I grabbed him by the throat and squeezed—perhaps a little harder than one should squeeze their friend’s throat—snarling, “You knew it was me out there battling your little creations on the bridge, and yet you still continued your little game?”
“No, no, no . . .” Jova sputtered. “I heard the squawk of those bat-vulture things. That is the signal that someone is coming, and it is time to test their fear response. I didn’t know it was you, I swear!”
“So you just hide like a little cowardly bogeyman and wait for them to fall off the bridge?”
Jova coughed, either uncomfortably from my grip, or his conscience was goading him. “I am so focused on projecting a realistic image,” he said, “that I do not even think about who is on the bridge. Not all of them have fallen. Some have given in to their fear, you know.”
“And that makes me feel better how?” I asked.
“I am sorry,” he said.
“Apology accepted,” I said, smacking him on the back of his head. I nodded and released him from my grip, my anger slowly ebbing. “You have gotten even better at being the Bogeyman since Port Royal,” I said. “Even though the Blade of Truth tipped me off as to your ruse, I swear I could actually smell the stench of carrion about that dragon.”
“That really was the smell of carrion,” Jova said, shrugging sheepishly. “This is Hell, Sirius, so it is actually hard to find material that doesn’t smell like carrion, or dung, if you know what I mean.”
“How did you manage to get your little fear study all set up anyway?”
Jova smiled. “Good question,” he answered. “Justice helped me set it up. And I have to say, the Lord of the Underworld was quite receptive. Thought it was a great idea! You know, he is really not such a bad guy.”
“He tortures souls for eternity.”
“I mean besides that!” Jova said. “We all have a job to do. You kill people for a living. Your dad and the Grim Reaper are on a first-name basis. Are you really being judgmental?”
He did have a point. I looked back at the bridge. “What happened to the ones that came before me?”
Jova shrugged uncomfortably. “Sirius,” he said, “we are in Hell. It is not like we are talking about choirboys coming through here, you know what I’m saying?”
“None of them were from Immortal Divorce Court, were they?” I asked. “Can’t say they mete out justice there so fairly all the time . . .”
“No,” Jova answered. “Even the Lord of the Underworld was okay with keeping them out of my experiment. He figured they had all suffered enough at the hands of their ex-wives—present company excluded, of course.”
“Of course,” I said wryly. “Have you seen Garlic?”
Jova nodded and motioned me toward the gate. “And it’s time you did as well,” he said. “You have got to end this with the Lord of the Underworld. And I am going to arrange a meeting between you two. Does that sound good? ” He saw the look of concern on my face. “Considering you are in his territory, and it’s about to get a whole lot, shall we say, warmer, it is the only choice you have.”
I told you I make the choices for you, the voice in my head said. I nodded grimly. This time the Lord of the Underworld was absolutely correct.
Through the gate we passed and entered the second level of Hell, and I braced for more heat, more wailing of tortured souls, and more monstrous creations from my deepest, darkest nightmares, but there was simply nothing. We were walking on a gray cloud that roiled and gyrated beneath our feet, and were it not for Jova’s calming presence, I would have surely plummeted straight down to my death. “It takes a little getting used to,” he said, as if we were each breaking in a new pair of boots. I relaxed and looked to each side, and glimpsed great black crystal formations. I looked a little closer, and saw trapped in them the faces of countless souls screaming soundlessly. I pulled my eyes from them with great difficulty as I could feel their desolate remorse weighing on my soul, and their dead eyes threatening to pull the very life from my own soul. “The lost ones,” Jova stated. “Forgot to tell you not to look at them, sorry again.”
