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

  I was gritting my teeth, trying to stop the screams, but all I succeeded in accomplishing was muffling the “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa” down to more of an “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.” It didn’t seem much of an improvement, and my lips were more exposed to the super-heated air. I hated chapped lips, so I opened up my mouth again and allowed my scream its full throttle.

  When you fall through the Throat of Hell, you can’t see very much: basically pitch black and then blinding white. That’s because, as you descend, you’re alternating between the interior of a circle (black) and the mile of air separating it from the next one (white). The trip actually doesn’t take very long, because normal physical laws don’t apply in Hell. Specifically, you aren’t limited by terminal velocity, and you keep accelerating. I guess if this fall were interminable, I might eventually exceed the speed of light. For some reason, this idea intrigued me. Would I go back in time if that happened? Maybe back to before I died?

  That would be nice, I thought, as I fell like a BB down the infernal chute. Then perhaps I could have stopped that little prick of a graduate student from blowing my brains out.

  Of course, I’ve been in Hell so long that I surely would have died of natural causes by now anyway.

  I was getting a leg cramp from being curled up in my cannonball position for so long.

  If I could go back in time, though, maybe I would do it with foreknowledge of damnation. Then I could spend the rest of my life being the best person I could, maybe change the odds and make it to …

  “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa … Ouch!”

  Chapter 3

  My abrupt landing disrupted my chain of thought … my spine too. As the knee bones, shattered from my impact on the carpet, glued themselves back together and reconnected to the thigh bones, I looked up to see Bruce the Bedeviled, Satan’s personal assistant, standing above me. He gave me a hand.

  “No applause, please,” I said, wincing in pain. “Just help me up.”

  Bruce was a small man, but very muscular. The former martial arts star had maintained his wiry strength. I wondered if he worked out, I thought, as Bruce gave my arm a quick jerk, popping me to my feet.

  “Thanks. Nice outfit, by the way. I’ve never seen you in a turtleneck and cardigan. It’s a good look for you.”

  There was venom in his stare. I guess he didn’t like cardigans. “I’m wearing this because I’m cold, and you’re late.”

  “You’re wearing a cardigan because I’m late? Why would that make a difference?” I asked mildly. “Besides, you always say I’m late.”

  “That’s because it’s always true.”

  “Is not.”

  “Is too.”

  “Is not.”

  “Boys,” said a voice from the side. “Shut up.”

  That was Beezy, my boss. The fat old devil, a token number of flies and mosquitoes orbiting his head, was leaning against the wall next to Satan’s office door. Beezy usually wore a white suit and black fez, but today he was dressed in an outfit a Mongol warrior might have worn out on the Steppes. He was clad in a knee-length toga; I think the Mongols called them dels. Anyway, it was a dilly of a del, made of suede, lined with sheepskin and dyed a rich burgundy. The sleeves were very long, long enough to cover his hands, though his claws extended a little beyond the cuffs. Beezy also had on leather boots with upturned toes and a sheepskin-lined felt hat with ear flaps strapped to his chin. As was his fashion with any hat he wore, my boss had it canted back slightly so his horns could clear the fabric.

  Odd. Is he cold too? Satan’s anteroom did seem a little cooler than its usual sauna-like state. I hadn’t noticed earlier because I’d been chilled from freefalling through the sky of Level Nine.

  Another funny thing: I don’t usually meet with Satan and Beelzebub together. This must be important.

  Removing my arm from Bruce’s grasp, I walked over to my boss. “What’s with the Genghis Khan outfit?”

  Beezy flicked a finger in my direction. He didn’t touch me, but I felt a jolt, as if someone had put a cattle prod to my cheek. “Don’t be a smartass, Minion.” Then he opened the door to Satan’s office.

  A blast of oppressive heat took my breath away. As we stepped into the office, I saw the reason. Striding back and forth in Satan’s sanctuary was an enormous red dragon. Each of its seven heads was blasting flames in a different direction. The creature’s ten foot tail was swishing back and forth, like that of a cat spoiling for a fight. Each head had a horn, and a crown too, as if someone was playing horseshoes and got seven ringers. There were three extra horns on its back. I didn’t know if this was for added scary effect, or if they were spares, in case one of the head-horns broke off.

