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
I reached the window by standing on a heavy chair made of some kind of animal bones. But even when I got to the windowsill I still couldn’t tell anything about the time. We seemed to be at the bottom of one of the soaring towers, a few hundred feet beneath the tangled forest of spires and connecting bridges I’d seen when I came out of the Terminus. One of the city’s massive black walls loomed nearby, effectively cutting off my view of anything but the giant stones themselves, as though a starless night had been tipped on its side and shoved up next to the window. The light that painted the courtyard in red could have been anything, a day beacon, a dangerous fire nearby, or even just the glow of one of the open lava pits that pocked Pandaemonium like titanic gopher holes.
As I shakily climbed down from the window, awkward with only one hand and my whole right arm still throbbing with pain, I noticed something lying on top of a broad chest at the foot of the bed. Facedown in the middle of a gentleman’s grooming assortment, tweezers and brushes and such, lay a heavy hand mirror. I hadn’t seen my own face since I’d been in Hell. I’d grown quite familiar with my gray-and-black skin, patterned like some creature of the African Veldt, even fond of it (because it was tough as buffalo hide) but my features were still a mystery to me, except that they felt human to the touch. Hell was very short of reflecting surfaces; almost no clear standing water, of course, and most metal too defaced by rust and corrosion to show a reflection. I lifted the mirror with a mixture of unease and curiosity.
I got a shock, too, I can tell you.
It wasn’t that the face didn’t match the skin, because it did. The dark gray and light gray had the same streaky pattern, and black stripes rose from my jaw on either side of my mouth, over my eyes, and up into curls that looked a little like Maori tattoos across my forehead. The mouth was fanged, but I knew that already, and even the eyes were pretty much par for the course: a pale, goatish orange with vertical slits like a cat’s. But the astonishing part was that it was my face under it all; Bobby Dollar, immediately recognizable, like a hastily painted stolen car. No shit. The demon-body amounted to no more than camouflage, and I had real doubts that it would fool anyone who had met up with my earthly self—a group that included Grand Duke Eligor, the monster I was planning to rob.