The Hellelujah Trail Read online



  The Hellelujah Trail

  Phillip T. Stephens

  Fiction

  Literary Fiction

  Satire

  Humor

  Black Humor

  No, seriously, Really Black Humor

  ©2015

  Too Bright Girls Publications

  Austin, TX

  [email protected]

  Cover design by Phillip T. Stephens

  Dustpiggie character courtesy of Mike Bromage (aka Tony Horseradish)

  Carnival clip art for cover courtesy of istockphoto.com

  Too Bright Girls is a family publisher.

  Not accepting submissions or queries.

  Follow Phillip @stephens_pt

  Other titles by Phillip T. Stephens:

  Cigerets, Guns & Beer

  Raising Hell

  The Worst Noel

  Seeing Jesus (Fall 2015)

  For more Raising Hell fun visit the gdiMonday website

  The Hellelujah Trail

 

  Table of Contents

  The Hellelujah Trail

  Raising Hell Sample Chapter

  Map of HallelujahLand

  Click on image to enlarge

  The Hellelujah Trail

  Lucifer hurled into his sink for the third time that morning.1

  He blamed Hemingway. The braggart bastard regaled him with stories of leading CIA troops into the Bay of Pigs, then challenged Lucifer to round after round of absinthe and mescal. Just before Lucifer’s head hit the table, the bragging bearded bastard rose from his chair and lead the bar in a rousing round of The Internationale.

  In that instant he sent Hemingway to the Hell of the Old Man and the Sea Where the Fish You Catch Drag You to the Bottom to Tug You Across Razor Sharp Shells That Flay Your Skin in Strips, Then Deliver You to Hungry Orca Whales Already in a Frenzy Over Their Maltreatment by Abusive Theme Parks That Claim to Display Them for Educational Purposes While Really Exploiting Them for Profit, Who Chew You to Bits and Spit You Back Into Your Boat Where You Encounter the Same Fish You Catch Who Drag You Once Again....

  Cursing Hemingway’s memory, but delighting in his punishment, Lucifer dropped his pajamas in a heap and kicked them into the far corner of his bathroom, making sure to rip some extra holes in the delicate fabric for his menial immigrant sweatshop laborers to mend.2

  He scrubbed his face with ingots and rinsed with lava. In the mirror he spotted Struggles, his Victorian era English valet, trying to escape attention in the far corner of the room. Struggles cowered in the shadows between the poison oak infested towel cabinet and the winter furnace that Lucifer kept at full blast even though hell never seemed to pass the end of August.

  “Struggles,” Lucifer yelled. Struggles, sporting a starched collar and severe black morning coat, stood to attention, a difficult position given his current rhinoceros form. “I think I’ll go early twentieth Windsor today. Do you have my morning coat and spats?”

  Lucifer delighted in expecting Struggles to be ready with his outfit before he even made up his mind. Another opportunity to punish the poor beast. Probably the reason he turned him into a rhinoceros.

  Struggles held out his forearm to show a flat stubby hoof, cloven into three unbending toes. “I had some difficulty, your most ungracious,” he said, “through no fault of yours.” In spite of the disclaimer, Lucifer felt Struggles did indeed blame him for the valet’s metamorphosis into a rhinoceros.

  Still, morning coats draped poorly across the basic rhinoceros frame. The shoulders threatened to unravel every thread, the pants twisted at the crotch and the seams split below the knees. “What were you thinking, Struggles?” he said. “To provoke me into such a short-sighted reaction. Have you no sense of decorum?”

  He changed Struggles into a one-legged war veteran. “Now get my wardrobe before I change my mind. And who’s my first appointment?”

  Lucifer reached for his blowtorch to take his morning shave. He switched it to high to clean away the rough scales after the rough night of heavy partying.

  The screams of the damned embedded into the walls of his bathroom slightly brightened his morning. Their cacophonous chorus of “help me, stop the pain, have mercy, whip me more, never stop the pain” (or whatever pleas of agony they hoped, quite without foundation, would bring an end to battering, flaying and scorching of their buttocks, feet and genitals which protruded from the other side of the wall) provided a cheerful accent to the colorless tones of his decor.

  Struggles hesitated. In fact, he looked like he would melt into a pile of leptons and quarks which would then smash each other faster than Higgs Boson particles fired from the next generation accelerator after Lucerne.

  “Wouldn’t you rather take breakfast, or at least a mild cup of sulfuric acid tea and let me reschedule for another century?”

  ”I could turn you into a Supreme Court Justice at tea party rally in Arkansas right after they granted same sex marriage.”

  “You requested an appointment with Pilgrim, your most reprobate.”

  Lucifer dropped the blowtorch. It caught his six thousand thread count Egyptian cotton face towels on fire, and then his liquid nitrogen after-shave. Within a few seconds his bathroom counter exploded into a mass of blue flame, not to mention his arms and torso. Without thinking he invoked the name of the All Lord It Over You and His Busy Body Son, which pissed him off even more than the pain.

  He extended a nail from his index finger and sliced his body from forehead to toe, peeling of three layers of skin. He threw them into his shower, still in flames, crackling and popping and casting off sparks like twigs in a campfire.