  “Revelation, Chapter 12, right?” I knew my Bible pretty well and liked to show off my knowledge whenever I could.

  The dragon batted me across the room with its tail.

  I slammed into the far wall, collapsing to the floor like a broken china doll. Despite the pain from what I estimated to be three cracked ribs, I rose to my feet.

  I really need to learn to keep my mouth shut. Beezy’s right. No one likes a smartass.

  As my bones began to mend, seven draconian mouths opened and roared, each slightly out of tune with the other. The sound was pretty unpleasant, and I don’t even have perfect pitch.

  The dragon shrank into the shape of a tall, thin man in black suit, shirt and tie. He wore dark sunglasses that hid any expression his eyes might reveal. No horns, though. Satan usually reserved those for special occasions, like mixers and costume parties.

  “My lord,” I said, bowing deeply, remembering the advice I always gave others who were preparing for an interview with Big Red: “Don’t screw with Satan. Just be unfailingly respectful and try to get away from him in one piece, as quickly as you can.”

  I touched my side and winced. If only I’d remembered my own advice before mouthing off to him.

  Satan and heights were the only two things I was really afraid of. BOOH used to scare me as well, but no longer. I was even getting a little better with my acrophobia, but I knew my fear of Old Nick would last forever.

  Beezy gave Satan a small wave. With a twitch, he changed his clothing back to his Sidney Greenstreet cum ‘Casablanca’ look. “Thanks for warming the place up.”

  Satan nodded. “Anything for you, old friend.” He didn’t really mean it. Satan didn’t have friends, but if he did, Beelzebub would be his best one. A massive desk and two chairs, one behind, the other before the desk, appeared in the space between us and the Earl of Hell. A light from an indefinable source struck the furniture, like a spotlight for dramatic effect. The rest of the room was black, and to me the space seemed infinite. I knew it was pretty large no matter what. After all, a monster dragon had just been roaming freely in it.

  Executives always have the best offices.

  “Have a seat,” Satan said, as he settled into his chair. Beezy followed suit.

  Of course, there was no chair for me. When there were just the two of us, Satan usually allowed me to sit - though in exceptionally uncomfortable chairs, like that one made entirely out of sharpened pencils, still, a chair is a chair - but with Beezy in the room, the Earl of Hell probably felt that would be inappropriate. Devils are very status-conscious.

  Satan and Beelzebub stared at me in expectation. Despite myself, I barked out a terse “What?”

  And found myself hanging upside down in the air. There was a couple of popping sounds, and two imps appeared. (Imps are vertically-challenged devils.) They stood on my butt as they stabbed me repeatedly with tiny pitchforks.

  “Ow, ow! Shit, that stings!”

  “Decorum, Minion,” Satan merely said then waved his hand. The imps disappeared, and I fell to the floor. Snap went the wrist of my right arm. I’d already exceeded my quota of broken bones for the day, and it wasn’t even noon. Resolving to watch my P’s and Q’s through the rest of the meeting, I squeaked out a pitiful “Sorry, sir.” Hauling myself to my fee
t once more, I bowed again, and said, “What, Lord Satan, the Great and Powerful?”

  Damn! I’m my own worst enemy.

  I saw a tiny smile on Beezy’s face that he quickly repressed. Satan raised his hand again then dropped it to the desk. “Screw it. I don’t have time for this.”

  The Prince of Lies got out of his chair and began pacing. “Gentlemen, we have a problem.”

  “What’s that?” I asked for the third time, rubbing the pain out of my wrist.

  “You mean you haven’t noticed?” Beezy chimed in.

  “What?” That made four.

  “Are you stupid, or just acting like it?” Satan asked. “I know you saw what happened to Old Dependable today.”

  I nodded. Not knowing what to do with my hands, I let them hang awkwardly at my sides. “I was looking for a work order with instructions to fix it when your note came through the tube. Do I need to light Dependable’s pilot or something?”

  Satan frowned, drumming his fingers on the back of his chair. Periodically one of his claws would catch on the leather, tearing it, but he didn’t seem to notice. “This problem is a lot bigger than that.”

  “What?”

