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
Hell is a big cylinder. Imagine somebody dug a hole down into hardened lava, all the way down to where it gets squishy and murderously hot again. Now, remember those cake tins Grandma Flossie used to send you at Christmas with ugly-ass fruitcakes in them, year after year? Take a near infinite number of those tins and stack them in the hole on top of each other, so the bottom is in molten goo and the top of each tin is the bottom of the next. That’s pretty much the infernal layout. There are cities on every level but also lots of wilderness roamed by bandits, monsters, and worse stuff. Remember, it’s Hell, so they made it big. Even with the more enlightened sentencing laws of the last hundred years or so, it still has to hold billions upon billions.
And I had to get to the top, or near it, to reach Caz. I knew there was a sort of elevator system—they call them “lifters”—that ran right up through the middle of Hell’s layers like the string of a necklace, but that was like knowing there’s an elevator in Montana when you’re on the Oregon coast. The famous rivers of Hell, Styx and Acheron and the others, also provide a way to travel, but first you have to be near a river, which we weren’t. So at least while I handled my boss Temuel’s errand, I had to make my way up through Hell one slice at a time. Even with Gob’s help, it took a couple of days just to find our way to the next level of Abaddon.
To my surprise, Gob decided to stick with me once we reached the next level, a dismal wasteland of stone and mud and smoking sulfur so godawful even the damned avoided the place. There were settlements, of course, but they were like the smallest, poorest, hottest, driest cattle stations in the Australian outback, if someone had pounded on them for a week with a fifty ton hammer made of compacted fly shit.
Don’t get me wrong: Abaddon was better than most of Hell, but it was still fucking horrible. I don’t know how long we climbed through its levels, from one parched landscape the color of dried shit to another, past ugliness and misery so vast I stopped paying attention, but it must have been at least a week before we found ourselves somewhere different.