  Pilgrim, that no good do-gooder who took every evil deed assigned him and twisted it into a cardinal virtue. That pernicious pain in the ass from the All Make You Miserable, who blew up Lucifer’s plans to unleash a War on Christmas and spread it like a virus, instead inspiring a multimillion dollar foundation and an all faith museum.

  When Lucifer condemned Pilgrim to Hell’s Soup Kitchen, rendering him into a tasteless dish to feed the never satisfied souls that shuffled through its doors like zombies, not only did Pilgrim create new recipes to make himself more delicious, he improved the entire operation and became the most popular dish and Employee of the Month at the same time.

  When Lucifer shipped him off to become fertilizer for agribusiness—which included passing through equine, bovine and swine intestines—he convinced them to raise the livestock organically. Not only did he improve the quality of his fecal content, he improved their overall production. They switched from genetically modified produce to a green-based market and won awards from liberal and pro-Labor governments across the Eurozone.

  When Lucifer condemned him to the New Word Inquisition as a subject to test for new torture techniques, he thought he dealt Pilgrim the fatal blow. Fray Vicente de Santa Maria not only relished persecuting Jews and natives, he plotted and schemed his ascension to Grand Inquisitor. But heretic Pilgrim showed them dozens of helpful suggestions to ensure pain and compliance. Some of the friars loved his suggestions; not so much with the others. The Inquisition did its share of burnings and torture, but they succeeded far better at squabbling and infighting, missing hundreds of opportunities for rape, impaling, dismemberment and reduction to ashes.

  Those days were over.

  Lucifer had plans for mister know-it-all fat happy face. Big plans. But he needed to render them fool proof. Lock Pilgrim down so tight he couldn’t wriggle free if he were a nanotube in graphene. Force Pilgrim to deliver exactly what Lucifer ordered to tooth and nail and coccyx.

  A dancing, hairless, scaleless, skinny, bright green gecko stared at Lucifer from the mirror. What had once been magnificent ram’s horns lay
scorched to cinders in his shower. His multi-colored scales scuttled on the shower floor sorting through the ashes. His skin continued to snap, crackle and pop like ad-enhanced sound effects in a cheesy cereal commercial.

  He kicked his towel cabinet, catching the base with a thick, gnarled claw. He yanked back, unable to disengage and, consequently, pulled the entire unit tumbling on top of him. Only in that moment did he remember telling Struggles to add a new line of dermestid beetle bath towels, which fell from the cabinet and descended on his open flesh, gnawing with the frenzy of locusts.

  Lucifer leaped across the room, batting at the beetles and screaming so loudly even the agonized souls embedded in his walls couldn’t help but laugh which was, in fact, their last laugh for a long time. And, it goes without saying, a long long time lasts forever in eternity.

  Lucifer grabbed his blowtorch and burned the offending beetles away. He pressed a hidden lever beside his shaving mirror. The wall swiveled one hundred eighty degrees and the embedded screaming souls came face-to-face with the legions assigned to torture them.

  “Begin again,” Lucifer ordered. “Face forward from now on.” The dense wall, much to his dismay, muffled their screams. Fortunately that lasted only until he turned up his blow torch and attended to their hind ends personally.

 

  Lucifer examined his freshly molted gecko look several times over in the mirror, and decided to retire the dragon persona—at least for three or four centuries. If nothing else, he would spare himself the embarrassment when his tail ripped through his garments at inappropriate moments.

  He pictured the usual alternatives, Satan (aka Old Scratch or Old Nick), Qing Dynasty Emperor, Davros the Emperor, Darth Sidious, KISS Gene Simmons. None of them tickled his enmity. Given the recent influx of immigrants from the Southern Hemisphere, however, (and thanks to his careful policies of breeding Anglo-European hatred and superiority) he suddenly thought of skeletons. They evoked a number of many southern superstitions—Papa Loa, Baron Samedi, Mictecacihuatl, La Calavera Catrina and Día de los Muertos.

  Besides, the slimming effect of a skeleton persona suited him. Not to mention the harrowing effect of looking into hollow black holes instead of eyes.

  He stepped from the elevator of the Capitol Complex for the Diabolical Administration of Perpetual Pain and Punishment3 sporting his spiffy new skeleton persona, decked out in morning coat, top hat, and spats with a ruby studded cane. His neck bones and skull danced above the starched collar like a cobra to the notes from a pungi. His Satanic Majesty’s Storm Troopers in the Service of Hell’s Democracy and Popular Rule paid him no mind, as though he were an ordinary denizen of hell on his way to Lucifer’s office to be arbitrarily dismissed with no recourse (which, in fact, he would have been were he going to see the Lord of Hell and not the actual Lord of Hell).

  His Satanic Majesty’s Storm Troopers served in the Hell of Gratuitous Sexual Objects Perpetually on Display for Testosterone-Impaired Drooling and Irritating Males. Their service required ear and nose jewelry, sandals with six inch stiletto heels and narrow leather leggings, lightning bolt tattoos on their shaved skulls, triangle tattoos, and no other ornamentation or clothing. For that matter, none were permitted.

