A Cold Day In Hell (Circles In Hell Book 2) Read online

  A Cold Day In Hell

  (Circles in Hell, Book Two)

  by

  Mark Cain

  CIRCLES IN HELL SERIES

  Hell’s Super

  A Cold Day In Hell

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  ‘A Cold Day In Hell’ is published by Perdition Press, which can be contacted at:

  [email protected]

  ‘A Cold Day In Hell’ is the copyright of the author, Mark Cain, 2015. All rights are reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations or events portrayed in this novel are either products of the imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover design by Dan Wolfe (www.doodledojo.co.uk)

  To Claire, who insisted that I continue Steve’s story. Thanks, Red, for everything.

  “Don’t let go!”

  “I’m not letting go!”

  “For Go … for Heav … oh, shit … just DON’T let go!”

  “I’m NOT letting go!”

  I was letting go.

  Not by choice, mind you, but the only thing keeping Orson’s nearly four hundred ectoplasmic pounds from falling thousands of feet, to be impaled on one of the jagged toe bones of Mount Erebus, was the tenuous grip we each had on the other’s wrist. My arm felt as if it was being pulled from its socket, and my fingers were beginning to slip.

  My situation was only slightly less precarious than Orson’s. A quickly-made lasso of duct tape was fastened to my ankle, a lasso I’d just barely managed to toss over a stony outcropping twenty feet above me; it held me upside down, suspended in midair. Periodically I’d crash into the sheer cliff off of which Orson and I had slipped moments before. Each time I hit, my nose would slam against the rock, and the delicate cartilage in my schnozzle would snap. “Ow! Ow!” I said every few seconds.

  “Steve! Do something! You know what will happen if I fall.”

  Well, actually, I didn’t. Falling anywhere else in Hell would just result in a lot of pain, and a passel of broken bones that would knit themselves back together in short order. But this was Mt. Erebus, and the normal laws of the Underworld didn’t apply here, according to Satan.

  Of course, he is the Prince of Lies. Not the most dependable person to take advice from. Still, he might be telling the truth this time.

  My recently-healed nose hit the stones again, breaking once more. It didn’t seem to be mending as quickly as it would under normal circumstances, although perhaps being whacked with such regular frequency didn’t allow enough time for a proper nose job. Since I didn’t know for sure what the Erebus Zone did to Hell’s normal laws, I could only assume the worst (which was generally a smart attitude toward things down here), i.e., that Orson’s immortal soul was in danger, that a fall to the base of the mountain would snuff it out.

  With my free hand, I grabbed for a roll of duct tape. If I could just make a few loops around our two wrists, the tape could hold us until we figured out how to get out of this fix.

  Our fingers slipped again. Despite the numbing cold, our hands and wrists were beginning to sweat. Bad luck that. It was hard enough to dispense tape one-handed without having to deal with sweaty palms. But I had to save Orson somehow, and we had to get back on the mountain, make it to the top, finish the job. If we didn’t, all Hell would freeze over.

  And that would be a very bad thing.

  Chapter 1

  I looked in disgust at the giant boulder, split neatly in two, as if someone had taken a meat cleaver to it. “How the hell did you manage this?”

  A heavily-muscled guy, wearing an ancient crown, stood before me and Orson, my assistant. “I tell you, Steve, I haven’t a clue. I was just doing what I always do, you know, roll the rock up the hill, watch it roll back down, roll the rock up, watch it go down, up, down, up … ”

  “Yeah, yeah, we get it,” Orson said, cutting him off. “The old Sisyphean thing.”

  The brawny royal frowned, as if we’d just offended him. “Hey! It’s what I do.” He slapped his chest. “It’s who I am.”

  Which was true. We were talking to the original Sisyphus.

  “Anyway, I’d just gotten my bolder to the top of the hill and was standing there, watching it roll down as I always do. When the thing reached the bottom, it just,” he looked embarrassed, “well it just split in two.”

  “You didn’t hit anything with it, did you?”

