell, never, ever run directly at a hellhound.” But I didn’t have any choice, really, since it was now between me and any possibility of escape. I lifted my guns and fired as I went, but the beast was bounding toward me, moving so quickly that my two fast shots went right over it without even creasing its weird, leathery hide. It landed on top of me, and that’s the last clear thing I remember for a little while except a lot of snarling and screaming (I think I was doing most of the second part). The drooling lamprey mouth darted at my face. The creature’s eyeless head followed my every move as though I had filed a plan of action with Hellhound Central ahead of time. I had to use both hands to fend off the crazed hellhound, and while I was fighting I lost one of my guns over the side. Just when I thought I could get my remaining gun free to shoot the four-legged bastard, it struck like a cobra, sinking its teeth into the meat of my hand so that the gun flipped loose, clattering on the bridge. I reached for the blade, which—thank the Highest and all His very nicest archangels—was still in my belt. When I got the chance I shoved it through the hellhound’s lower jaw and up into where its brain should have been.

I don’t know whether the beast didn’t have a brain in there or just didn’t use it much, but it clearly wasn’t going to die just because I drove a knife the size of a machete through its head. It did, however, seem to get grumpier, and began trying even harder to suck my face into its unpleasantly round, toothy mouth. I used the knife embedded in its jaw to keep it at bay, hanging onto the hilt for dear life as the hound kept forcing itself at my softer, more important bits.

I won’t spoil your day by describing what genuine hellhounds smell like up close, by the way. You can thank me later.

It was a stalemate, one that I knew I was going to lose pretty quickly. The thing weighed twice as much as I did, and if a knife in the brain wasn’t slowing it down, chances were I wasn’t going to outwrestle it either. So I grabbed my last chance: I pulled my feet up under me, put them against the thing’s bone-armored chest, and then shoved as hard as I could.

If I thought I’d get lucky twice, and it would fall away and slip off the bridge, I was disappointed. To be honest, I hadn’t thought things through that carefully—I just knew the beast was about to eat my head, and that my head was something I shouldn’t let it eat. The hound did fall back, and its back legs skidded out from under it, but that only meant it scrambled in place for a moment until it could find its balance and lunge toward me again.

But while that happened, I’d found my gun.

I lay on my back as the monster came toward me, with little chance to aim as carefully as I had at the first dog, so I emptied a couple of rounds into it as quickly as I could pull the trigger. I hit it in the chest, making a big, dripping red hole, and also blew off one of its ears along with a chunk of sloping skull, but although the thing whined and choked a little, it straightened its legs and took another few staggering steps toward me. Cursing like a man who’s just seen his hated brother-in-law win the lottery, I shot again. This time I put a round square in its chest and the dog took a strange, awkward sideways step, then another, as if the bridge beneath it had suddenly slanted to one side, then it walked right off the span.

I heard angry shouts from the hunters who had just reached the scene, but I didn’t bother looking: I was busy trying to struggle upright. If I’d counted correctly in all the confusion, I had one gun and one bullet, so I wasn’t going to outduel Niloch and his boys, but perhaps, since they no longer had the dogs, I could outrun them. I was sure going to try.

Something hit me as I took my first steps—hit me hard, like I’d walked in front of a speeding pickup truck. I flew half-a-dozen feet forward through the air, flopped on my belly and slid, ending up with my arm and shoulder hanging off the bridge’s edge. It all happened so suddenly that it took a moment to realize I had about a foot of harpoon sticking out of my chest. The fact that the harpoon was attached to one of my pursuers became clear a moment later when something pulled on it from behind and the harpoon slid back until its barbed head caught on my collarbone.

You will not think me too big of a sissy, I hope, when I tell you that despite my lack of tear-ducts, I did my best to weep like a disappointed kindergartener. Well, in between bouts of coughing up blood.

The cable attached to the harpoon yanked tight again, dragging me back from the edge. Through the horrible agony I reached up to grab the rope as I struggled to roll onto my back where I had a chance to defend myself. I had no strategy. All I could think of was that I didn’t want anyone to yank on that barbed harpoon ever again until the universe ended.

Niloch was coming toward me past the creature who’d speared me, a squat, troll-like thug wearing a proud if unevenly-toothed grin. The commissar followed the tight, vibrating harpoon line like a child coming down to the tree on Christmas morning. His head had mostly regrown.

“And what do we have here?” Niloch murmured. “Oh, goodness me, oh, look! It is the Snakestaff creature, the one who ruined my beautiful, beautiful Gravejaw. I think that before we bring you back to the Mastema, we must make you answer for that, mustn’t we? I think all we have to do is bring back a good-sized portion of you to be tortured by the Inquisitorial Board, hmmm? The head and a few dependent bits, perhaps? And after we have played with it, the rest can go into the mortar for rebuilding Gravejaw. That would be appropriate, would it not, my rude little guest?”

It took me a moment to figure it out, because so many parts of me were sending back messages of terrible, overwhelming pain, but I was lying on my gun. I reached under myself as unobtrusively as I could, meanwhile closing my eyes as if I had just given up, trying to get Niloch to move closer. One shot left. It wouldn’t save me—there were too many other hunters behind the commissar—but I could at least take Niloch out.