  The women leaned against the wall, smoking cigarettes and throwing knives between each other's toes with remarkable accuracy. Lucifer loosened his jaw and flamed them, a skill that remained unimpaired, even without his lungs. “Attention,” he demanded.

  The flames left the women with nothing but a pile of cinders, which included their bodies, then blasted past them like an industrial furnace to blister the britches of His Majesty’s Pointless and Pedestrian Palace Guard as they stood about like teenage boys in a Catholic School stag line at the end of the hall. As the Storm Troopers gathered their remains from the ashes, the leering, drooling dim witted underachievers with collars stained with grease from hair oil and Clearasil, scrambled into formation—shoving, pinching, nose picking, giggling, snorting, snickering, belching and farting.

  Not a single trooper understood he served in the Hell of Testosterone Riddled, Barely Competent, Leering Drooling Men Whose Pants Droop Beneath Their Butt Cheeks and Who Are Forced to Spend Eternity in Close Proximity to Drop Dead Gorgeous Scantily Clad Women While Totally Lacking Any of the Social Skills Required to Attract Them.

  Members of the Palace Guard spent every hour in the afterlife trying to stand perfectly still in scratchy wool uniforms while hard-bodied, barely dressed Storm Troopers bustled past them. Even worse, if Lucifer spotted the least sign of an erection, he swatted it with a ruler.

  Sergeant Underdrawers, who manned the outer desk, raised his hammy fingers to his forehead in an effort to salute, but the rolls of fat in his arm and six-sizes too small uniform kept them at neck level. “Only His Satanic Majesty is allowed to let a flame rip like that,” he informed Lucifer, using his best impression of an officious tone.

  Major Halfhooters, the Storm Trooper stationed at the outer doors hissed, “He is Lord Lucifer, you nitwit.”

  Underdrawers dropped his salute and stood at attention, which, given the amount of fat in his arms and lack of material in his uniform to cover them, left them angles 45 degrees to each side. “Not to speak out of turn, Major,” he whispered from the side of his mouth, “but everyone knows the Allsoulsucker is a drag….”

  Lucifer grabbed Underdrawers by his grease-stained collar and lifted him to the roof like a zeppelin in flight. He twisted the collar until Underdrawers’s neck looked like the tie between two sausages. “The All Who is a what?”

  Underdrawers’ face turned blue, then purple, then white. He could barely spit out the words because so little air could escape his lungs to sound them. “Go right on in, sir?”

  Major Halfhooters and two dozen troopers looped the chains on the office door handles across their shoulders and strained backs and knees to drag the massive doors open. Hand-carved from the bones of the fourteenth century papal courts, the doors groaned and creaked on their hinges. The sound of the door frames scraping against the floors reverberated down the halls and everyone clasped hands over their ears in a futile attempt to withstand the pain. Lucifer tossed his cane over his shoulder and tap-danced through, an ill-considered plan, in retrospect, since he installed two foot deep shag carpeting from endangered arctic sealskin during his most recent redecoration.4 Especially since that moment when the crew kept interrupting his thoughts and he told them to forget the transition strips to smooth the edge between the shag and the bare floor.

  He tripped on the shag’s lip, knocking every bone out of joint and tumbled into the carpet like runes waiting to be read. Lucifer rolled with the momentum, scrambled to his feet and leaned with his elbow on his cane, one ankle crossed. He tossed his hat and cane to the coat rack and pretended to absorb the vast panorama his office presented as though he choreographed every step.

  The cloying scent of incense and souls roasting in the fire pervaded the room, like Saturnalian celebrations of old. The mantle speakers piped in screams of the newly inducted damned on their virgin runs through the dungeon wine presses. Four new paintings dominated the far wall. Bruegel’s “The Incest of the Borgias in the Vatican,” depicting Alexander VI in bed with his children and grandchildren (including Lucretia pregnant with the Vatican choir). De Sade’s “Excesses of Louis XVI” depicted Marie gnawing on cake in one hand and the bones of peasant children in the other while an orgy consumes the background.5 Urine finally flowed through Duchamp’s urinal, and bloody puss infected urine at that. And, finally, Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Gas Chamber,” in which Sam-I-am, now a member of the Nazi party, taunts a Jew strapped to a table with a plate of green eggs and ham at the same time Joseph Mengele uses a dinner knife and fork to dissect him.

  The new fireplace, three times wider than the old one, heated the office to a mild 1000°C. Member of Parliament flatulence powered the overhead lighting, but when Lucifer needed mood lighting he preferred the sconces with candles fashioned fr
om the melted flesh of American politicians who denied global warming. The soft warm glow they lent to his office added to the irony of the soft warm glow into which they helped usher the planet for at least two centuries.

  Lucifer leaned over the coal bin and found a healthy mix of Sunni and Shia fighters who had martyred each other in Afghanistan.

  “We’re proud to die for Allah,” they yelled. “We wait our vestal virgins.”

  “Allah says you are each other’s virgins,” Lucifer laughed, and tossed them in. One flamed back out, like a cinder spark.

