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

  “Ah.” Orson stared off into the distance, daydreaming. “You know,” he said, abruptly. “I wish Satan would let me make a film about Hell.”

  “Yeah, sure, that’s gonna happen.”

  “No, I’m serious, Steve. Hell may be pretty horrible, but it’s quite an eyeful. I’d think the devils, at least, would enjoy the movie, and Satan could use it as a recruiting piece to get more demons.”

  “Keen.”

  Orson harrumphed. “Stop being so sarcastic. You know he has a worker shortage in that area. He’s certainly tried to talk you into being a demon more than once.”

  That was true. I like to think of myself as a nice guy, but if I don’t like someone, well, I guess I have my nasty side. A couple of examples: Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were two of my least favorite people in Hell, and I’d certainly put those two through the wringer more than once. I chuckled nastily then caught myself.

  I guess I’m not as nice as I think I am. The thought made me uncomfortable.

  “Anyway, I could really do a bang-up promotional video.”

  “Would you do it in gray?” Orson preferred making black and white films.

  “Uh-uh. There’s way too much vivid coloring down here. You know, all the blood and bile and stuff. No, it would be Technicolor all the way. And my movie would make ‘Satyricon’ look like ‘Bambi’ by comparison.”

  I brushed some dust I’d picked up from that damn rock off my shirtsleeve. “Well,” I opined, “there was that forest fire sequence in ‘Bambi.’ I thought it was pretty scary when I was a kid.”

  “Phtt! That was a cartoon, Steven.” Orson gestured expansively. “Look around. This is the real thing!”

  I didn’t say anything for a while, and soon we were closing on the surface of Level Four. I noted the fire pits and the Sea of Thorns, where tens of thousands of the damned were impaled. In the air, two harpies sped by, sharp talons extended, as they chased a few understandably terrified souls. Off in the distance, Old Dependable, a perpetually-erupting volcano, spilled its fiery guts onto a town below. The screams could be heard even from the Escalator. “More like the surreal thing, I’d say.”

  “Absolutely!” Orson beamed. “It would make a great movie, and I wouldn’t even need to get Harryhausen to create the effects. Who needs stop-motion dolls, when we have real giant apes, three-headed ogres, a volcano that just keeps on giving.”

  At that moment, Old Dependable’s fire simply went out, as if someone had placed an invisible cone over the summit and choked off the oxygen. “Orson,” I said, pointing toward the suddenly-inert volcano. “Look at that!”

  Orson scratched his goatee. “Well, I’ll be damned … ”

  “That goes without saying.”

  “Yeah, but have you ever seen Old Dependable when it wasn’t erupting?”

  At that moment, the Escalator took us below the surface of Level Four. “Well, now I can’t see anything.”

  Orson grabbed my arm, a little more tightly than he needed to. “But that’s never happened before, has it?” he wheezed, the hot air no doubt scorching his lungs.

  “No,” I gasped. And it could mean only one thing.

  Trouble.

  Chapter 2

  The Escalator reached Level Five, and we jumped off, just before the moving stairs delved beneath the surface on their way to the Sixth Circle of Hell. Five was where we had our office.

  Normally, the Escalator platform for Level Five was near Plant Maintenance. Periodically, though, Management would randomly reroute the thing, and this was one of those times. We were at least five miles from the office. For an hour Orson and I tried to hail a cab, but none would stop, despite all of them appearing to be empty. Their “Available” lights were on too. It was pretty aggravating, but about par for the course. Still, our office was a little too far away to walk, so when a bus halted right in front of us, spilling out five sewer workers onto the pavement, we hopped aboard.

  “Fuck you,” said the demon at the wheel. “Fifty thousand bucks. In the slot. Now.”

  I rolled my eyes. Money was meaningless in Hell, but it didn’t pay to argue with a demon, so I began stuffing all the bills and coins I had in my pocket into the change collector. Yet my mouth, which had gotten me in trouble my whole life, and a fair bit of my afterlife, wouldn’t stay shut. “You’re full of crap, you know.”

