Chapters (60)
- DAW Books Presents
- HAPPY HOURINHELL
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Dedication
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- prologue
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- interlude
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- interlude
- thirteen
- fourteen
- interlude
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- interlude
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- thirty-eight
- thirty-nine
- forty
- forty-one
- forty-two
- forty-three
- forty-four
- forty-five
- forty-six
- forty-seven
- forty-eight
- epilogue
The trio of demons dragged me down long corridors echoing with screams and less articulate noises, past room after room, each one a laboratory where new kinds of pain were devised and put to use. I saw prisoners torn, smashed, pulled to pieces, scalded with steam, boiled into nerve-spaghetti and then stretched on hot wires until the nerves vibrated like plucked violin strings in screams I could feel without hearing. On we trudged, through long stretches of flickering darkness, past horror after moaning, gurgling horror, until what little command I had over my thoughts began to slip again. It felt pointless to keep struggling, to try to stay sane. Why fight? Even if I got out of here somehow, Hell was practically endless, and I still had to walk right into my enemy’s stronghold and try to steal Caz right from under the grand duke’s nose, then escape him and all his power and somehow get back out of Hell again.
The word for that, it seemed pretty clear, was “impossible.” I hadn’t thought it was a great plan even before I got to Hell, but as my friends often tell me, I have a tendency to be way the fuck too optimistic.
At last, after I had been dragged past too many rooms full of shrieking meat to care anymore, we arrived at a desk in front of a big, black door. The female creature sitting behind the desk had a lovely golden-curled head like a postcard angel, but the rest of her body was a giant centipede’s, and she had to coil her segmented body around the arms of the chair to stay seated properly behind the desk. She eyed my captors with suspicion.
“Wha?” The golden centipede girl had the slurred voice of an ancient rummy or a punchdrunk fighter. “Wha you want?”
“We have to see the Block, lovely one,” said Bird. “We need to show him.”
“Nah gon’ habben.” I could see now that the reason the receptionist (or whatever she was) talked that way was because she had a mouth full of smaller centipedes. A couple of them fell out onto the desk and then began to climb their way back up her body, heading toward the mouth. “The Block do’ wanna be disthurh . . . disturh . . .” She paused to gulp down the ones who’d returned, then lifted a pincered claw to keep the rest from making an escape in the confusion. “Disturbed.”
“Oh, he doesn’t?” snarled Porcupine, but Bird waved a feathered claw.
“He’ll want to see this, sweetling. He truly will.”