  Something tugged Lucifer’s trouser leg. He kicked it away. “Struggles, clean this cinder.” It tugged again. Lucifer glanced down. A throw pillow shaped dust bunny with ears at each corner and roly poly eyes yanked again.

  “Love that scorch carpet smell,” it said.

  Lucifer pulled his heel back to drop-kick the creature. In the same instant a congruous calamity of events conspired against him, to wit: A second spark sputtered from the fireplace and leaped to his morning coat. A voice he knew all too well spoke behind him and said, “It’s a dustpiggie.”6

  The voice spoke with excitement, enthusiasm, pleased to share his precious little tidbit, when any expression of pleasure in hell should trigger angst, despair, withering doubt and tremors of desperation from the dread of the punishment to follow.

  Lucifer stopped mid-cock, his right leg angled a full ninety degrees behind his hip, prepared to return the swing with the full power of his kick. But the joy, the enthusiasm, that utterly inappropriate outburst of enthusiasm in the last place in eternity any enthusiasm should poke its head, caught him off guard. As it always did.

  Not only that, but the sight of the spark singing a hole in his morning coat but not falling through—rather hanging onto a thread and then charring that thread and the threads around it, and, as a result, painting in his mind a picture, a foreshadowing of the immediate intersection of flammable materials and ignitable catalysts—froze him to the spot, leaving him perched on the cuneiform behind his inner left metatarsals (otherwise known as the ball of his left foot). With his left foot precariously balanced on one joint, his right leg fully extended behind his hip, and his mind (for his empty skull had no brain) frozen, he lost his balance and, unable to correct himself, lost his sense of gravity as well. Then he lost all connections between his bones.

  Everything collapsed into a pile inside his Windsor suit. Not just inside his Windsor suit, but underneath the smoldering cinder, which, it turned out, stopped smoldering and instead ignited the delicate but aging fabric—mostly with the help of the chemical residue left by hundreds of years of storage with moth balls. The suit burst into flames and turned to black ash that powdered Lucifer’s disconnected bones.

  Lucifer summoned his disconnected bones and rose from the ashes, wearing nothing but his charred oxfords. Pilgrim sat on the new six-inch nail office chair surrounded by dozens of the dustpiggies. “Wow that suit sure went up fast. I thought you would have had it flame-proofed. You being, Lucifer, and all.”

  Lucifer shot his wrist bones to the coat rack to retrieve his cane and commanded them to the desk to bash Pilgrim’s smiling face to melon mush. He followed with his remaining bones to add fury to the blows.

  Pilgrim, when he first arrived, resembled an overweight Palestinian goat herd, or a cab driver who chewed too many Pay Days waiting at stop lights. Now, after millennia of punishment and readjustment, Lucifer saw him as nothing more than an elastic happy face he could pull, twist, smack, blast and abuse only to snap back into shape, lopsided but recognizable. That didn’t stop him from swinging for the fences.

  Pilgrim wore a Buster Brown suit with laced waistcoats, knee shorts, buckle shoes and a wide-brimmed ribboned hat (an outfit ridiculous even when upper-class British women dressed their children in them in the nineteenth century). His feet barely touched the floor, instead swinging back and forth like a three-year-old. One of the dustpiggies perched on his knee, its ears flapping at like tiny vestigial wings.

  Lucifer gripped his cane with both hands, twisting his wrists and swinging his cane backward over his head to bring it down into Pilgrim’s squishy skull and cleave him through to the nails on the chair.

  Pilgrim said, “Still working on those anger issues.”

  “Asshole,” said the dustpiggie, although when dustpiggies talk it’s more of a mumble with a mouth full of saltines: “sshll.”

  “Done a good job with your cardio,” he added. “You’ve dropped, what? Three, four hundred pounds.”

  The cane missed Pilgrim by a good two feet. Lucifer’s swing sliced to the left, ripping the the side of his chair, still enough to send Pilgrim and the piggie tumbling into the carpet with several dozen nails embedded in Pilgrim’s backside. The dustpiggie poked an arm from its poochy pillowy body and pointed to the nails. “Gotta hurt,” it giggled with piggie like glee.

  Unfazed, Pilgrim dusted his elbows and knees and continued the conversation as though nothing happened. “You’re not even skin and bones. Just bones.”

  Lucifer chased Pilgrim around his desk, lashing his back with the ruby cane to drive the nails in further. “Never compliment the Lord of Hell. Never be nice, never be kind, and never ever stroke my ego,” he shouted, even though he demanded those very three things from his minions whenever they kowtowed before him.7

  The dustpiggies leaped onto Lucifer’s desk and cheered. The bloodier the stripes on Pilgrim’s back the greater their frenzy. Money passed between tiny piggie fists and, even worse, his personal secretary, Lord Byron,8 took odds.

  Lucifer cleared the piggies off the desk with a single sweep of his cane and settled into his new office chair, hand carved from one of the last two Bois Dentelle trees in existence. The piggies jumped up and down in protest, shouting “arsehole,” “shyteheel,” and other epithets but Lucifer pressed the button to open the in-floor burners and quickly incinerated them all. Struggles swooped in to sweep the mess and dashed from the office before he could draw Lucifer’s ire.