  Without taking his eyes off the road, the demon, a little puce-colored creep whose name, I think, was Gaap, lifted a whip from his lap and lashed me across the face.

  “Ow! Shit, that hurt!”

  “Back of the line, you two. It’s the rules.” He closed the bus doors and slammed down on the accelerator. Orson and I were pitched to the floor. My friend landed on top of me, completely predictable in Hell, since he was much heavier than me. When his considerable personage made its emergency landing on my shoulder, it dislocated.

  My assistant pulled himself up by grabbing the leg of a nearby passenger. She cursed and thumped him on the head with her purse. Struggling to keep his balance, Orson helped me to my feet. “Sorr … ”

  “Skip it,” I said hurriedly. You don’t dare sincerely apologize for anything in Hell. That results in a rather juvenile, but nonetheless humiliating and painful, form of punishment down here. “I’ll be okay in a moment.”

  There were no seats to be had, and barely any standing room. With some effort, we worked our way to the back of the bus, as Gaap had told us to. I noticed he was watching us through the rearview mirror, and I didn’t want any more trouble from him. Between Orson and me, we managed to score six inches of commuter pole, to which we held on for dear life.

  Well, okay, not life, since we were already dead, but you catch my drift.

  I hated riding in Hell’s buses. With cabbies, at least you got a human, even if he or she was blind, but with a bus, the driver was always a demon. The cabbies couldn’t help scaring the bejeezus out of you. They may have been blind, but they tried their best. Demon bus drivers, though, did everything in their power to make your ride miserable. A demon would seek out traffic jams and contentedly sit for hours without moving the vehicle, pretend the bus had broken down, or just stop to get out and flatten a tire, take a smoke, or throw excrement on one of the bus’s windows.

  If you were lucky, the window was closed.

  Today’s ride was no different. We went one block, and the demon stopped the bus and began filing his nails or, rather, claws. The passengers started to grumble.

  Gaap reached for the microphone of the bus’s PA system. “Shut the fuck up!” he yelled. “Besides, I’m on break.”

  Back on Earth, some scientist got a grant from the National Science Foundation to study traffic patterns in New York. To me it sounded like one of those story problems we all had to do in high school math. Anyway, it went like this: in Manhattan a man got on a bus that was going from east to west. At the same time, another fellow just started hoofing it. The walker reached the West Side half an hour before the rider. I don’t know why the NSF bothered to fund this kind of research. Any New Yorker could have predicted that outcome. But what can you do? Your tax dollars at work.

  Our bus ride in Hell promised to be a repeat of the NSF study. I sighed. “Let’s just get off and walk.”

  Orson nodded and prepared to force his way to the back door. Being big as a house, he was just the guy for the job.

  Suddenly there was a buzzing sound, like flies. It reminded me of my boss, Beezy, aka, Beelzebub. The noise came from the driver’s dispatcher system, his connection with the Authority that managed all of Hell’s buses. Gaap put down his nail file. “Shit. Now what?” He picked up his headset and slipped it on. In the mirror’s reflection, I saw his eyes go wide. “Right away, sir,” he mumbled, and rang off.

  Gaap floored the accelerator again, and we took off like a bat out of hell.

  Well, not really. I served with BOOH, I knew BOOH, the storied Bat out of Hell. BOOH was a friend of mine, and Gaap was no BOOH, but he moved the bus as fast as he
could, running cars and trucks off the road, sideswiping pedestrians on the sidewalks or work crews in the streets that were busily carving fresh potholes into the asphalt, as he pushed his vehicle to its limit. There was the ding ding ding sound of numerous “let me off” pulls on the “let me off” cords, but Gaap didn’t stop until he was right in front of my office, then he braked so hard his foot could have gone through the floor.

  We were in one of those buses designed to kneel. Back on Earth, they were used to aid the boarding and de-boarding of disabled passengers. In Hell, they served to throw people out of the bus and onto the asphalt. Orson and I had just reached the rear door, when we were tossed through it like bags of garbage. We slammed against the curb.

