Hell of a Time

I was talking with my dad and I accidentally said "infernal optimist" instead of "eternal optimist." And then this thing fell out.

 

 

Rezendel was, quite literally, down to his last nerve.  Having searched in vain for rope, twine, or any other means to bind this, this—what the devil was she?—this Rosalie, he’d eventually settled for using his own, purely decorative, sinews.

            One of the advantages of being a demon, often overlooked, is that the body becomes purely a manifestation of will.  Rezendel, though not exactly a demon, had “lived” (for want of a better word) and served in Hell long enough to learn a few things.  Namely, that while he could not change his form, he could do without it, or, as was often the case, bits of it at a time.  This discovery, however, was very bad for maintenance, as he had not yet mastered how to re-grow parts that he had removed—thus resulting in numerous jests from actual demons and his fellow Andians, depending upon which parts of him he had to ask for assistance in reattaching*.

            Rosalie, the contemptuous thing in his charge currently, had nearly driven him insane in the space of an afternoon, when he had “survived” eons of Hell, sanity intact, thankyouverymuch.

First of all, Rezendel was geriphobic; he’d never liked old people much when he was a human, and years of Hell didn’t really change it.  For one thing, “Old People Smell” is not a physical manifestation; oh, no, it goes all the way down to the soul, and there’s no getting it out.  Mix that with the scent of sulfur lakes and it’s an olfactory nightmare.

Rosalie had been 104 when she died, the day after her birthday party, by choking on a pretzel.  The concept of her even having a birthday party at her age was dreadful; at that point, it wasn’t even a party anymore, but an intervention.  Her wise family members probably thought it best to convince the old hag to give up that nasty habit she had of not dying.

When she finally took the great late twelve-step program and stopped denying her own mortality, she was Rezendel’s to deal with.  As a minor Andian, it was his job to show the new arrivals around and gauge their psychological reactions to the various sections of Hell proper, so the VR guys could create their own special personified versions.

You see, Hell is all done on computers, virtual reality, the whole nine yards.  Except for the comparatively few souls who genuinely hated a lake of fire or never-ending thirst or other physical pains more than anything else they can imagine, souls have their own distinctive Hells created for them by the Virtual Reality personnel.  It takes up much less space, as the poor sinners are just lined up in a room with helmets on them, but it isn’t nearly as showy as the real thing.

And the Virtual Reality guys get so arrogant sometimes, the jerks.  If it wasn’t for Public Relations guys like Rezendel, they wouldn’t have anything to go on.  The idiots’d probably wind up giving a masochist his own personal paradise!  And they were snobby little gits, every one of them.  While Rez worked his hoofs off walking through every part of Hell proper, they sat in their office, drinking coffee and occasionally checking the time.  The only method of revenge Rezendel had managed to come up with was randomly stealing their lunches from the office fridge.  Petty, yes, but vaguely satisfying.

Sure, he did all the work, but did anybody ever stop to thank Rez? Noooo, he just had to spend his eternity dealing with inane morons like this Rosalie.

She’d showed him baby pictures of her grandchildren when he first introduced himself. There he was, making a soul-shakingly terrifying entrance, with smoke and bats and a booming voice and everything, and she’d just coughed politely and waited for all the screeching to stop.  Then she’d said, “Oh, hello, dear. You remind me of my great-grandson. Would you like to see a picture?”

And Rosalie Stottsman stood there, in Hell, in the presence of someone who is very nearly an actual demon, searching through the unwrapped mints and denture adhesive and miscellaneous old-lady miscellany of her purse. Rezendel stood transfixed, not knowing how else to deal with such a situation, until she held in her paper-skinned old hand a flimsy wallet-sized photo album.

The descendent he supposedly resembled was a drooling mammoth baby with slime-encrusted jowls a-swing, vacant eyes displaying nothing so much as the intelligence of month-old yogurt.

“I don’t like you,” Rezendel had said, and began showing her the sights.