  Lucifer drummed his distal phalanges on the desk’s surface, carved from an African baobab tree, inlaid with Honduras rosewood. They sounded like dice rattling in a cup. “Where did those…creatures come from?”

  “Aren’t they sweet little guys?” Pilgrim faced the desk posed on pigeon toes, one hand behind his back, his little finger at the corner of his lip, his fat cheek resting on his knuckles. A Kodak moment for a mother; a stick your finger down your throat and spew moment for the Lord of Hell. “I warn you, though, they’ll eat everything in sight once you feed them.”

  The drumming grew louder, sounding more like machine gun chatter. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Pilgrim poked his toe in the carpeting. “I found them in Subbasement 7999LevelD124. You ordered me to clean it out to punish me for, well, you punish me for so many things I don’t remember what I did any more.” Now he ground his toe in the plush pile and looked down as though blushing.

  Lucifer doubted Pilgrim every suffered a memory lapse. He rested his chin on intertwined phalanges and began to drum a new rhythm against his knuckles. Struggles appeared at his side with a sulfuric acid served in a teacup carved from the skull of a baby Saimaa ringed seal.

  “Maybe if you just tell him what you want, he’ll leave and you won’t be so aggravated, Your Most Lecherous.”

  Struggles’ voice trembled with anxiety and agitation, as Lucifer expected of his minions. At least he displayed an appropriate level of panic and unease in His Satanic Majesty’s presence.

  Lucifer hit his cane tip with his elbow, swinging the knob into Struggles’ testicles. While his valet tried to cup his balls and balance on one leg, Lucifer leaped from his seat, grabbed his pants and tossed him across the desk. He hurdled the desk, then chased the valet over the top of his second century bookshelves, knocking over his priceless set of codices containing the original directors’ cuts of the Gnostic Gospels According to Judas, Mary, Pilate, Mary Magdalene, the Virgin Mary, th
e Not So Virgin Mary and, Mary the Virgin? You’re Kidding, Right?

  “When I want your advice I’ll turn you into an owl who hoots advice, drape you in robes and fill your head with books you tray-bearing, tea-pouring, dust-sweeping menial labor lackey whom I could trade for immigrant labor and get five times as much work for one tenth the pay and none of the lip cause they couldn’t speak my language anyway.”

  He chased Struggles down the shelf and into his Cabinet of Cursiosities.9

  Unfortunately, Struggles learned the art of dodging even better than he learned the art of service. Lucifer broke only two of Struggles’ shoulder blades and one knee cap, but he also broke his Chinggis Khaan death mask,10 his complete LP collection of Pavarotti being forced to sing the Mezzo roles of Wagner and Puccini an octave higher and at 78 rpm, his Han Dynasty vase carved from the bones of the Empress Lv Zhi while she danced for her supper, and, his particular favorite, a Popeye piggy bank whose eye popped out when the penny popped in.

  “Why do you always vent on Struggles when you’re really mad at me?” Pilgrim asked. Lucifer stopped his chase and Struggles vanished through a service entry Lucifer made too small for him to squeeze through, but which proved impossible for the Lord of Hell.

  Pilgrim sat on the carpet, legs crossed, feeding peanuts to two dustpiggies who somehow found their way back and now sat on his knee. Or was he feeding them his fingertips?

  Lucifer gripped his cane so hard it shattered into pieces. Rather than unleashing even more damage, which would only blowback on his office and incur cleaning bills, he stormed to his desk, dreaming up new novelty hells for Pilgrim and storing them alphabetically in memory. He snapped his left fibula and fit it into the cane tip and knob, then cracked his knuckles, which, having no flesh to muffle them, popped like cannons in the echo chamber of his office.

  Lucifer also fought back the urge to bash Pilgrim’s dustpiggies into couch dust, loose change, body lice and fingernail clippings, which, if you added dust mites and loose curls of hair, summed up their basic composition. Of all the vermin infesting the subterranean arteries of hell he hated dustpiggies most. He gave the order to seal them in that subbasement.

  A masterstroke when he created them: hell’s pernicious twist on dust bunnies. They came, multiplied endlessly, never left and made themselves at home like your drunken foul-mouthed uncle Ernie, who might be molesting your daughter as well.11

  Come to think of it, he didn’t recall sending Pilgrim to the any subbasement on clean up duty. He would never allow the two on the same continent. The fact that he faced them both presented a pernicious problem indeed.

  Lucifer crossed his arms. He crossed his legs. He tapped his cane on the carpet protector. He tap danced with his shoes. The fire may have ruined the finish, but the cleats remained and kicked up a good clatter on the hard plastic surface.

  “Feet’s a tappin’” a piggie said, but Pilgrim held his fingers to his mouth.

  Lucifer pulled some files from his desk and perused every page, passing each one to Byron to be initialed. He booted his computer and waited a month for Windows to Hell Infinity to load. He played a game of Minefield and lost. He torched his computer and twiddled his thumbs while it melted into soft goo against the rare baobab wood.

  He sipped his tea. His cold tea.

  Lord Byron, knowing what came next, punched the intercom. Lucifer yelled, “Struggles, how could you let my tea get cold?”

