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 already told you what happened on the Neronian Bridge. Here’s what happened when I stepped off it and into the hot, thick mist at the edge of Hell.
I had been expecting something like the old border crossing into East Berlin or maybe even the Black Gate into Mordor, but instead entering the Bad Place was as easy as stepping out of a taxicab—at least at first.
From what the guardian Lameh had planted in my memory, I knew I must be in the Abaddon levels, somewhere in the upper middle of Hell. But if this was upper middle, I knew for sure I didn’t want to visit anything lower, because even before I could see any of it, I could smell it. Abaddon stank. I don’t mean simple, ordinary foul odors like shit or rotting meat. I mean a combination of every foul smell that biology and geology could create, blended into a heady bouquet that combined not only all that a nose would normally detest, but wafts of things so odd and unexpected—like copper and burning hay, just to throw out a couple of examples—that I simply could not get used to it. I never really did, either. The architects of the underworld were, excuse the pun, fiendishly clever: They knew that a single stench, or even a million unchanging stenches, can become familiar after a while. But small changes can keep anything new, no matter how horrible. As long as I was there, I never learned to ignore the stink.
As I left the bridge behind and walked through the swirl of stinging, acid mist, voices filled the hot, damp near-darkness, some human, some animal, some horribly in-between—shrieks, moans, arguments, even tatters of laughter that sounded as though they had been jerked painfully out of whatever spawned them. The noise of the damned. Pretty much what you’d expect. The air was horribly hot and slimy, muggy as the worst August day in the New York subway times a thousand. Already I could feel the gears grinding at the interface between what my mind expected my body to do—pump gallons of sweat as quickly as possible—and what the demon body actually did, which was nothing. This was normal, you see, and the body I wore treated it that way. One hundred and forty degrees and drippy as a Florida swamp? No problem.
Lovely day, sir and madam. Expect it might rain diarrhea later so I brought my brolly, eh what? Cheerio!
As I emerged from the mists near the bridge I could see for the first time where I actually was.