I would have smacked him in the head again if I could have guaranteed that it would not have knocked me off my cloud. “No problem,” I said, staring forward into the grayness. Up ahead a single lantern shone through the murkiness. A slab of the blackest obsidian lay across the cloud. Streaks of red ran through it, reflecting the light cast by the lantern being held by a small, cloaked figure. As we grew closer, I could see the red streaks were rivulets of blood that dripped down over the edge of the obsidian into the emptiness below. I followed Jova onto the slab, stepping carefully over the blood, as he had done. Streaming down from the black crystal cliffs that housed the lost ones was a river of blood, pulled one painful drop at a time from them and funneled through the silently screaming mouth of a great skull, which turned the river into the small stream that adorned the granite.
“What is this thing?” I hissed to Jova as we walked up to the cloaked figure.
“It is called an elevator,” Jova said.
“A Hellevator?”
Jova stifled a grin. “Actually, that is more appropriate.” He proffered a coin to the cloaked one, who reached out a definitely female hand with long fingers that ended with pointed nails, painted with wet-looking red blood on their tips.
The cloaked figure took the coin and set her lantern down on the slab. She cast off her cloak with a flourish, and before I could draw out the Blade of Truth from my waist, I found a completely naked demoness thrusting her forked tongue into my mouth for the most unpleasant kiss of my life. It felt like she was going to penetrate my skull with a tongue so cold and thick it was like a writhing snake trying to get down my throat and suffocate me. She locked her hands behind my neck and thrust her pelvis into my own, her close-cropped, coarse, black pubic hair rasping against my manhood like a hundred bits of sharp metal. She mercifully broke the kiss, thankfully leaving my tongue in my mouth still attached and working. I did not move for fear of her demonic twat causing me more harm than I feared it already had. Her dark cold eyes stared into my own for a moment, then she leaned her head back, and shook out her snaky black curls before she again coiled her sinewy arms and legs around me and squeezed so hard that I was fairly certain her hard, pointy, black iron-tipped nipples had drawn blood.
“Going down, Mr. Sinister?” she said, cocking her eyebrow suggestively, her voice several creepy octaves deeper than mine.
“Yes, yes, we are,” Jova interrupted. “Tenth level, please.”
The demoness looked at Jova as if seeing him for the first time. “If you were not here, fear peddler, I would stop on the way with Mr. Sinister for a little fun.” She reluctantly unwrapped herself from me and put her cloak back on. I could now feel the sting of my wounded private area, and saw twin trickles of blood running down my chest where the demon’s nipples had pierced my skin.
I stepped close to Jova as the demon picked up the lantern. He opened his mouth to speak, but one look from me silenced him. “Don’t even think about apologizing again!” I lectured. Jova’s mouth closed. I shifted my manhood to a more comfortable position under the watchful gaze of the demoness, who was literally drooling at the prospect of being with me. “Let me guess,” I said. “She never tried to have a little love on the Hellevator with you, did she?”
Jova shook his head. “Well,” he said. “I am married.”
The demoness whistled at me. “Sinister,” she said, bending over and lifting up her cloak to show me her womanhood, which I swear was opening and closing like a great mouth—a mouth with very sharp teeth. “Once you are with me, you will never be with another.”
She was definitely right about that. I would certainly think twice before my next go-around with the fairer gender! “Sorry, sweet princess,” I said. “The only bitch I am going to pick up in Hell is my dog. Take me to your lord.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, dropping her cloak back down over that nightmare-inducing mouth, and raising the lantern. “Going down.” She cackled. “Down, down, down.”
My stomach lurched as the obsidian slab soundlessly dropped. I widened my stance and drew my sword. “A word of advice, Sirius,” Jova said. “You might want to stare at the elevator floor. This place is full of nightmares both imagined and unimagined.”
As he spoke, we descended to a shrill concert of screaming agony that I heard coming from millions and millions of tortured souls. I drove my fingers deep into my ears to drown out this unholy harmony, and knelt with my eyes closed. I looked up at Jova when the sound faded, and as we continued our descent into the depths of Hell, I saw him shake his head and look to the Hellevator floor. “Even the Bogeyman does not need to see certain things,” he said. “There is a reason only demons reside in the lower levels.”
“And my poor dog is there,” I added, still concentrating on looking down.