  Finally, with a fresh cup of hot sulfuric acid tea at his elbow, in a new cup carved from another rare baby Saimaa seal, he said to Pilgrim, “I have a job for you to make up for your disaster at the Hallelujah Palooza rally in Bedford Falls. Which, as you recall was entirely your fault.”

  Pilgrim lifted his tiny little leg by his ankle to cross it over his knee. It slipped back into the carpet. “I’ll do anything you ask. Especially since I have no choice.”

  “I expect you to build a theme park to Hell.” Lucifer stretched his hands as far to each side as he could, as though showing off a whopper he caught on a fishing trip. “As big as, as loud as, and as kick ass as any of the Christian theme parks.”

  Pilgrim quit trying to cross his leg and clasped his hands on his knees. “I thought those came and went with the second millennium. Flashes in the pan, like super slides and the pet rock.”

  Lucifer ignored him. He tucked his cane under his arm, Patton style, and paced behind his desk. “I want rides to terrify the most defiant child into tear-stained submission and exhibits that will make that most macho father piss in his pants.” He rested on his knuckles and leaned across the desk. “I want families to arrive expecting family fun time and leave tearing at each other’s throats.’

  Three more dustpiggies appeared with kazoos and began to play “The Halls of Montezuma” on kazoos.

  Lucifer leaped onto his desk and thrust his cane forward like a saber. “I want gnomes and ogres, dragons and leviathans, and most of all, at some point I want every family member to be armed with weapons.”

  He parried and thrusted with his cane. Four more piggies appeared with slide whistles and a tiny bass drum. “I want weapons they can strike with, slash with and weapons they can throw. I want weapons they can bash with and weapons that will put out eyes.” A flag burst from the knob end of his cane, with two dragons tearing each others’ throats apart. “I want tunnels. I want holes. I want THX sound and IMAX 3D. And most of all I want the families to keep score so that at the end of the day there will be winners and losers. No team work either; one on one competition.”

  He leaped from his desk and marched in a circle around Pilgrim, the dustpiggies following with their instruments. “I want concessions, food that they can overstuff their stomachs with and spend the long drive home car sick and diabetic. Sugary, high fat, bad for them. Nothing they can really enjoy.”

  He came to a halt in front of Pilgrim and thrust his cane in the carpet as though claiming it for the King of Hell, which would be him, a banner waving at his side. “I want them returning home broke, fat, fucked and realizing they pissed away their vacation for nothing and it won’t get any better.”

  The dustpiggies broke out cheering.

  Lucifer pulled free, from thin air, the contract, his climax, his perfect trap which would seal Pilgrim’s fate. It rolled over Pilgrim’s head, across the room and all the way to the edge of the fire. “The terms and conditions. I expect you to adhere to each and every one.”

  Pilgrim sighed. He collected the contract, sat on the hearth and scoured the contents from the declaration to the signature line, which took him most of the twenty-third century.

  “And my budget?”

  ‘What budget?”

  Pilgrim rolled the last 437 pages into the scroll and secured it with a twelve foot rubber band. He rolled it to Lucifer’s filing cabinets, straining his back since even on its side it was almost as tall as he.

  “Budgie?” a short dustpiggie with one-eye asked, pointing to his mouth.

  “Badger,” another said, trying to mount a third.

  Pilgrim wiped his forehead.“Pardon me, sir, but it sounds as you’re sending me on one of those paradox quests.”

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  Pilgrim reached under one edge and dug his feet into the carpet to lift the contract into a vertical position. “On one hand, you really want your Hellelujah Theme Park. But you put me in charge of it, with no resources and no plan of action, and, pardon me for saying this, sir, but, it’s me that you put in charge.”

  “So?”

  Once Pilgrim raised the contract three feet under the ground he squatted and backed underneath the contract so that he could use his knees and back as a forklift, “Me? The one soul in hell you hate more than any other soul?” His voice grunted from the strain of lifting. “The soul you’d do anything to see disappear from hell except that would prove you’re a failure at corrupting me so you send me on these quests, time and time again, to corrupt me anyway?”

  Lucifer s
at on the end of the contract. “Exactly. You finally understand your dilemma, the deliciousness of your eternal damnation, deserved or not.”

  In spite of Lucifer’s added weight, Pilgrim pushed the far end of the contract upward. “So for me to be damned I have to fail. But I always fail at failing you, which only upsets you more. Yet you keep dreaming up these schemes.”

  Pilgrim pushed the contract upward and outward, forcing Lucifer to move or tumble.

  Lucifer didn’t like the direction of the conversation. He also didn’t like the fact that he couldn’t hear the dustpiggies any more.

  “I still don’t follow you.”

  Pilgrim rolled the contract into place against a filing cabinet and stepped away. He stooped over with palms on his knees to catch his breath. “You know how you complain about people in the forelife who make the same mistake over and over but never learn their lesson?”

  Indeed Lucifer did. He flew into rages just thinking of them. “Fools. Adding option after option to their ticket to hell and no clue how they got here. Once they’re here, they blame me, as though I made their decisions for them. Why would the All Know It All make me responsible for them? What was he thinking?”