When I thought I was in position to move quickly despite the pain, I tugged the revolver out from under me, aimed, and pulled the trigger. The noise was surprisingly loud for a place with no ceiling, the echoes snapping back off the cylindrical walls, over and over. It hurt a lot to roll and move so violently, so quickly, but it would have all been worth it if I hadn’t missed.

Niloch didn’t seem disturbed that a bullet had just flown past his bony head. “Tch,” he said. “So unpleasant. First you destroy my sweet hounds, now you would attack me, too? For doing my civic duty? Shame on you, Snakestaff, shame.”

I think the rattling noise was him laughing, but I was a bit distracted by the glow now hovering in the air just behind him. Several of Niloch’s nearest soldiers were also staring. At first it was only a fizzle, no more than the smolder of a road flare, but then that fizzle suddenly dove down toward the ground, leaving an unstable streak of light hanging in the air. Just as Niloch himself realized that something was happening, a glowing hand appeared from the jagged, midair stripe of light; a second later Smyler bounded out of nothingness and onto the bridge beside Niloch. Even as the commissar opened up his bony jaw to shout an order, and well before his astonished soldiers could do anything, Smyler grabbed Niloch and jammed his four-bladed knife into the commissar’s neck, then began to twist it around in a way that couldn’t have been pleasant even for an arch-demon. Niloch screeched in pain and surprise. His men came crowding in around him, trying to pull loose the scrawny thing, but they couldn’t get a decent grip. Smyler was literally climbing around on Niloch, clinging like the commissar was a bunch of bananas and he was some kind bionic-murder monkey.

I realized I was staring at all this with my mouth open when I should be running like crazy. I tried to get up, but the heavy rope still ran from the harpoon in my chest and all the way back into the melee, and now it was wound around several people. Every tug as they fought with Smyler made the harpoon twist in my bloody chest, an agony I won’t insult with the weak word “pain.”

“Now it sees!” Smyler screeched from the middle of the tangle. Niloch’s men were fighting desperately to free their master, but they were limited by the narrowness of the bridge and Smyler’s astonishing, horrifying quickness. “It sees now. The reason. You are the reason. That is why you came before you should—it sees!”

At the edge of the fight, the demon soldier holding my harpoon suddenly grunted, staggered, then tumbled off the bridge in a spray of his own blood. I had only a split-instant to brace myself against being yanked over with him, but to my grateful astonishment the rope lay slack on the bridge, a bloody meat spider still clutching its far end: the harpoonist had gone, but his hand had stayed behind, thanks to Smyler’s crazy knifework.

Given a second’s reprieve, I did my best to break the rope, because I couldn’t run with that thing trailing behind me. It was going to be bad enough with the harpoon still waggling around in there, probably tearing the shit out of my demon lungs and demon heart. As I struggled to free myself, I backed carefully away from the melee. The space left by the harpoon-demon’s sudden exit had given Smyler more room to work, and work he did. It was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen, and I don’t care if you pardon the expression.

Imagine a world-class but spastic ballet dancer. Now run the video in your head about three or four times faster, and try to imagine that ballet dancer carries a long sharp blade, and when it uses that blade on flesh it believes it’s praying. I have never seen anything so horribly brutal that I could also call beautiful. I know it sounds weird, but it was art, like the wildest improvised solo you’ve ever heard spun out, sped up, and then landing at the end with a crash right back on the main riff. Everything happened so quickly it was hard to tell it wasn’t planned. But nobody, not even a demon, ever planned to die like that, on the murderous blade of that giggling, rubbery thing.

Two more of Niloch’s soldiers staggered bleeding off the bridge into nothingness. The whole pack of them now were converging on my unexpected savior like piranha in a feeding frenzy, but I didn’t think it was Smyler’s blood I saw fountaining in the air, or Smyler’s fingers and ears flying out of the scrimmage.

“Run!” he shouted. “Run, angel!” Then, as if to prove Smyler’s kind intent, something else came flying out of the ruckus and rolled to a stop near my feet, blood dribbling from it to join my own good-sized puddle. It was Niloch’s long, skull-like head, the jaws snapping at nothing, slow as a dying crab. The wet red eyes rolled up, and it saw me. Somehow, despite no longer being attached to larynx or lungs, it said in a near-whisper, “I . . . will . . . !”

I didn’t think, just stomped on it as hard as I could, feeling the bones smash beneath my foot. “Shut up,” I said, then kicked the broken, oozing lump off the bridge. “Just. Shut up.”

I ran then, although it was more like hobbling, blood and brain matter still oozing out of the back of my skull, clutching the harpoon stuck through my chest in both hands to minimize the horrible pain from its every movement—a picture William Blake might have painted after a really bad Saturday night. I ran until the bellows and squeals of Niloch’s soldiers had fallen away behind me, then ran on, through a darkness I can’t even remember now. I vaguely recall reaching the elevator, but I think I kept running even after that, throwing myself blindly against the sides of the coffin-shaped box until I understood I was safe, or at least as safe as I’ll ever be in this life, until I could finally say the words Temuel taught me and lay aside my demon body, until I could leave Hell behind me and surrender to blessed, blessed blackness.

I’ve never seen Smyler again since the Neronian Bridge. I don’t know whether he survived. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but I am sure that he saved me when nothing else but God Himself could have done it.