“Right,” Jova said. “But she does not see and hear what you and I do in this place. That is part of the power of Hell, and for that matter, the power that allows fear to control a person’s mind. Hades merely manipulates the energy put out by the dark side in all of us, mortal and immortal alike, to create what amounts to our own personal, well—hell. Garlic is pure and good, and though she has your blood, she is not tainted with things like avarice, gluttony, envy, pride, and sloth, which are so very common to mortals and immortals.”
“It is usually lust that gets me in trouble,” I quipped, and instantly regretted it.
“Lust is soooo good,” screeched the demoness. “Having second thoughts, Sinister? We have only a little time left . . .” I could hear her flapping her cloak in my direction, and I had the awful vision of her placing her malevolent mound in my face.
“Can’t this thing move any faster, Jova?” I said. “Princess over there is beginning to scare me.”
“You don’t need to fear me,” the demoness said. “I am just a sweet little pussy. A pussy you are going to wish you had petted once my lord is done with you. I would have showed you mercy, pretty one, and given you pleasure before I brought the pain. It is a fine line that lies between pleasure and pain. I would have taught you the difference between the two, but he will only show you eternal pain.”
The Hellevator slowed to a stop, and I opened my eyes carefully and rose to my feet, taking comfort in the white light the Blade of Truth was casting into the utter darkness. Jova hummed a happy song about bluebirds and did not seem remotely bothered by the overwhelming feeling of gloom permeating this dark place. He was safe in a world of his own creation.
A great marsh lay before us as we stepped off the Hellevator and bid the demoness a not so fond goodbye. She waved coyly and winked as the Hellevator rose out of sight, leaving Jova and me to our own devices. There was but a single path, composed of shiny white skulls, through the marsh. Black trees with moss hanging from their branches filled the great black bog that lay to either side of the skull path. Tendrils of smoke rose from the bog and formed the shape of faces that mocked me with their empty stares as they faded, reformed, and then faded again into nothingness. Far ahead a great black castle appeared with its many spires thrusting up violently into the ebon eternal night.
Every now and again a huge ball of fire exploded out of the bog and crashed into one of the trees, leaving yet another bit of moss hanging down. As we walked toward Hades’s domicile, I realized, when one fireball struck a little too close for comfort, that it was not moss hanging from the trees of death and despair but human skin, the last remnant of a tortured soul’s existence before Hades scattered its doomed essence to the cosmos.
The path was so narrow that only one person could pass at a time. I held out my hand and motioned for Jova to go ahead of me. He hesitated, and a smile crossed my face as I realized that the legendary Bogeyman was afraid. “Lead the way,” I said. “I take it that you have been to big, evil, and gloomy’s palace before?”
Two fireballs struck uncomfortably nearby as Hades let me know he was not amused by my comments. What was he going to do? Banish me to Hell? I was here. I took solace in the fact that if he wanted me dead, or merely tortured for an eon or two, that would have already happened. As I had surmised all along, there was something more to his vendetta against me.
“No,” Jova said. “I’ve actually never met him. I was here once, at the entrance to the tenth level, when I got the tour, you know. I have mainly been dealing with demons, like Princess Pain and others, who actually have been nothing but hospitable.”
“I think this should be a most popular holiday destination for the world’s royalty, what with the friendly customer service,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“They actually tend to wind up here anyway,” Jova said. “But, I have never been . . . over there.” He gestured to the dark palace, and I could see a bevy of wraiths playing what looked to be tag as they whipped around the turrets of Hades’s castle. “You are the assassin and master tracker,” Jova continued. “I am sure half the people you have killed are here anyway. So it only makes sense for you to lead the way.”
“Indeed,” I said. “I might meet a few old friends along the way.” Sure enough, rising from the bog and forming into smoky images were the unmistakable countenances of the long-dead Trouble brothers, residing in their proper place, having found their just reward for a life of evildoing. “Well, there you go,” I said. “Say hello to Big Belly Bart when you see him, boys, unless he is hanging from one of those trees out there, that is!”