  Pilgrim squeezed his plump fingers into a fist as though the Lord of Hell missed some inescapably obvious point. “You don’t see the lesson here?”

  Lucifer kicked the contract over, broke the rubber band and sent it unravelling across the office once more. “The lesson is that I expect you to deliver me a theme park or I’ll deliver you to the Hell of Dithering Dillweeds Who Dawdle When Opportunity Is Offered By Babbling On and On About Obscure and Off The Point Analogies Only to Find Yourselves Missing The Boat Entirely and Swimming in Shark Infested Waters Where the Octopi Pull You Under and Suck Off Your Skin With Razor Sharp Tentacles And Deliver It To The Ed Gein Tanning Plant To Be Hand Sewn With Overly Large Bone Needles Into Poorly Designed Articles of Clothing Worn By Men With No Taste Who Think They’re Women and Who Chase Innocent Girls In the Woods To Their Doom While You Experience Every Moment and Feel Excruciating Guilt That Your Skin Enabled Them to Commit Such Heinous Crimes.”

  In that moment the dustpiggies burst out of the shelves of his rare collection of heretical Buddhist pornography, with parchment pieces in their teeth, explaining all too clearly why they escaped his hearing so long. Which only enraged him more. He set his right index distal phalange to semi-automatic and took them out in rapid single-fire bursts, each of them exploding in a cloud of allergens.

  Pilgrim rolled into the line of fire and rescued the last two. “They don’t know any better. If you want to punish anyone, punish me.”

  Lucifer waved his finger. “Oh no. Keep the couch corner trash. You’re going to break the contract. No heaven for you. None of this, ‘One day if I hold out long enough, hell will turn around and I’ll get back to heaven’ nonsense. You’re fucked, skewered and puckered.”

  He opened a hidden door behind his file cabinets. Three gargoyles dragged an album as wide as a wall into the room, bound in human skin with their faces still begging forgiveness. The lead gargoyle, who bore a remarkable resemblance to Donald Trump, pulled open the front cover, which held a pocket for the contract. The other pages held needle and thread.

  “These pages will hold the pieces of your skin from Dithering Dillweed Hell which will be personally sent to me after they wear out their usefulness, and I will sew them on with relish.”

  Pilgrim clutched the piggies to his chest. “Absolutely, sir,” He saluted. “ I’ll get right on it.”

  “No hugs,” a piggie yelled.

  “No parks,” the other pleaded.

 

  Lucifer dug his toes into the top rung scalp of his twenty-two demon ladder as he carved his cubist depiction of a lava fountain from Margaret Thatcher's flesh. Both screamed from the pain, but Thatcher screamed loudest. “I was England’s Prime Minister. Have you no shame?”

  A middle rung in his ladder retorted, “Je suis Henri Matisse. Pensez-vous que j'ai rien à foutre?”12

  Lucifer grabbed her tongue and splayed it to make a four dimensional lava flow.

  Lord Byron rapped on Lucifer’s desk, and Lucifer did his best to ignore it. He knew Byron wanted to draw his attention to the golden phone, the hot line, the message board beeping with unanswered messages from His Ever Annoying.

  Lucifer selected his frosting tool to add texture to the new flow.

  Struggles cleared his throat, never a good sign because it meant he intended to offer advice and Struggles’ advice inevitably compelled Lucifer to reward his valet with a cruel and gratuitous punishment that would render him useless for a century or two.

  “Begging your pardon, your Most Discourteous, but perhaps you should listen to at least one of those messages, if only to prevent a personal visit from the All Mighty.”

  Lucifer hammered his chisel through a particularly sharp lava spear. It broke off and impaled Struggles to his bookshelf of arcana from fifteenth century alchemists burned at the stake by Torquemada during his purge.

  Now he would have to re-skin Torquemada to bind the volumes again, which wouldn’t bother Lucifer in the least, except another fragment of sculpture broke free. It bounced off the desk, bounced off Byron’s knuckle and bounced off the answering machine’s play button. The All Pest’s voice echoed across Lucifer’s office like a bagpipe powered by a hurricane.

  “Morningstar. Where’s my soul?” The message ended, followed by a click and then the previous message played. “I’m getting tired of this shit. Where’s my soul?”

  That wasn’t good. When the All Lord It Over You turned scatalogical, you were in deep scat indeed.

  In fact, Lucifer promised to return Pilgrim during a face-to-face meeting with His Impossible To Say No To. However, he continued to bank on the probability that, sooner-or-later, one of his projects would corrupt the roly poly, perpetually smiling, platitude popping puppy dog and the Ever Hold You To Your Word would let it slide.13

  Lucifer leapt from the top of the ladder. The twenty-two demons tumbled and collided like Keystone Cops in a pile up. He climbed over his desk and stopped the machine before it could play back further. He knew he should watch Pilgrim’s project more closely, but every time he thought of Pilgrim, a wedge formed in his brain the size of an industrial buzz saw.

  Besides, the contract, that immaculate legal labyrinth, drawn up by hell’s leading litigators, took care of Pilgrim for him. A contract— bullet proof, acid proof, sword proof, shark proof, fire proof—drafted not by ordinary litigators, but by the lawyers who dreamed up Enron, Swissair, Deutsche Bank AG, Bre-X and Seimens.