  “Minion!” Satan hissed. “If you say ‘what’ one more time, I’ll make you have sex with Uphir.”

  Ugh. Uphir was just about my least favorite demon in Hell. He ran the hospital, aka, the Big Toaster, up on Five. Aside from being an exceptionally unpleasant demon, he delighted in upsetting Flo. Things were bad enough between the two of us these days, and having sex with Uphir, beyond being unimaginably unpleasant, wasn’t likely to help the situation.

  The painful knot in my chest returned. This was happening with fair regularity these days, ever since Flo and I had been estranged, but shaking off my heartache and general self-pity, I turned my attention back to my two bosses. Well, actually, Beezy was my boss, but Satan was his boss, so I considered both of them as my bosses.

  If you think about it, I’m actually pretty high on the organizational chart, to wit:

  I guess that means I have still one more boss, but I’m not allowed to talk about Him, this being Hell and all. I’m not sure, but this apparently places me on the same level in the organization as a solar system.

  Hmmm. Maybe I should gain some weight.

  Of course, this line of reasoning would make Bruce, as Satan’s personal assistant, nearly the equivalent of a galaxy, and I just didn’t buy that. Maybe a black hole.

  Once more I bowed to the Prince of Darkness. “Intimacy with Uphir won’t be necessary, my Lord. Just tell me wha … the situation and how you would like me to proceed.”

  Satan nodded curtly. “Better, Minion.”

  “Come on, Nick,” Beezy said. Beelzebub often called Satan “Nick,” at least to his face. I think it was a sign of their familiarity, or maybe it was a subtle bit of disrespect on Beezy’s part. Well, if anyone could get away with it, my boss was the guy. “Let’s stop playing mine is bigger than yours and get Minion to work.”

  “I was just getting to that, Flyface,” Satan said.

  Flyface. Heh. A good one.

  Beelzebub is not only “Lord of the Flies;” that’s an actual translation of his name from the ancient Semitic.

  Satan waved a hand at the air behind him and a large monitor appeared, showing a schematic of Hell. “Minion, you’ve not had much to do with Hell’s HVAC system over the years, have you?”

  Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning for the uninitiated.

  I thought back to the millions of work orders I’d closed or ignored in my time as Hell’s Super. I shrugged. “Except for replacing a few burners and lighting the occasional pilot light, I guess not. Seems pretty dependable.”

  “It is,” Beezy said. “I designed it myself. I build ’em good,” he said, with a smirk.

  “‘Well,’ Beelzebub,” the Earl of Hell said. “Not ‘good.’”

  “Whatever. In any event, the heating system works flawlessly.”

  “Until recently,” Satan corrected again. “A few hours ago, the system started to act up. I always keep the thermostat at 225 degrees, but the temperature has been dropping.”

  That’s Fahrenheit. No Metric system in Hell. That would make too much sense.

  Beelzebub frowned, making his fez slip forward a little, only to be stopped when it caught on his horns. Without thinking, Beezy shoved it backward. “There’s no design flaw. Until today, the HVAC system has performed like a Swiss clock. This is the first problem we’ve had with it in over two thousand years.”

  “Maybe a pipe is clogged or something,” I offered, trying to be helpful.

  “Maybe,” said the Lord of Hell. “Maybe not. It’s your job to find out.”

  I groaned. This would be worse than fixing the Escalator that bore damned souls from Saint Peter’s desk down through the bowels of Hell. That had been my last really big job, along with rebuilding the Stairway to Paradise, though actually Orson had more to do with that than I did. The Escalator was a discrete if enormous piece of machinery, but the HVAC was a complete system, crisscrossing every section of the Underworld.

  Beezy snorted. “Buck up, Minion. It’s your damnation, remember?”

  With an effort, I suppressed the urge to groan again. A hiccup popped out instead. “Any suggestion on how I should start?”

  Beezy got out of his chair and walked over to Satan’s monitor. “This is a systemic problem, not like a clogged pipe. All of Hell is getting colder. Right now, we’re about five degrees off normal, and the temperature is dropping by the minute.”

  “Five degrees? That doesn’t’ sound like very much, not enough to put Bruce in a cardigan.”