One of the Trouble ghosts recoiled, and sure enough, as I continued down the path of skulls, there, hanging from a tree was saggy, white human skin with a long red scar caused by my favorite vampire Maltese where one of the legs should be. “Full circle indeed,” I said to no one in particular, hoping that somehow Garlic knew that some of her finest work was displayed for eternity here in the tenth level of Hell.
The skull path was surprisingly solid underneath our feet even though they did not appear to be attached to each other with any kind of substance. Jova was picking his steps very carefully and must have been reading my mind. “Odd,” he said. “I don’t see anything that keeps our path held together. These skulls appear to be hovering in midair above the marsh.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, striding more confidently with every step. “These souls are bound together by the poor choices and wicked deeds that got them where they are today—under the feet of a vampire assassin and the Bogeyman. This path isn’t going anywhere. And I bet it stretches down below us into eternity, what with all the evil I’ve seen in this world of ours!”
“How very insightful of you to say so, my learned friend,” Jova said. “Life has been your university. I do recall from my studies that Saint Bernard of Clairvaux said Hell is full of good wishes and desires,” Jova said. “People mean well, but do harm.”
I looked at him in confusion. “I don’t see what a talking philosopher dog has to do with it. Bad is bad. Good is good. Your dog friend there knows the difference between being tripped over or kicked. The souls below our feet did not have good wishes and desires, or they wouldn’t be here, now would they?”
Jova laughed loudly, his voice echoing eerily through the trees, causing a couple of spooks to poke out from the bog to see what the ruckus was all about. “Sirius,” he said. “I cannot wait for you to study under Hedley Edrick after this is over!”
I kept walking, staying silent for a moment. “I will take that as a vote of confidence that there will be an after.” The closer we got to Hades’s castle, the larger it appeared, its five main towers poking skyward like fingers on a great black hand ready at any moment to ball into a stony fist and smash us into nothingness. The path of skulls simply ended at a massive black-bricked courtyard in front of the castle. I saw no guard towers, no sentries, no hellhounds drooling in anticipation of a vampire-and-Bog
eyman snack. But then again, what did the Lord of the Underworld have to fear here on the tenth level of Hell? Absolutely nothing.
Thrusting into the air in the center of the courtyard was a spear-shaped fountain buttressed with a round shield on either side, making it appear, either intentionally or unintentionally, to be a large phallus and its accompanying gonads. And my nose told me the black substance spurting out of the top and raining down into the pool below was blood. There was nothing else in the courtyard but the fountain, making it appear even more prominent. As we entered the courtyard, the sound of the spattering blood grew into a deluge, and we stopped dead in our tracks, trying to figure out how to navigate through the curtains of misty black blood that came off the fountain. Whereas normal blood was the liquid of life, so warm, red, and sweet, this black blood was cold and smelled of bitterness and death.
“Well, that is a bit creepy,” Jova chimed, staring up at the fountain in disbelief. “Not sure what the message is there!”
“It is a monument to Hades’s weapon,” I said. “Wants everyone in the world to know he has the biggest manhood and set of cojones around.”
“But who sees this thing?” Jova said as we made our way around it with morbid fascination, dodging the curtains of mist. “Only demons and the like come down this far.”
“That is an easy one,” I said, noting the large streaks that looked suspiciously like pulsing veins on the side of the spear. “And I didn’t even have to go to school to figure it out. He sees it. And that is all that matters to him.”
I could see Jova wanted to say something as we ducked and sprinted past the black mist coming from the fountain. He paused, looking back at the fountain. “Well, he is either extremely proud of its size, or . . .”
I looked around for a fist, fireball, or other instrument of death coming my way. “No need to go there, my good Bogeyman. Men with stature issues like to be astride big horses, carry big swords, and sail as captains of big ships, no?”
My Ex-Wife Said Go to Hell Page 38