  Orson’s face was planted firmly in my butt, and his capacious belly was flattening my face into the concrete. With a groan, he crawled off me again, pulling me up by my sore arm. It hurt like hell, but in the process he popped my shoulder back in place, so things could have been worse.

  Orson examined a tear in his coveralls. “What was that all about?”

  “I’m not sure, but dollars to donuts Beezy was behind it.”

  My friend nodded. “You know, that’s a really stupid expression, but I agree. I thought I recognized Beelzebub’s ring on Gaap’s walkie-talkie.”

  Before us was a dilapidated excuse for a trailer, propped up precariously on cinderblocks that were slowly disintegrating. The vinyl siding of the structure was beginning to pull away at the edges; it also needed a new roof. Our office wasn’t much to look at. Back on Earth, it would probably have been the first to go in any trailer park when a tornado careened through, cherry picking people’s homes, pulverizing them, and then throwing the remains to the four winds. This particular single-wide was our office, not where we spent our evenings, though it felt as much like home to us as any other place in Hell. The peeling wallpaper, damp and moldy from a ceiling leak that we had never been able to find, the rickety furniture, the ancient and rusting time clock: they all were evidence of the drab ennui of our eternal damnation. But at least they were familiar.

  Above the roofline of the trailer loomed the twin towers of Hell’s Hospital. The hospital was where thousands upon thousands of the damned were unceasingly tormented. I usually called the hospital the “Giant Toaster.” There were a couple of reasons for that. One, its twin steel towers, stuck together as if they’d been epoxied, reminded me of the toaster we’d had in my house when I was a kid.

  Also, everyone who goes to hospitals ends up dead eventually, and, as everyone knows, when you’re dead, you’re toast.

  Hell’s Hospital dished out fear and pain with marvelous efficiency. It was easy, mainly because of that “toast” thing I just mentioned, but the hospital had a major problem preventing it from achieving its full potential as a place of torment. There was a powerful subversive element wandering the halls of the Toaster, an indomitable force for good thwarting the efforts of Management, bringing relief wherever she went.

  That would be Florence Nightingale. Unlike the rest of Hell’s denizens, Nightingale was not one of the damned, but more of a missionary who was trying to do some good in a backwater place. She was, in fact, the finest, kindest, purest soul I’d ever encountered in my life or afterlife.

  Upon her death in 1910, St. Peter was all set to escort her personally to the Pearly Gates, but Florence thought she could do more good in Hell than she could in Heaven, so she came here and began to provide what comfort she could to the denizens of the Toaster. Flo drove Satan crazy, but he was powerless to touch her. She wasn’t one of his minions, but a saintly soul who seemed to have the protection and approval of the Top Brass.

  Flo. My Flo. My one true love.

  Corny, I know, but true, or at least it used to be, and the thought of her brought a familiar knot to my chest as I stood there on the pavement before my office. Flo and I used to be an item. She was helping me find some conspirators down here. In our time working together, we got pretty close and, well, we ended up in the sack. Unfortunately, while we were in flagrante delicto, Satan had a couple of devils film the whole bedroom scene; they turned the footage into a porn movie that continued to play in every movie theater in Hell. Flo was humiliated by the whole affair and had been avoiding me ever since.

  It was a problem I was still trying to solve.

  “Steve? You okay?”

  “Huh?” I’d stopped moving once I’d spied the Toaster. “Yeah, sorry. I was just thinking about something.” I wiped my eyes on my sleeve before Orson could see any tears.

  “Flo, huh?” He smiled in sympathy, putting a friendly hand on my shoulder.

  I sighed. “Yeah.”

  “Come on,” he said, gently shoving me toward our office. “Best thing for a broken heart is to stay busy.”

  “Right,” I said and got moving again.

  We climbed the rickety stairs, keeping our balance by gripping an even more rickety metal railing. As I grabbed the office door handle and pulled, it came off in my hand. This was not the first time, and by habit, I reached for my hammer, preparing to throw it through the frosted glass.

