Happy Hour in Hell
A Bobby Dollar Novel
Tad Williams
The first Bobby Dollar book was dedicated to my dear friend David Pierce. Since Dave left us, several other people I really care about have also departed—Jeff Kaye, Peggy Ford, and Iain Banks, to name just a few.
I’m glad Dave’s got such good company, but it breaks my heart they didn’t all hang out with the rest of us a bit longer.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, many people were involved in the making of this book other than me (although I did a lot of the writing).
My wife Deborah Beale is always there for me with words of wisdom, calm consideration, and the occasional necessary kick to the fundament. My partner.
My agent Matt Bialer is another indispensable partner, except without the smooching stuff. (But he’s still fun.)
And my beloved editors, Sheila Gilbert and Betsy Wollheim, put a huge amount of work and concern into this book. Blessings also upon Mary Lou Capes-Platt, who had a lot to do with shaping the final version. In fact, many thanks to all of the DAW folk.
Lisa Tveit continues to anchor me in cyberspace and to help me in a zillion different ways, for which I am ever grateful.
And a shout-out to Sharon L. James, for help with Classical Greek, and of course to all the Bobby Dollar Army and the other wonderful folk, readers and friends—especially Smarchers, on my webpage, tadwilliams.com, and Facebook (tad.williams and AuthorTadWilliams), not to mention the kind folks on Twitter who mostly see me after I’ve been edited by my wife (MrsTad) so that I sound smart.
Oh, and thanks to King Solomon, Hermes Trismegistus, and the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum for help chasing angels and wrangling demons.
Many gratitudes, my droogs.
prologue:
welcome mat
A MOMENT COMES in pretty much everyone’s life, or afterlife in my case, where they can’t help but wonder, What the fuck am I doing here? I have more of those than most people (a couple a week, on average) but I’d never had one quite like this before. See, I was just about to walk into Hell. Voluntarily.
My name is Bobby Dollar, or sometimes Doloriel, depending on the company I’m keeping. I’d arrived at this ugly spot by elevator—a long, long ride down that I may or may not tell you about at some point. I was also wearing a body that wasn’t my own, and all my information about the place came from a rogue guardian angel whispering in my mind while I was sleeping. Not that I had learned much useful stuff from her. In fact, most of it could be summed up with the simple phrase, “You can’t even guess how bad this is going to be.”
So there I stood, just outside Hell, at the foot of the Neronian Bridge, a featureless, flat span of stone that stretched over a chasm so deep that, if we had been on ordinary old Earth, the hole would probably have gone all the way through the planet and out of the other side. But Hell isn’t on ordinary Earth and this pit wasn’t bottomless—oh, no. See, at the bottom, impossible miles and miles below me in the darkness, the really bad shit was going on. I could tell that because of the faint sounds of screaming. I couldn’t help wondering how hard those folks had to be screaming to be heard that far. Also, what exactly was being done to them to make them scream like that? Already I was asking questions with answers I didn’t want to know.
Just in case all this isn’t weird enough for you, here’s another interesting fact: I’m an angel. So not only was I headed to the worst possible place anyone could ever go, I was doing it as a spy and an enemy. Oh, and I was going there to steal something from one of the cruelest, most powerful demons that ever existed, Eligor the Horseman, Grand Duke of Hell.
What was I trying to steal from Eligor? My girlfriend, Caz. She’s also a demon and she belongs to him.
Oh, and when I said I was an angel, I didn’t mean the avenging kind with wings and the Lord’s Righteous Fire to wield against my enemies. No, I’m the kind who lives on Earth, pretends to be human most of the time, and advocates on behalf of human souls at judgement. In other words, I’m pretty much a public defender. So what I brought to the conflict was just enough information to know I was in serious trouble. Me against a Grand Duke of Hell on his home turf—great match-up, huh?
I was in what was, without question, the biggest enclosed space I’d ever seen—that anyone had ever seen, probably. All those medieval artists who’d pictured the place, even the really inventive ones, had never thought big enough for this. A wall of rugged stone surrounded me, extending straight up beyond sight. It seemed to be ever so slightly curved on either side, as though the vast cavern itself was the casing of a monstrous engine cylinder. Presumably there was another wall in front of me on the far side of the bridge, the piston inside that bigger cylinder and the point of my visit, the endless tower that is Hell. The bridge itself was narrower than my arms could stretch to either side, a walking surface only about a yard and a half wide. That would have been plenty, except for the fact that beneath the narrow span lay nothing but emptiness—a pit that extended down farther than I could see or even understand, with just enough flickering hell-light to let me know how very, very far I’d be falling if I took a wrong step.
Trust me. Like any sane being, I would have rather been anywhere else, but as I’ll explain later, I’d worked hard to get even this far. I had learned how to get here, found an entrance nobody remembered to guard, and I was even wearing a brand-new demon body (because that’s the only way I could travel safely in Hell). I might have been an unwanted guest, but I had already paid quite a bit to take this ride.
As I approached the span I gulped a deep breath made gritty by sulfur smoke and the faint but unmistakable tang of crisping flesh. A stone skittered away from my foot and bounced into the pit. I didn’t wait to hear if it made a noise, since there wouldn’t have been much point. You can only stall something terrible so long before all the courage just leaks out of you, and I knew that things would only get worse from here. Even if I made it across this whisper-thin span and managed to sneak into Hell, the whole place was jam-packed with creatures that just plain hated angels in general and me in particular.
The Neronian Bridge dates back to ancient Rome, and it’s named after the Emperor Nero, the one who supposedly fiddled while Rome burned. Nero wasn’t the worst emperor Rome ever had, but he was pretty much of a horrible bastard anyway, and one of the ways we know this is because he had his own mother murdered. Twice.
His mother Agrippina was the sister of another, even nastier little bastard you may have heard of—Caligula. He married one of his other sisters, but he humped them all. Still, despite all the creepy stuff with her brother, after Caligula was stabbed to death by his own guards Agrippina was rehabilitated and eventually married Caligula’s successor, old Emperor Claudius. Somehow she even managed to convince Claudius to put aside his own beloved son and instead make Nero, her son by a previous marriage, his heir. Once Nero was the emperor-designate, she bumped off poor Claudius by feeding him poisoned mushrooms.
Clearly grateful for his mother’s assistance in becoming the most powerful man in the world, Nero promptly turned around and ordered her killed. He first tried to do it with a trick boat that was supposed to break apart so she’d drown, but Agrippina was a tough old bitch and made it back to land, so Nero sent some of his guardsmen over to her house to stab her to death with swords.
Family values, Roman Empire style.
Nero did a lot of other pretty terrible stuff during the rest of his reign, including burning a buttload of innocent Christians, but that isn’t the reason he got his own little highway project in Hell, the bridge I stood in front of now. See, what Nero didn’t realize is that his mother’s coup in getting Claudius to marry her and raise Nero above his own son was the result of a little bargain she’d made with one of Hell’s more influential inhabitants, a powerful demon by the name of Ignoculi. Now, Ignoculi and his infernal pals didn’t give a (literal) damn about Nero killing his mother—in fact, they rather admired it. But they did expect him to live up to the terms of the bargain his mother had made to put Nero on the throne of the Roman Empire, because Hell had big plans for Rome. But Nero refused to play along. To be honest, he probably didn’t realize how big an operation Hell really was—the Romans had a different religious picture of things, Pluto and the Elysian Fields and all that stuff. It was probably a bit like that movie producer in the Godfather who thought he could tell Don Corleone to fuck off, then woke up to find a horse’s head added to the bedroom decor.