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
Things swam past me in the murk, some of them quite depressingly solid, serpentine forms like huge eels or something fished out of Loch Ness, but others that were scarcely more than dark streaks in the water or cold currents with a definable shape. I didn’t see any of Riprash’s fang jellies close up, but I saw something large in the dark distance that looked like a floating circus tent trying to fold and unfold itself as it floated along. I didn’t waste much time thinking about it or any of the others, because it seemed obvious to me that the bottom of a river in Hell wasn’t likely to be a safe place. The only thing I could do to improve my odds was get to land as soon as possible.
As elsewhere in Hell, the animal life was as distorted and depressing as the more complex creatures. As I reached the bottom and began to trudge slowly across the mud in what I believed was the general direction of shore (and if I was wrong I was going to be in serious trouble) I found myself stepping carefully around spiny things that could have been sea urchins if they hadn’t been in a river and five feet wide. Flat, disklike crabs with disturbingly human faces skittered in and out of the rocks on the bottom, sending up little puffs of silt as they dodged away from predators that were little more than toothy jaws with fins. Once I stopped, despite my limited amount of air, and waited while a vast shadow passed right over me with a slow flick of its tail. I couldn’t see it clearly, but it was covered in bony plates and had a mouth big enough to swallow Bobby Dollar and a few other folk at the same time. I had no illusions that I’d be able to outswim or outfight it—the thing was the size of a school bus—so I just hunkered down. It was a long wait, but at last the living submarine moved on, and I could continue. Later I think I even saw a hogsquid, which truly did look a bit like a my friend Fatback in his pig form, if Fatback was as big as the payload of a tanker truck and had twenty-foot tentacles growing out of his mouth. Fortunately for me, the ugly bastard was too busy rooting up and swallowing doomed creatures from the murky river bottom to notice me.