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

  Great. He’s not giving me any clue as to how I could fix it. “Any suggestions on where I should start, what I should look for?”

  Beezy shrugged. “The temperature appears to be dropping uniformly throughout Hell. Like I said earlier, it’s not a specific problem; it’s a systemic one.”

  “And what does that mean?” I mean, I knew what it meant. “Systemic” had been in my personal lexicon for a long time. I just didn’t know how this demonstration of my impressive vocabulary could help me diagnose the problem.

  “It means the problem is likely to have nothing to do with the transportation of heat or cold, but with the sources of each.”

  “Meaning what exactly?” I was trying my best to absorb the situation, but a paper towel would have done better.

  “Erebus is either putting out too much cold air, or the heating elements, mainly on Nine as I told you, though there are repeaters on each of the upper floors, are not putting out enough heat. I don’t think it’s one of the repeaters, since the temperature is dropping on every level, even down here. Still you need to check them out.”

  I sighed. “Of course I do.”

  “Most likely, it’s the source burners or Erebus itself.”

  “Could it be both?”

  “Unlikely,” Beezy said with a frown, “but possible, I suppose.”

  I stared at the screen. Beezy had marked it up so much, it looked like a rabid Etch A Sketch. “Could I have a copy of this schematic?”

  Satan had had enough. He snapped his fingers, the screen disappeared, and a scroll formed in his hand. “Here,” he said, handing it to me.

  “Hey!” Beezy protested. “That’s mine. My design. You shouldn’t be handing it out to just anyone.”

  “He’s not just anyone,” Satan pointed out. “He’s the one who has to fix the problem. And it’s not your design. Remember: work for hire. I own all intellectual property rights down here.”

  Beezy turned bright red, redder than usual, which was about as red as a maraschino cherry. His mouth popped open then just as abruptly closed.

  I was fascinated. I’d seen the two of them together only a few times before. It had always been clear to me that Beelzebub wasn’t afraid of Satan, but clearly Satan was the boss, and Beezy knew it.

  And so did Satan. A smug little smile formed on his cruel mouth.

  What a sweetheart.

  Satan gave me a withering look, and I shivered. Right. He can read my mind.

  And the Prince of Hell gave a slight nod of his head.

  “I … I assume this is top priority.”

  Satan grinned, flashing his sharp canines at me. “Of course it is! All of my work assignments are, as you very well know. Though,” he frowned, as a sudden thought came to him, “this one is perhaps more important than usual.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked, as I unrolled the schematic and examined it more closely. “Can’t everybody just bundle up until the HVAC gets fixed?”

  Beezy snorted as he made eye contact with Satan. “He doesn’t get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “The metaphysical ramifications,” Satan responded, running a hand over the rosewood desktop.

  “How can a little cold have metaphysical ramifications?”

  Both devils looked at me as if I had a screw loose. “Do you mean,” Beezy asked in astonishment, “you’ve never heard the expression, ‘a cold day in Hell?’”

  “Well, sure. Back when I was alive, I used it all the time. Like, ‘it will be a cold day in Hell before Congress can work together,’ or ‘it will be a cold day in Hell before I’ll be nice to that jerk’ or … ” I stopped. My stomach felt a little queasy. “Do you, do you mean … ”

  “Yes, Minion,” Satan said in impatience. “If things get really cold down here, all of those casual statements you humans used to make will start coming true.”

  “But why?”

  Satan lifted a paperweight off his desk and threw it at me. It bounced off my skull, and I crumpled to the floor. “Listen! I don’t make the rules. Well, usually I do, but this time I didn’t. It’s one of … His.” Satan looked upward, a sullen look on his face. “I don’t know why, but if you don’t get the system back in balance, these unlikely things will start happening just as surely as Beezy will get fatter or BOOH will drool on my carpet.”

  “Speaking of BOOH,” I thought quickly, as I climbed off the floor. “I’ll probably need to get around Hell really fast to work on this, so … ”

  “No.”

  “Come on,” I whined. “BOOH and I are a great team.”