  “Bruce has recently been made a demon,” Satan said with a shrug, “and demons, like devils, are very sensitive to temperature drops. That’s why Beelzebub was dressed for autumn out in my lobby.”

  Beezy nodded. “Five degrees may not seem like much to you, but we feel it. Besides, the temperature is continuing to drop steadily. If this keeps up, in no time we’ll be below 150 degrees, which for Hell is like winter in Vostok.”

  “Where?”

  “Antarctica.”

  “Oh.” I looked over to Satan. “You heated this place up pretty effectively in your dragon form. Couldn’t you do the same for the rest of Hell?”

  The Lord of the Underworld frowned. “Maybe, but I’m not going to play Big Bad Wolf and huff and puff myself silly. Besides, that would just be a workaround. It’s your job to get the system fixed.”

  “May I continue, please?” Beezy didn’t like to be interrupted. If it had just been me, he probably would have sewn my mouth shut, but since Satan was also disrupting his explanation, there wasn’t much the Lord of the Flies could do but try to grab back everyone’s attention. “The HVAC system is a simple balance of opposing forces. Down here on Level Nine, you have the main jets that heat all of Hell. There are jets on other levels, but those are more for torturing the damned than actually heating the Underworld.”

  “On each Circle of Hell, the heat is distributed through a series of ductwork, but between levels, it travels through a single pipe that runs up the Throat of Hell.”

  “Really? I don’t recall ever seeing it.”

  Beezy examined the inside of his right hand; for the first time I noticed a small tuft of hair growing from it. “That’s because I put a glamour on the pipe so no one could see or touch it … or fuck with it. Here,” he said, and thwacked me in the forehead with his palm.

  “Ow!” I said, holding my hand to my smarting brow. “Why’d you do that?”

  “What a wuss!” my boss grumbled. “I just adjusted your vision so you’ll be able to see the pipes and ductwork.”

  “Thanks, I guess.” My head felt like a boxer had just clobbered me. “What, what about the cooling system?” I knew we didn’t use much cold in Hell, but we had some.

  “The system works like a sublimation cooler, rather than an air conditioner,” Beezy explained.

  “B
eg pardon?”

  Beelzebub frowned and scratched his beard with one of his long, black claws. “You know, Minion, I’ve seen squirrels with more mechanical aptitude than you. Let me put it in terms you’ll understand: think ice box instead of refrigerator.”

  “Aha! Gotcha.”

  Sighing, Beezy pointed at a large, stalactite-shaped mass on the upper right of the schematic. “Mount Erebus provides all the cold air and, since cold air falls, it does the same thing as the heater, but in reverse. The heating and cooling pipes between levels are separate, as is most of the ductwork, but they parallel each other. There are also occasional points of cross-over.”

  “Where?”

  “Here, here, here,” Beezy continued pointing at the schematic, and at each touch of his claw, a mark showed. He touched a handful of spots, where hot and cold blended to form something I never imagined existed in Hell: temperate.

  I noted there weren’t very many of them. A temperate zone in Hell was a bit of an oxymoron.

  “Sounds complicated,” I opined.

  Beezy shrugged. “Not really. That’s why it doesn’t break. The heat rises, the cold falls. Usually we want blast-furnace heat and occasionally bone-freezing cold. The few places we don’t, the furnace and cooler work together. The system has never failed.”

  “So what is wrong now?” Satan asked. I don’t think he was really interested. In fact, he was tapping one of his cloven hooves impatiently. Still, as a manager, he had at least to feign interest in what Beezy was saying.

  Beezy shrugged. “Dunno. I would have sworn it was impossible to break the HVAC, unless someone did it intentionally.”

  I thought back to the Escalator incident. The Free Hellions, led by the Three Stooges, had attempted to break the Escalator in order to engineer events that would allow them to escape Hell. I didn’t think a human could damage a system he couldn’t see, and I couldn’t imagine a devil or demon who would want Hell colder than it was. “Do you expect foul play?”

  “Always,” Beelzebub said. “This is Hell, after all. But if you mean do I think someone intentionally damaged the HVAC, well, I simply don’t know. You need to check the mechanics of the system first, though, before you spend any time looking for a saboteur.”