  “No, no,” Sisyphus said impatiently. “Besides, if I had, the boulder would have flattened it.” Sisyphus looked crestfallen. “I’ve had it all these years, and now, look at it. Ruined, just ruined!”

  All these years was right. Sisyphus - whom Satan had picked up from Hades, the Greek god, along with a few other colorful individuals that had lent some class to the place, characters like Charon, Cerberus and Prometheus, at the time the big devil-may-care had bought Hell from his Greco-Roman predecessor - had been shoving that damn boulder up the hill for over three millennia. Both hill and boulder looked a little worse for wear. Sisyphus, though, was in great shape. They say weight training does wonders, and Sisyphus could have put Charles Atlas to shame. Maybe even Atlas himself.

  “Do you still have the owner’s manual?”

  “I have it here somewhere.” King Sisyphus patted down the pockets of his tunic - when he had found time to have pockets sewn into the garment I’ll never know - and pulled out a dog-eared pamphlet, entitled “Care and Use of Your Boulder (Model BB1000).

  “Oh,” I commented, “a BackBreaker 1000. Good choice.”

  “Thanks,” Sisyphus replied. “It’s served me well. Never had a lick of trouble in all these years, until now,” he said, slightly deflated.

  I flipped to the index, found the page I wanted, and turned to it. “How many miles do you think you have on your rock?” I asked, as I read the fine print.

  Sisyphus scratched his beard in thought. “Dunno. Ten million?”

  I exhaled hugely. “Well, there’s your problem. Says right here on page twenty-three. The thing wasn’t designed to go beyond five.”

  “Is it still under warranty?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Guess not.” Sisyphus sat down on the edge of one piece of the broken rock. “I suppose I could get another one.” He patted the surface of the boulder fondly. “Won’t be the same, though. Me and Bessie … ”

  “Wait a minute,” Orson said. “You named your rock?”

  Sisyphus hopped off Bessie and made a fist. “So I named my rock. What’s it to you, fatso?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” Orson Welles, one of filmdom’s greatest directors, said hurriedly. “Rock guitarists sometimes name their axes, so I guess there’s nothing wrong with a Greek king naming his boulder.”

  Sisyphus relaxed. “Right, and don’t you forget it. Anyway, me and Bessie have been together a long time. I’ve really just gotten her broken in, if you know what I mean.”

  I looked dubiously at the bisected boulder. Ironically, the millennia of stone hill rubbing against stone boulder had had the same effect as a gargantuan rock polisher. Bessie had become as smooth and polished as a bowling ball - without the finger holes, of course. The hill itself was probably several feet shorter than it used to be. Yep, Bessie looked pretty good … except that she was split in half.

  Sisyphus nodded to himself. He had made some sort of decision. “Look, Steve, I don’t mean to be a nuisance, but I don’t want another boulder. I want Bessie. Can you fix her?”<
br />
  “Fix a boulder? And how am I gonna do that? SuperGlue?” I turned to Orson, who just shook his head.

  “Well, why not?” Sisyphus countered. “You’re Hell’s Super. You’re supposed to be able to fix anything. At least try, please?” The hulking Hellene looked like he was ready to cry.

  I don’t know where he got the impression I could fix anything. Sure, that was my job: Mr. Fixit for the Netherworld. That didn’t mean I was any good at it, though. This was my eternal damnation, chosen specifically because I was lousy at this kind of work. Hated it, too, I mean really hated it, though that’s about what you’d expect of an eternal damnation. Still, I had to try. “Fine, fine,” I said at last. “But you’ve got to help.”

  “Sure,” the king said, enthusiastically. “What can I do?”

  “Well, first you can help Orson and me get the two pieces back together, okay?”

  “Sure, I can do that.”

  That task was trickier than one might imagine. It wasn’t just getting the two halves to touch; it also required a little bit of futzing around to get them to meet at the precise points where they had parted. Orson and I worked one half of the boulder and Sisyhpus the other. Our half alone seemed to weigh a ton. We ended up taking the limb of a nearby dead tree and, using a large rock as a fulcrum, applied all our weight and strength to lever the hemisphere into position. Then we chocked it up with some more rocks that were lying around. Sisyphus had no difficulty with his piece. After all, this was half the weight he was used to handling.