  “That alone would be reason enough, but right now you don’t need him. Your work starts down here, on Level Nine.”

  “Really?” I had never been allowed to go anywhere on Nine except the waiting room and Satan’s office.

  “Yes, really. Beelzebub,” the Devil (capital D) said to his lieutenant. “I’m tired of this meeting. I’m going to take a sauna. Finish up.” With that, Satan disappeared in a puff of smoke.

  Beezy grumbled something in Assyrian. I think it was a curse, but it was one I didn’t know. “Give me the diagram.” I handed it over.

  “On the upper levels of Hell, you’ll need to check that the heating and cooling pipes are working properly.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “On a heating pipe, put a finger to it. If your finger burns off, things are working right.”

  “Swell.”

  “Don’t worry,” he chortled. “It will grow back.”

  It’s one of the few benefits of being dead and in Hell. I heal better than Wolverine, as I’d already demonstrated many times since breakfast. “Do I test the cold pipes the same way?”

  Beezy’s laughter made my skin crawl. “No,” he said, still chuckling. “What you do is … ” My boss whispered in my ear.

  “No way!”

  “It’s either that or your dick. Which would you prefer?”

  I looked at Beelzebub sullenly. “Fine. I’ll do it your way.”

  “Thought you might. Now, since the main jets that heat the Underworld are here on Nine, you might as well start on this level.”

  “How do I get to them?”

  “There’s a door immediately across from Bruce’s desk.”

  “I’ve seen it. I thought I wasn’t allowed to go in there.”

  “Normally you’re not. That’s where the Traitors are located.”

  “Ah,” I said with sudden understanding. I’d always wondered where Judas, Cain and the others were kept.

  “Go through the door - Bruce will unlock it for you - walk past the Traitors, and at the far end of their, uh, quarters, you’ll find a door. Go through, and you’ll be in the boiler room. Meanwhile, I’ll talk Satan into letting you use BOOH.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. Normally, I’d let you struggle through this without any help, but a cold day in Hell is just about the most cataclysmic thing imaginable. Satan knows this. He just said no out of reflex. Anyway, I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. I mean, literally, don’t mention it. I don’t want anyone thinking I’m getting soft or anything.” Beezy rolled up the schematic and handed it back to me. “You’d better not lose this. I don’t care what Mr. High and Mighty says, this is mine, and I don’t want it falling into just anybody’s hands.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. You wouldn’t want someone like Edison or Ford improving your design and selling it to Satan.”

  Beezy gave me a half-hearted shove that sent me sprawling. “Minion, I swear, well frequently, but I swear you have a death wish.”

  The floor and I were constant companions, so I was not particularly fazed by finding myself on it once again. “No, not really. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.”

  The Lord of the Flies grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and hauled me to my feet. He snickered. “True. That would be overkill. Bruce!” he yelled, as he opened the door to Satan’s office. “
Let Minion into the Traitors’ quarters.”

  Bruce looked as if he’d been slapped. “Only the Lord of Hell can authorize … urp!”

  Satan’s secretary was suspended in mid-air, grasping at his neck, gasping for breath. Beside me, Beezy was squeezing together his right thumb and index finger. He flicked his wrist, and Bruce flew across the room, going splat against the door he’d just been told to open. “So, Demon, Third Class: open the fucking door.”

  “kkkkkk … kkkkaaaa … kkkkaaaa”

  “What are you doing, coughing up a hair ball?”

  “kkkkaaaa … kkkkaaaan … kkkkaaaan do, Lord Buh, Beelzebub,” Bruce finally managed to say.

  “Then open it.”

  “Yessir.”

  I didn’t particularly dislike Bruce, except for the fact that he was an officious twit. Still, I took a perverse pleasure in watching my boss put the little jerk in his place. I also admired the efficiency with which he did it. One thing I always said about Beelzebub was that he didn’t mess around.

  As Bruce unlocked the door, I turned to Beezy. “Is there anything in particular I should look for?”

