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
Watery light all around me, dirty glass, stainless steel tables striped with old blood, ancient linoleum brown with the dried scum of countless vile fluids. Hanging above the operating table on which I was strapped was a gallery of machines that would have made Torquemada flinch: drills and bone saws and claspers and graspers whose purposes I couldn’t even grasp, but whose rusted, stained surfaces spoke volumes.
“Or if you’re more of a traditionalist,” said Eligor’s voice, “we could try this.”
The light dimmed. Now there was only a single torch, just bright enough to reveal that the ancient stone floor around me boiled with crawling things. The walls, too, were alive with moving, clicking shapes. I gasped and jerked, but I couldn’t get up, let alone away.
“How about Surrealism? You like all that 20th century stuff, don’t you?”
I was stretched in a dozen directions, my eyes impossibly far apart, binocular vision in two separate directions. A vast mouth had replaced the pale ceiling above my head, lips as big as the front end of a car that giggled and made kissing noises and murmured things I couldn’t quite hear while a fine mist of saliva fell down onto my face. Spiders with the heads of birds and birds with the heads of medieval harlequins hopped and fluttered all around me. The lips made a choking noise, then rounded into an “o” and something gray and ropy and as big as a gorilla began to climb down from between the teeth, eyes floating around in its body like bubbles in a bag of liquid.
“Or maybe you’re beginning to appreciate the original theme,” Eligor said, and suddenly the hotel conference room snapped back into being around me. “You see, it doesn’t really matter. You’re not in a place, Doloriel—you’re in my place. And you will tell me where the feather is. It’s only a matter of time, and we’ve got . . . forever.”
Great roiling, billows of crematory flame leaped from the walls, red and yellow and orange, the same hideous orange as Eligor’s eyes. I couldn’t see Eligor anymore, though. I couldn’t see anything but the flames.
I felt my skin charring. I felt it dry and then crack, then burn away. I felt my nerves become blackened wires, my muscle tissues shrivel and catch fire, my very bones burst into flames. I felt just what you would feel as you burn to death, a level of shrilling pain in every fiber that cannot even be described, agony beyond anything I could have imagined. And I kept feeling it. It went on. It went on, and on, and on.