  In about fifteen minutes, we had the two halves together. “Now, your highness,” I said, reaching to my belt, “I’m going to need you to push the two pieces together as tightly as you can, closing the crack on this side.”

  “Okay,” Sisyphus said, shoving the two bits of rock against each other until a wisp of smoke couldn’t have gotten through.

  I pulled two strips of duct tape, one from the roll hanging on a spool on the right side of my tool belt, the other from another roll on my left, and taped over the crack. “Orson, take over from Sisyphus.”

  My assistant’s face puckered up as if he had been sucking on a lemon. “Come on, Steve. I can’t handle that much weight.”

  “You and the duct tape can. Besides, you won’t have to do it for long.” Grumbling, Orson took our places. “Now, your majesty, let’s deal with the other end.” The king and I went to the far side of the boulder, he held the two pieces tightly together, and I secured things with two more strips of tape. “Now give me a minute to make a few passes around the rock.”

  I didn’t need a minute. The tape flew from my fingers as I did a double-circumnavigation of the boulder, slowed only by my ability to run around the rock, dodging Orson and Sisyphus as I went. Then I had the two of them step back as I began to encase the entire rock in duct tape. In two minutes, everything but the top and bottom was covered. I had Sisyphus roll the rock over so I could finish the job. “There,” I said, at last.

  When all else fails, use duct tape. It was my fixit failsafe in life, and using it was the only thing I was good at in my afterlife.

  Sisyphus scratched his head, dubiously. “I don’t know Steve. Doesn’t look as pretty as she used to.”

  “Hey,” Orson said, still panting from his time holding his side of the rock together. “She’s still gray and a little shiny. Besides, the tape will flatten over time.”

  “Sisyphus, I’m sorry but it’s the best I can do. Why don’t you give it a couple of test rolls and see what you think?”

  The king shrugged then started shoving the boulder up the hill. He got to the top; the rock rolled down to the other side. He followed. He rolled it up, and the rock rolled down toward us - pretty fast too. We had to jump to one side to get out of the way.

  Sisyphus came trotting down, a big smile on his face. “She may not look so good, but the old girl rolls like a dream. This’ll do fine.”

  Whew. Close one.

  “Okay,” I said, handing Sisyphus a pen and the work order. “Sign here, please.”

  Sisyphus put a sigma on the form, in the “completed” box. “Thanks again.”

  “You betcha.”

  “And Orson, sorry I got a little hot there for a moment. Bessie and me, though, well, like I said, we go way back.”

  “It’s okay,” Orson said. “I should have been more sensitive. Thoughtless of me.”

  He and I made our goodbyes to the burly king and began wending our way back to the office. Steve Minion, Hell’s Superintendent for Plant Maintenance, and Orson Welles, his trusty assistant, had triumphed again.

  One work order down, an infinity to go, but that’s life in Hell for you. Sisyphus had his rock; we had our work orders. He had his version of Hell; we had ours.

  My friend and I headed for Hell’s Escalator, a one-way affair that stretched from Gates Level, where St. Peter sorted recently deceased souls into lambs (Pearly Gates invitees) and goats (Gates of Hell inductees), all the way down to the Eighth Circle of Hell. As we walked, I noted that the day was an atypically nice one. The sky, or what passed for sky down here, seemed more clear than usual. Sure, it was still gray and smelled of gym socks, but I could see farther than was customary. The view from the Second Circle was spectacular that day, though not scenic, like a view from the Sears Tower or the Matterhorn or anything like that. Hell’s spectacles tended to be a bit more grisly.