“That’s the lake of fire, there’s the feces mounds, that’s the sulfur volcano—go ahead and stop me if you see anything that makes you want to hide in the dark recesses of your soul and abandon sanity for the sweet enveloping abyss of madness, okay?—and that’s the corpse pile, where we keep you trapped under the decaying bodies of everyone you ever loved and cared about. That odor you’re smelling is—“

“Such a nice boy to show an old woman around like this.”  And she pinched his cheek.  A bit of it came off in her hand. Rosalie, apparently, opted not to notice this. “And you know, it’s the funniest thing: ever since I got here, my arthritis is gone, and I can hear a little better. Tell me, young man, how much am I supposed to tip you, or is that included in the price of the spa?”

“The—what?! This isn’t a spa! Those are lakes of fire over there! Sulfur! Smoke! ‘Flames of damnation which burn but do not consume!’ And a pile of rotting bodies! What kind of spa has that?”

“Oh, not an expensive one, I hope.”

“This is Hell, you miserable old maggot! Not a spa! You are going to be beaten, battered and broken until you wish you had the luxury of having never been born!”

“Ohh, I can see it’s going to be one of those spas,” Rosalie intoned, nudging the Andian conspiratorially. “You know, I always did like things a little…rough!” She had growled the last word, and her voice trailed off into what might have been a flirtatious giggle.  Rez was nearly certain she winked at him.

            Rezendel decided immediately to locate whatever part of his brain contained the mental image which arose, and destroy it as soon as possible.

* * *

            And that was pretty much it. Once it appeared Rezendel had finally convinced Rosalie that yes, this was indeed Hell, she still didn’t seem too phased.  “It could be a lot worse, I always say.” And, dim though they were—“My feet are finally warm!”—silver linings she wanted, and silver linings she found.

Rezendel began to suspect she must be a sim-demon. Some millennia ago, it had been discovered that everything can be made infinitely worse by having someone right there with you, having a good time and whistling the same song over and over in between saying, “Isn’t this just great?”

Sometimes, they’d go to Earth and do this, usually in drab hotel lobbies on rainy vacations or in subways that had gotten stuck. It was partly to listen to humans and keep curse words in current vernacular, but mostly to spread hate and general bloody-mindedness in the human world.

Sim-demons look nearly exactly like human beings, having been designed for this purpose, except their smiles tend to be a touch too wide, their skin a flicker too oily. Their behavior varies based on specialization, but unilaterally, every single sim-demon has the insatiable desire to, at some point in conversation, poke their companion in the chest. When said companion looks down, the sim-demon will flick their nose on the way up and laugh hysterically.

Thus far, Rosalie seemed innocent of this particular vice, but Rezendel decided to keep his eyes peeled.*

Every section of Hell they’d tried, from the classic Lonely Oblivion to the more modern You’re Naked Onstage In A Room Full Of People And You Have No Idea What Your Lines Are Or Even What You’re Doing There And Hey, Isn’t That Your Mother-In-Law In The Front Row, Rosalie seemed not only to tolerate, but actually enjoy.  As for the rooms of physical pain, beatings and such…Rezendel shuddered.  The woman hadn’t been kidding.

In a desperate attempt, Rezendel stuck her in the Technocracy Room, full of gobbledygook gadgetry and lingo, complete with the sort of ironic snobbery that can only be offered by sim-demons with pimply faces and irritating ponytails, sneering at your inferiority while you stress out and, more often than not, accidentally cause yourself grievous bodily harm from various benign-looking doodads. It was always a big hit with the elderly.

Who could have known the old woman loved gadgets? Rosalie romped through the room with all the disturbing grace of an obese cat, picking up Whatsits and Hoozats, even tweaking a few stray Thingermebobbers. Unscathed. She knew the purpose of every single blinking light, the nuance of every bleep, buzz and spurtlezzzip. If you’d have handed her a Walter PPK, you’d have sworn she was James Bond, if James Bond looked like a loose rubber sack half-full of butter and chestnuts that had been pushed through a mile or so of variously-shaped crawlspaces.

Rezendel dragged the old woman immediately from the Technocracy Room, flung her into a spiky pit, and sat down to think.

Rezendel was not an overly ambitious Public Relations Worker, Andians being fairly servile by nature. In fact, even as a human, he had had a tendency to fade into the background, even when there was no background. When he had been human, Rezendel, then named Randall Pools, was a straight-C’s sort of person, with a “will you start my orange?” approach to life. He’d been a bland, middle-aged yes-man all his life—all his afterlife, too—and he liked it that way. He had no intentions of trying to climb the incorporeal ladder.