  “Just ask the fire demon who runs the place. He’ll show you around. By the way,” he said, as an afterthought, “Surtr’s an old one, and an odd one. I think he’s going senile, so if he acts a little weird, just put up with it.”

  “Surtr?” I asked in astonishment. “The Surtr? Ragnarok, end-of-the-world Surtr?”

  “Yeah. Satan bought him off Odin about a thousand years ago, around the time Christianity had pretty much closed down the whole Norse mythology franchise. Got Surtr at a fire sale,” he added in an off-hand manner.

  “Bad joke.”

  “Couldn’t resist. Besides, it’s pretty much what happened. Odin was desperate to pick up a few bucks. He’d already sold most of his assets, including Valhalla.”

  “Really? Who bought it?”

  “I can’t remember, but I think they sold it to Disney about twenty years ago. Mickey Inc. turned it into a theme park.”

  “Valhalla’s a theme park?” I asked in amazement.

  “Yeah, in one of those Scandinavian countries. Valhalla’s mostly for guys who like to drink a lot of beer and mead and stuff, eat shanks of meat and throw them on the floor, watch the dogs chew up the bones. I popped in there once to check things out. It was pretty boring.”

  “Well, I bet drinking is a popular activity there. What else can they do in the winter?”

  “Ski and shiver, I suspect.”

  “Yeah.” I thought about the fire demon being sold to put a few coins in Odin’s pocket. “Too bad about Surtr, though.” I shook my head. “How the mighty falleth.”

  “You said it.” Beelzebub mumbled, picking his teeth with a claw. He would know all about falling mightily, since he himself was once a Semitic god … or a fallen angel … or both. “Get to work,” he said, disappearing in an explosion. The bodies of dead flies lay on the carpet where he’d just been standing.

  Chapter 4

  I stepped inside and closed the door. In front of me was a corridor, really just a two-yard span of gray concrete between two sets of cages, each no bigger than eight by eight feet. I couldn’t decide if the area looked more like lockdown in Alcatraz or the ape house of a Nineteenth Century zoo.

  There were eight cages total, but only those on the left of the corridor were occupied. The first one I came to held a butt-naked, long-haired dude hanging by his neck from a rope tied to a small tree that was growing through the concrete of the cell. A dinner plate was floating in mid-air, right within arm’s reach. On the plate were what looked like silver coins. Periodically, the man would take one of the coins and swallow it. This would put his body into spasms, and he would jerk on the rope as if he were choking. I waited a few seconds and heard a plink. Looking down, I spied the coin on the ground. The man took another coin from the plate and swallowed it. Again, ding, like change coming out of a vending machine, the coin fell to the ground. I imagined when he consumed all thirty coins - I was pretty sure there were thirty of them - they would be transported back to the plate, and he’d start eating again.

  I left Judas to his meal and looked in the next cage. Here I found an aged man dressed in knickers and a baseball cap. Three of the four sides of his cage were covered with blackboards. The old guy was using a stick of chalk to write, “I will not disrupt class by making unpleasant noises.” Each time he touched the chalk to the board, the most irritating screech you can imagine shattered what would otherwise have been an almost eerie silence. The high-pitched grating was augmented by an amplifier as big as a refrigerator in the center of the room.

  This was the boy who invented the Screech, and he was one of two recent additions to Level Nine. As a former teacher, well, university professor to be completely accurate, I’d had the Screech happen to me a time or two. By the time students had reached college or graduate student age, they tended not to intentionally make that sound, but it could still be caused accidentally. Of course, I’d been dead so long teachers had probably switched to holograms, which no doubt posed aggravations of their own, but it didn't matter that the Screech was obsolete. In its time, the sound was unbelievably irritating. I just hated it and was glad to see the human who invented the quintessential classroom disruption being punished for it.

  Screech Boy finished filling the last blackboard, then he set down his chalk, picked up an eraser, wiped down all the boards, and started again. Wheeeeeeeeee.

