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Back Happy Hour In Hell
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

Weird and new as all this was, I had very little time to drink it in, because as soon as I stepped out of the mist, I was surrounded closely by noise and stink, bumped and jostled by some of the ugliest fuckers you’ve ever seen.

“Worms!” A froggy-looking guy with no back legs waved a sheaf of blackened, muddy sticks in the air. “Crispy like you like ’em!”

“Gin! Swaller of gin, just a spit.” This from a guy who looked as though he’d been sawed apart by a very bad magician and put back together by the magician’s amateur-surgeon brother. His off-kilter eyes caught me staring. “You, there. You look like you need one. Guarantee you’ll not have a clear thought again ’til last lamp. Only a spit!”

Last lamp. Lameh’s inserted memories stirred. There was no daylight or moonlight here, so first lamp was lit to signify morning, a second at midday, then one of those was put out and they went back to a single lamp until day’s end. (The fiery cracks in the walls, which provided the only brightness after day’s end, were called “afterlights.”) And a “spit” was an iron coin. The gin was almost certainly made from something horrible and did not tempt me in the least. Hell is remarkably realistic compared to Heaven, which I guess makes sense—real nakedness, real food, real shit, real money, you name it. The fairy lights and muted, pastels of the Celestial City were looking better and better by comparison, and I’d only been in Hell for a few heartbeats.

The gin peddler shuffled nearer to me, offering me a cup that dangled on a piece of rawhide so long that the cup had been dragging in the dirt. I was feeling pretty thirsty, but even if that filthy thing had been the Holy Grail I wouldn’t have lifted it to my mouth—I could smell the ghastly odor of the “gin” past the thousands of other stinks of the place, and no oblivion was worth that. (I really thought that then. I changed my mind later. In fact, by the time I’d been in Hell awhile, I was slurping down whatever I could get, just like back in the real world. If there’s ever a place where a person needs a stiff drink occasionally, it’s Hell. Hell and parts of Oklahoma.)

But the guy with the booze was interrupted before he could finish his spiel, shoved rudely out of the way by something very large that loomed above me like an arriving bus. The newcomer was female, in an Alice’s-Duchess sort of way. In short, she looked like a bitter manatee in a wig.