Being fairly devoid of work ethics or sense of duty, then, Rezendel was perplexed as to why he hadn’t simply passed Rosalie on to someone else.

Even as he thought about it, a big mad grin oozing its way across his lips, something felt…wrong. He had what humans generally refer to as a “gut feeling” somewhere in the general vicinity of where his appendix used to be. He couldn’t put his finger on it—the feeling, not his appendix.  He could put his finger on his appendix anytime he liked, or rather, anytime he was in his quarters, and on top of a chair high enough to reach the shelf he kept it on. No, it was the feeling he couldn’t place, the odd wrongness of passing this miserable old…Rosalie on to some other poor soul.

It wasn’t guilt—Rez had never seen any problem with duping his co-workers into taking on a less-than-desirable workload before, and Satan knows it’s not some hitherto-unknown love for the job. Still it was persistent, and Rezendel took it at face value: whatever else happened, he would be the one to break Rosalie.

“Oh Cabana Boy!” she called from the pit. “I’m all fin-ished!”

Thinking of what the old woman would be “all fin-ished” doing in a pit full of foot-long spikes—and sound so damned cheerful about!—Rezendel shuddered again, and headed over to the pit.

Now, it is a well-known phenomenon that old women are extraordinarily strong. Oh, sure, an ant can lift up to one-hundred times its weight, but the lifting power of your average ninety-pound grandmother is immeasurable. Coupled with their natural make-your-old-styrofoam-egg-cartons-into-interesting-waste-baskets mentality, and you’d be likely to find a skinny octogenarian popping truck tires inside out bare-handed, then turning them into adorable plant holders.

It was this curious strength-plus-domesticity combination that explains what Rezendel saw when he looked at what used to be the Pit of Pointy Badness (The Pit of Despair and Pit of Oblivion and other such names having already been designated to other pits in Hell.)

“Like it?” she called from the bottom. “It’s a conversation pit! They were all the thing in the Seventies, and we’d just retired, my husband and I, and I’d wanted to re-do our living room to have one, but my George, he wouldn’t stand for it. Said, “Rosalie, if you want to waste our money on some half-baked—”

Cacafuego! thought Rezendel, assessing the damage in his head. Those spikes were embedded in solid metcrete!*

The Pit of Pointy Badness was fairly modest, as Pits in Hell go; it wasn’t too much more than thirteen feet deep, packed with various sizes of spikes ranging in material from bone to steel, sticking out at all angles from the floor and lower walls. Apparently Rosalie had survived the toss unscathed. Even more apparent, the Pit didn’t.

There were enormous cooper spikes, pulled from the floor and bent into odd-shaped chairs, the thin bristly porcupine spikes had been woven into seats for them.  A great stone spike, along with a circle of the metcrete which had previously held it, had been juxtaposed in the center of the Pit, apparently for use as a coffee-table-slash-conversation-piece.

“Out!” Rezendel shouted, noticing too late that, while she had Martha-Stewarted what had been an admittedly shabby pit, made out of the odds and ends and mostly second-hand stabbity pits of other parts of Hell, into an accommodating though out-of-fashion little nook, Rosalie had neglected to make a way out.

Tsk—and he’d half-expected a charming little ivory ladder with nifty wooden inlays.

Rezendel extended an arm the full depth of the pit and none-too-gently plucked up the offending human. She was babbling still.

“Sorry to make you have to come and get me,” she said. “I was going to make a charming little ivory ladder with nifty wooden inlays, but I needed those spikes to make the ottomans.” Like a cataracted scorpion, her hand was darting about, trying to pinch his cheek.

“Such a nice boy,” she said when she succeeded.

There was a good solid five minutes or so of demonic cursing. Rezendel had always prized himself on his gift of tongues and had amassed quite a collection. He could curse in seventy-four separate languages, not counting various dialects and colloquialisms. His current diatribe was a rather impressive tapestry of profanity ranging from Sanskrit to Pig Latin.

As he did it, he tied up Rosalie with his tendons and sinews. Things got a bit messy all around.

Afterward, while he was making a gag with a piece of small intestine, it occurred to him that he could have used her innards instead, and was on the verge of cursing again, when he remembered she’d probably find something good about that ordeal as well. “Why, you nice boy!” he mimicked her voice in his head, “You completely cleared out my colon!”