  Orson stopped me. “No, don’t. We have enough to do. Let me help.” He pulled a credit card out of his pocket. Where he got one, I don’t know - maybe he was buried with it; maybe it was one he used in a TV commercial - but the card was an American Express that looked to be nearly a hundred years old. Anyway, Orson used it to jimmy the lock.

  I whistled in admiration. “Membership really does have its privileges. That was pretty good. Where’d you learn to do that?”

  “A bad spy movie,” he said, opening the door. “After you.”

  We went over to the antediluvian Mr. Coffee and filled our mugs with the burnt dregs from the morning’s pot. Funny. All I’d had time to do before leaving to help Sisyphus was turn on the coffee. The pot should have been full, or only slightly cooked down, but the contents of the carafe were more like sludge than java. My cuppa Joe always tasted like hell - that was a given - but I usually didn’t have to strain it through my teeth to get some liquid out of the concoction.

  Whatever.

  Setting our mugs on my desk, a beat-up All-Steel model, we checked the wire in-basket for new work orders. As usual, there were way too many for us to handle, so we looked for any top priority ones.

  “What did you think of Old Dependable winking out like that?” Orson asked, as we performed our triage, separating out two work orders from the hundred that had filled the basket while we were gone. Another light bulb had burned out in the sign above Hell’s Gate; we’d need to get to that soon. Mussolini’s sewing machine - the Great One was spending eternity making panty hose - was broken, and he had nothing to do. The guy was just enough of a baddie to require fairly prompt attention.

  “I don’t know what happened to Old Dependable. I half-expected to find something in here about it.”

  A low gurgle of sound emanated from the pneumatic tube above the basket. This was the way we usually received work orders. The noise grew, then with a moist popping sound, the tube spat out a burning piece of paper. It landed in my basket, and I quickly used my needle nose pliers to pick it up, laying it atop the metal desktop.

  When the flames died down, I looked to see what was written on the page. “Crap.”

  Orson glanced up from the work orders he was examining. “What? What is it?”

  I handed him the paper. It wasn’t a work order but a short note.

  Down the rabbit hole. Now. S

  “Rabbit hole? What?” Orson’s eyes widened. “Does this mean what I think it means?”

  “Yeah,” I said, unbuckling my tool belt and placing it on my desktop. “I guess I’m off to see the Wizard.”

  That’s two children’s literature references in a row. I’ll have to watch that. Besides, Satan might not like me calling him the Wizard. You never know what’s going to make him mad.

  “Do you really, uh, have to take the express train?”

  I walked to
the front door, swallowing hard. “You know I do. See ya. While I’m gone, go over to the hospital blood bank and pick up a sack-full of blood bags.” We always liked to keep bags of blood on hand, in case a certain friend of ours came visiting. I preferred getting them myself, but because of the situation with Flo, Orson had been performing this task for me.

  Once outside the trailer, I broke into a run, heading straight for the Throat of Hell, the series of big holes that ran through the center of all circles in the Underworld, from the Mouth of Hell at Gates Level all the way down to Level Nine, where Satan had his office.

  The running was important. Satan didn’t tolerate any hesitation or lateness from his minions, and the quickest way to get to him was by

  “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa … ”

  plunging down the Throat of Hell.

  This was one of the worst parts about my job, responding to an emergency summons from the Big Guy. My life-long fear of heights, actually one of only a couple of things that really scared me, had persisted beyond the grave. I had made this jump twice before, the last time plummeting all the way from Gates Level, down down down through all the Circles of Hell, before landing in Satan’s waiting room. Trying to make the best of a bad situation, I noted that my fall would only be four circles this time - well, five if you counted the splat at the bottom. The last time I’d done a freefall through Hell had involved all nine levels.

  I was curled up in a tight little ball, like a pill bug. This was for self-protection. The sides of Hell’s Throat were as hot as Hades, well, precisely as hot, and I didn’t relish the thought of coming in contact with them. I also didn’t want to accidentally catch myself on some stone, throwing off my trajectory and landing on Six, Seven or Eight. Then I’d just have to jump in again.

  And Satan would be pissed off because I’d kept him waiting.