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
Order was restored, but it only got worse for Nero from there. Time and again he would begin to sing and be pelted by garbage and shit or knocked down by stones, some of them big as a baby’s head. I distinctly heard one of them break his arm, but Caym wouldn’t let him stop, although it was harder and harder to distinguish his singing from shrieks of pain and terror. I kept sneaking looks at Caz. Her face showed no emotion whatsoever, but Eligor was clearly enjoying the spectacle, laughing and whispering with Caym. At last, nearing what seemed to be the middle of the opera, a thunderous barrage of larger missiles, great jagged things that might have been broken paving stones, crushed Nero to the stage, and though he struggled to get up it was hopeless. At this point things went completely mad. Members of the audience leaped up on stage and began to kick him and beat him with the largest pieces of stone. Nero offered no resistance—it all had the feeling of a ritual enacted many times. Even with the musicians still playing gamely along, it sounded like someone jumping up and down on a barrel of eggs.
As Nero was reduced to a bloody wet tatter I looked up to see Eligor saying goodbye to Caym. Caz was already gone.
“That was his best performance yet,” a man said in a loud, braying voice behind me. “Folded him up before they even got to the part about Seneca.”
In other words, this happened all the time. Two thousand years Nero had been in Hell, and they still humiliated him in public on a regular basis, not to mention tormenting and destroying his body over and over again. What would they do to me if they found out? After all, Emperor Nero had been on their side.
On the way home Vera was quieter than usual, and although she stroked my hair as she liked to do while we sped through the red-flickering streets of Pandaemonium, she did it roughly, distracted perhaps by what she had seen, so that again and again she pricked me with her fingernails. As for me, I should have been as excited and terrified by seeing Caz as I had been during those first moments after she entered the theater, but instead I was suddenly exhausted. Too much for one day. I was finding it hard to keep my eyes open as the roar of the steam boiler and the red strobe of the city lights dragged me down into a half-sleep. For a moment I imagined myself on that stage, broken and bleeding, laughed at by Hell’s leading citizens, but even that horrific image couldn’t keep me from being pulled down, down, down.