Finally, though, she was quiet. Still and quiet, and best of all, he couldn’t see her face and know that she was probably smiling. “Good,” Rezendel muttered. “Now you just….stay there!”

And he stalked off, fuming, to find his Master.

* * *

Randall Pools had gone to Hell by default. He had never really done anything evil in his life, though he’d never really done anything good, either. Still, he was a man for whom the harsher tortures of Hell would be unjust, and wasted anyway, as his mind was more adept at making his own tiny tortures from minor annoyances.

This was exactly the sort of mind the PR group was looking for, and after only a few short centuries, Randall Pools was promoted from tortured soul to fledgling Andian, given the name Rezendel, and sent along his way.

Before humans came along, when Hell held only demons after the Great Battle, it was a fairly decent place. For a bunch of fallen angels, the absence of God was bad enough; they felt the lack of the Divine Presence like a wasting disease, like an infected knife wound in the gut. It felt like being trapped in an office-supply store, starving to death until eating thumbtacks seems like a good idea.

And then they got over it. So there was no God down here, so what? That’s it?

It got successively easier for each generation of demons, ones who had been born or made in Hell and who had never seen or touched or smelled God (God smells like cookies, oddly enough, but won’t admit it.) For a time, Hell was actually…well, not pleasant, of course, but had only the mild unpleasantness of a New Years Eve party that was still going on in March.

Then, of course, there were humans. Humans had never, on the whole, felt the presence of God.* The mere absence of that presence, then, was nothing to them. That was when the fires came in, and the liver-eating eagles, and the pointlessly large rocks that must be pointless rolled up hills. There were subtleties next, like never-ending thirst or hunger. Next came more delicate nuances—confusion, anxiety, guilt, lust, often combinations thereof.  Hell continued to evolve, growing more powerful with belief, until, finally, it was worse than Earth.

Hell started getting virtual reality equipment once it was understood that some humans could bear anything but loneliness.  It was impossible to have an endless, barren wasteland with one single inhabitant, while at the same time have all the other tortured souls going about their business, so other options had to be discovered. It wasn’t virtual reality as 21^st-century humans know it; it was more accurately a splitting of metaphysical planes. After its conception, it became easy to track every single soul in Hell, register the astounding human ability to adapt to tortures and make them bearable, and automatically change the program accordingly.

* * *

About nine-and-a-half minutes after he’d told Lucifer about his “situation,” Rezendel became acutely aware of his comparative inadequacy in the belligerent swearing department.  Nine-and-a-half minutes of cursing nonstop, and there had been no repeats so far!

The majority of his brain was not taking a linguistic interest in his Master’s tirade, however, but was instead cowering in fear.*

“She’s just a human!” The Big Man shouted. “A puny little old lady! You know what old lady hell is, Rez? Anything! Loud teenagers! Cold weather! New movies! Being old!”

“B-but Sire—”

“But nothing! You get back to wherever it is you put her and get back to work!”

* * *

There’s a saying about the road to Hell being paved with good intentions, which is a totally cynical lie.  In fact, the road to Hell is paved with bits of cynics.  The flat bits.

The road through Hell, however, is paved with excuses, comeback lines that you don’t think of until the next day, and the three pick-up lines that actually worked, along with the thousands that never have nor will. Rezendel was studying these as he walked back to Rosalie, wondering vaguely if there was any excuse listed that would have explained away his incompetence. He had just gotten to the pick-up line that starts, “Are you Irish?” when he heard an entirely-too-familiar voice.

“Oh Cabana boy!”

He shuddered. Maybe he could leave her here. Forced immobilization seemed fairly unpleasant, right?

“Cabana boy!”

Not a truly Hell-worthy punishment, sure, but it certainly wasn’t fun, and—

“I’m finished with my seaweed wrap. Come undo me, dear.”

“Those are innards, not seaweed!”

Rosalie giggled. “Oh, of course they are, dear. ‘Innards.’ And this isn’t a spa, it’s actually ‘Hell.’ Oh, I just love these theme places. One time, I asked my husband to take me to one of those restaurants, you know, the ones where the waitresses yell at you? But my George, he said—”

“Shut up, you old hag!”