  I found the second recent addition to the club of traitors in the next cell. Hitler was hanging wallpaper, using his mustache to spread the paste. I noted that he was a really shitty wallpaper hanger, even worse than me, and that’s saying something. I don’t know why this was a particularly awful version of Hell, after seeing Judas and Screech boy, but things bother some people more than other. Hanging wallpaper would be unpleasant for me, but it was clearly Hell for Adolf.

  In the fourth cage was a bestial looking fellow. He had what appeared to be a bright red rash on his face. The inmate was flipping through a family album. I could just spy the figures of Adam, Eve and their first two sons. One of the boys was smiling placidly. He was holding what looked like a 4-H trophy, and his parents looked down on him with obvious pride. The other boy was glaring at his brother, murder in his eyes. In the sky, a beneficent being looked down upon them all. “Mom always liked you best,” Cain muttered, sniffling.

  Eight cages total. Four empty. Plenty of room for growth, I thought, as I reached the end of the corridor. There I found a closed door. At eye height was a small panel that looked like something the bouncer at a speakeasy would open to make certain there were no cops outside. The door was unlocked, though, so I ignored the panel, decided against knocking, and let myself into the boiler room.

  “Gaaaaaaaaaaah!” It was hotter than Hell in there, which made sense, as I thought on it, since it was the source for all of the Underworld’s heat.

  Beezy had called this the boiler room, but I didn’t see evidence of water anywhere. There were plenty of pipes, sure, that went this way and that; they looked like a jumble of linguini. But there wasn’t a boiler. Instead, there were rows upon rows of burners, each one superheating air, which then passed into a pipe above it, bound for some destination elsewhere in Hell. Odd, though: I didn’t smell any sulfur. I wonder what they burned: natural gas?

  We humans think natural gas stinks too, but it really doesn’t. It’s completely odorless. On Earth, an additive to the gas gives it that smell so you’ll know if your pilot light goes out, a handy piece of information if you don’t particularly relish dying of asphyxiation. Down here, well, we’re all dead anyway, so adding smell to gas would be unnecessary, although in keeping with the spirit of the place. I supposed that all the sulfur Management burned in Hell was deemed sufficient to provide the necessary olfactory effect.

  The boiler room was a cavernous space. The cement-colored ceiling was high above me, and the floor was as big as a football field. It had
to be in order to accommodate the thousands of burners. They looked like blue flowers. Very hot flowers - a field of them.

  That’s when I saw a row of sputtering jets. They were all but extinguished. Hovering over them was a fiery giant.

  “Dear, dear,” muttered the creature in an ancient voice, a voice ravaged by millennia of heat exposure. Or maybe he was a smoker, like Dora. Dora, the head of Parts, was a chain smoker, and this guy sounded a bit gravelly, like her. As the flaming head bent lower to examine the jet, I saw a large cancer stick - no filter - sticking out of his mouth.

  Surtr, for surely this was he, reached toward one of the flames, as if to nurse it back to health. Instead, the flame went out entirely. The fire demon moved to the other side of the jet, nattering to himself all the while. That’s when he saw me. I guess I surprised him, because he took two steps back and rose to his full height.

  Yep, he was a big one, twenty, twenty-five feet high at least. But he’d seen better years. Even standing up, he seemed a little hunched around the shoulders, and his flames, while still pretty impressive, guttered out periodically on different parts of his body. He was hot enough to scorch my face though, even from fifteen feet away. I wondered, as I shielded my eyes from the heat, why the little wire-frame glasses he wore didn’t melt.

  “Sorry, Mr. Surtr, sir,” I said, as politely as I could. I didn’t care how old this coot was, he could melt me like candle wax, and I didn’t want to risk an insult. “Sorry if I startled you.”

  Surtr cocked his head to one side, then to the other. He was looking at me as if he’d never seen such an odd creature in his life.

  “Who are you?” he rasped. Damn he was old!

  “I work for Beezy, uh, Beelzebub. He sent me down to check out the burners. Is everything okay?” I asked in genuine concern as another jet winked out.

  “‘Is everything okay?’” the old demon hissed. “Does it look like everything’s okay?”

  “Uh, no. I was just being polite.”