  Off to the right, I could spy a large fiery pit with a gargantuan grill top. Hundreds of souls, bound in chains, were stretched atop it, like so many frankfurters. Beside the grill stood the giant Cyclops Polyphemus, who, like Sisyphus, was a colorful character from Greek mythology and another long-time inhabitant of the Underworld. He was dressed in a white apron and chef’s hat, and his single eye monitored his charges as they sizzled on the grill. In his hand was a spatula the size of the digging bucket on a backhoe. Periodically, Polyphemus would flip over one of the souls in order to brown the other side. When one of these unfortunates was well-done - charred to me, but well-done to Polyphemus - the Cyclops would flip him or her off the fire and onto a massive platter. This would give the flesh of the damned soul time to heal, and then the giant would toss the raw meat back on the grill.

  All of this, of course, was accompanied by plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth. That’s generally a requirement in Hell. All of us are really good at wailing and gnashing our teeth, seeing as how we’ve had lots of practice.

  At least they aren’t stuffed in a bun and eaten. That would be downright undignified. Extra onions. Hold the mayo. Ugh.

  In the distance was the cone-shaped silhouette of Mount Erebus, which was sort of an anomaly among all mountains, earthly or otherwise. It hung upside down, suspended from the underside of Hell’s First Circle, a gated golf community for virtuous pagans and unbaptized babies.

  (Seems a bit unfair about the unbaptized babies, but the early leaders of the Catholic Church, who got to Christianity first and set up most of its basic constructs, are responsible for that. A lot of people don’t like that babies are in Hell, but the First Circle is really very nice. Besides, I didn’t make the rule, so don’t shoot the messenger.)

  The mountain is a frigid affair, a gigantic stalactite of ice that dominates the skyline, narrowing as it approaches the surface of Level Two, stopping just a few hundred feet shy of the ground. Erebus provides most of Hell’s ice, which is used to punish the damned who in life lived in places like Florida, Hawaii, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (which to me always sounds like a Sixties Motown group). Others who get the cold shoulder include former Snowbirds, those northerners in the States who drive south in their RVs and spend the winters in more temperate climes. In other words, Erebus provides torment for people who hate to be cold.

  Oh, devils and demons also use ice from the mountain for their martinis.

  I remembered from a geography course I took in college that there was a Mount Erebus in Antarctica. At 12,000 feet it was taller than ours, but since it didn’t hang upsi
de down, Earth’s version wasn’t as impressive to me as our own mile-long stalactite.

  Orson and I were going to take the Escalator from Two, where Sisyphus had his rock and roll gig, down to Five, where our office was located. We could have taken Hell’s Elevator, but while it could traverse the Circles of Hell faster, it was less reliable. You could spend your entire day poking at the down button, trying to get the damn Elevator to stop and pick you up. And the Stairs, well, that was just way too much work. The Escalator was generally very dependable, and while we were on it, we weren’t expected to fix anything, giving Orson and me a bit of a break.

  “What do you want to do today, Steve?” Orson asked, as we passed some Gluttons on Level Two being force-fed cans of Spam.

  I idly wondered why these souls weren’t down on Three, in Glutton’s Gap, where most of the gluttons tended to be gathered. Hell wasn’t as tidy as Dante’s Inferno suggested, though; I knew you could find sinners of every stripe in almost every Circle of Hell.

  We came to the Escalator and hopped on. “I dunno. Fix some stuff, I guess.”

  “Well, that’s pretty obvious,” my assistant responded in that supercilious tone he would sometimes use. I had long ago gotten used to it, but I know it pissed off a lot of people down here. I don’t even think Orson realized he did it. He was such a big shot in life that he had never quite gotten used to being a flunky down here. “I mean, what are we going to work on?”

  We had just passed beneath the surface of Level Two, burrowing into the firmament that supported it. The air, already hot, since things tended more toward toasty than chilly down here, suddenly became superheated. I took a breath to answer my assistant and went into a coughing spell; it’s hard to talk when you’re sucking in super-heated air. Orson pounded me on the back, which didn’t stop the coughing, but it gave him something to do, and he kept it up until the Escalator emerged into the air above Level Three.

  “Like I said,” I wheezed. “I don’t know. Sisyphus caught me right after I clocked in, and I haven’t had a chance to look at the work orders yet. Didn’t even get to pour myself a cup of coffee.”