“Yes, that was about it. Did I tell you this already?”

* * *

Days dragged on like this, weeks, months. It seems Rezendel had no other clients, no one else to show around Hell. He did not eat, he did not sleep*, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to an after-work bonfire party.  Rezendel’s entire being was taken up by Rosalie. One day blended into many, many blended back into one, and it felt like he had no other memories, no other life or after-life than this. Day in, day out, every hour and every breath, and she was always there, always smiling…

Rezendel, who’d had his tear ducts removed some eons ago, wanted to weep for his sorry soul, weep that he couldn’t die again and get away. He briefly considered believing in reincarnation, decided it was probably a little late for that, and besides, with his luck, she’d be there too, somehow.

Rezendel walked Rosalie through Hell every day. At first he stuck to the main path, hooves treading on  “My car wouldn’t start,” “Same to you and your mother” and “The word of the day is legs.  Care to spread the word?”  He dragged her through every torture joint .  Rosalie bought souvenirs.

Later, as the more common tortures and torments proved useless against her unbearable optimism and indefatigable naiveté, he took the back roads, seeking obscure, original afflictions.

There was not one thing she disliked. In all of Hell, there was not a single thing that caused even the slightest negative reaction, not one thing that could be fed into the VR machines to make her own personal nightmare.

Rezendel was more miserable than he had ever been.

***

“How long’s he been in there, Danolith?” asked a freckled, bespectacled demon, peering in through the door of the Control Room.

Danolith nearly dropped his Three-Mile-Island ice tea. “Figgerfarbujet, boy!  You startled me! What have I told you about being all spry and sneaky?!”

Booker simply looked at him, head tilted slightly. Like an obedient trainee, he responded quickly and from route: “ListenhereyoulittlesquirrelsackifyoueversneakuponmeagainIwillnailyourearlobestoatableandsetafireunderyournose.”  He paused. “Or do you mean the other thing you said, about stuffing my every orifice with wassabe and sewing me shut?”

Despite himself, Danolith found himself chuckling. He was the meanest-tempered Andian in Hell, Senior Manager of the Virtual Reality Department, made an official honorary demon some millennia back, and was damned proud of it.

Because of his length of service to Hell, he’d been given a nice retirement pension for when he decided to give it all up, but for the past several years he’d been training new VR recruits. He hadn’t wanted to like Booker—he certainly hadn’t liked any of his other trainees—but there was something about the little tyke that…well, made you want to call him a little tyke, for one.

Danolith reached behind one of his right ears, pulled out a half cigarette. There was an acrid, used ashtray smell as he relit it. “To answer your question, about an hour. Our time. His time, it would be…” Danolith glanced at the Subjective Time Dials on the casement. “About six months.” He registered Booker’s glance. “We’ve got it on low.”

“And after this,” Booker said, “I mean, after we let him out…what happens?”

Danolith grinned. “Sumbitch’ll learn not to take my sandwiches from the office fridge anymore.”

 

---

* And, of course, his often embarrassing reasons for having removed them in the first place.

* Not literally. He tried that once, and it proved not only painful but useless and embarrassing.

* Since the building materials in Hell are largely metaphysical—the “souls” of their earthly counterparts—met- is a common prefix.  Metcrete is best thought of as metaphysical concrete, though certainly no one ever told concrete it had a soul.

* Well, a few had, but they were mostly teased whenever they mentioned it.  Especially the part about the cookies.

* The tiniest minority of his mind—about one tenth of a percent—was thinking about how pleased it was that Rezendel, absent his organs and muscle tissue, was neither trembling embarrassingly nor at any risk of evacuating his bowels in terror.

* Purely a social function, anyway, but still.

Author's Note

Oooh, baby, don't fear the footnotes.

(They are better placed in Word.)
I was on a Pratchett kick, and Dots knows that man loves him some footnotes.

Reviews

[Khef Kha]

Sarah, I greatly appreciate your style of writing. It's great fun. I would suggest when using footnotes in this format to use numbers instead of asterisks if possible. Or add a note at the beginning to explain about the footnotes. (i didn't catch them till after the story was done) And now that i read the message right above where i'm writing about them being better place in word i feel like an a*s. Oh well. Great story though. Keep going in this style and i think you'll hit something great.