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Chapters (60)
  1. DAW Books Presents
  2. HAPPY HOURINHELL
  3. Copyright page
  4. Contents
  5. Dedication
  6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  7. prologue
  8. one
  9. two
  10. three
  11. four
  12. five
  13. six
  14. interlude
  15. seven
  16. eight
  17. nine
  18. ten
  19. eleven
  20. twelve
  21. interlude
  22. thirteen
  23. fourteen
  24. interlude
  25. fifteen
  26. sixteen
  27. seventeen
  28. eighteen
  29. nineteen
  30. twenty
  31. twenty-one
  32. interlude
  33. twenty-two
  34. twenty-three
  35. twenty-four
  36. twenty-five
  37. twenty-six
  38. twenty-seven
  39. twenty-eight
  40. twenty-nine
  41. thirty
  42. thirty-one
  43. thirty-two
  44. thirty-three
  45. thirty-four
  46. thirty-five
  47. thirty-six
  48. thirty-seven
  49. thirty-eight
  50. thirty-nine
  51. forty
  52. forty-one
  53. forty-two
  54. forty-three
  55. forty-four
  56. forty-five
  57. forty-six
  58. forty-seven
  59. forty-eight
  60. epilogue

Obviously, that was better than being actively tortured, but only for the first thousand or so hours, after which I began to go a little crazy. I know, I know, you’re saying, “Hey, he’s already said he was tortured for hundreds of years or something, and now this.” You’re right, time does pass in Hell, even if it passes differently than in the real world, and the subjective time I’d experienced would have made at least a bunch of years of earth-time, but the key word here is “subjective”—as long as I was Eligor’s prisoner, I was out of normal time altogether. He could make it feel like whatever he wanted. It was entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that this was still the same morning of the day I entered his hospitable clutches.

Still, for the first time since I heard the grand duke’s voice and knew he’d caught me, I felt something a bit like hope. Not much, but he’d offered me a deal. It might be just another trick, but the mere fact that he’d taken a break from flaying my skin and boiling my nerves like vermicelli suggested he wasn’t sure what to do with me. Paradoxically, my threat to let him torture me to death was keeping me alive, at least for the moment.

I wasn’t bluffing, either. I had realized, somewhere in the worst of it, that my situation was truly hopeless. Eligor was just too strong. I couldn’t escape him, I couldn’t fight. The only thing I could do, I realized in that cauldron of pain, was suffer. But I could keep on doing it if I had to. Yes, I would beg for mercy. Yes, I would tell him anything, say anything. But as long as I kept refusing to actually do what he wanted me to do, he could only subject me to more torture. He could torment and kill Caz in front of me, but he could do that to her whether I helped him or not. The only way I could do anything for her was by refusing to do what he wanted and forcing him to bargain.

So I hung, or floated, or lay there suspended in nothingness, forever or even longer, trying to build up my strength for when the hurting would start again. And I knew it would start, because I would have to prove to Eligor that I wasn’t bluffing. I would have to make him give up on pain.

It started again. I won’t bother to describe it. After a few millennia, even Eligor seemed to get bored and left me to the eager attention of something named Doctor Teddy, which looked like a plush bear toy but had the stunted fingers of a human child and the eyes and whisky breath of a terminal alcoholic.