  And yet…

  Rather than releasing Struggles to clean up the demons on his carpet, he ordered Byron to punch the intercom—two inches from his own fingers—through to the lobby. “Halfhooters, get your bony ass in here.”

  Halfhooters, left to open the outer office doors on her own, struggled to drag the ornate barriers open with the chains. Several hours later, she stood at attention in front of his desk. “Appearing as ordered, Your Most Ungracious. What is your command?”

  Lucifer didn’t even look up. “Aren’t you going to close them?”

  He relished her look of dismay as she ran back to the doors only to realize she couldn’t pull them closed since the chains were fastened to the outer handles. She walked back and forth for several minutes before grabbing one of the pokers from the mantle. Using it as an improvised screwdriver, she detached the chains from the outer handles and reattached them to the inner handles. Then, just as she lifted both sets of chains over her shoulders, Lucifer pushed the automatic button to close the doors.

  “Silly me,” he said. “I forgot. You’ll need to replace those when you leave.”

  Halfhooters carefully lowered the chains into the carpet, making sure not to dirty the fibers and, once again, stood at attention.

  Once again, Lucifer refused to look up. He simply wiggled a finger in the direction of the demon he
ap. “Clean that mess up.”

  Without uttering a word of dissent she wrestled the demons one-by-one to the fireplace where she tossed them in, screaming in protest.

  Lucifer ordered Byron to pull the Theme park file from his center desk drawer, which was beneath his elbow. He examined the Pilgrim’s plans: Four miles of theme park glory, beginning with the opening gates and demons in dinosaur-sized costumes to herd the more timid souls through. A roller coaster that ran the length of the park, over ground and underground, including an underwater plunge—with no height limit—guaranteed to send children screaming and frazzled parents arguing. Enough food stalls with popcorn, sodas and sweets to run parents into perpetual credit card debt and keep kids stomach’s churning and tempers soaring.

  He checked off each page of the schematics, each one more evil and far more in line with Lucifer’s liking than he imagined Pilgrim capable.

  Once Pilgrim delivered, his soul was locked in Dillweed hell forever. “I have him.”

  “Can you release me now, sir?” Struggles asked from where he dangled on the bookshelf.

  “Did he clear out those damn dustpiggies too?” Lucifer asked, changing the subject.

  “Not exactly, sir. He took them with him. To build the theme park.”

  “Good luck with that.” Lucifer tapped the pages into alignment and tucked the schematics back into the file. Still, the thought nagged him that he should see the real park and not just plans. “I suppose I should check on him to see what progress he’s made with construction.”

  “Surely you’re not going unattended, sir?” Major Halfhooters interjected.

  Lucifer glanced up in surprise. Halfhooters stood at attention before his desk, the demon mess cleaned as he suggested, the door chains replaced and his carpet scrubbed as well. This was the last thing he needed—ambition. Oh well, she was a woman. Probably trying to escape her current assignment with those nitwit males just beyond the door.

  He waved his wrist to dismiss her. “Go away. No one needs you any more.”

  “Think of the hostile terrain, stepping into a crowd of wild dustpiggies without the confines of hell to restrain them.”

  Lucifer leaned back in his chair and propped his feet on the desk, scuffing the delicate baobab wood with his heels. “Are you suggesting the Lord of Hell isn’t powerful enough to handle a Dale Carnegie wannabe and a few dust mite sloughing pillows?”

  Halfhooters remained perfectly at attention, not looking him in the eye. “No, sir, but I fought in the first campaign to remove them. I merely suggested you add a first line of defense to draw enemy fire.”

  Lucifer looked deep into her soul. He wanted to find the one thing she feared more than anything, a difficult task for most souls. They enter the world conflicted and collect more and more loved ones and priorities unwilling to share. In Halfhooters case, however, he heard it like a gun shot that breaks the truce. Anything but a housewife.

  “You realize failure means banishment to the Hell of Westinghouse Commercials Where You Pose Forever in High Heels While Making Papier-Mâché Meals and Ironing Ersatz Clothing for Actor Husbands Even Less Sincere Than the Real Ones, Not to Mention Sleazy Producers on the Make Who Try to Get in Your Pants by Threatening to Replace You With Girls With Bigger Tits and Looser Morals.’

  “Sir, never, sir,” she swore, with a level of honesty that made him laugh. He knew the one thing she didn’t: she barely made the cut-off for damnation the first time.

  He sent her to Hell’s Armory. She returned with real armor for a breastplate, leather protection for her legs and arms, and two Hellblazer scimitars with curved blades made of molten steel that burst into flames to slice through flesh like butter. Her helmet was forged from the finest Byzantium steel.

  He circled her for the complete inspection, tightening her bucklers, adjusting her leg guards and feeling under her breastplates to make sure of the spacing. Then he said, “Lose everything but the swords. It’s still hell, Halfhooters, and you still fight humiliated and naked.”

 

  The complex stood at the edge of the desert. Sand and tumbleweed drifted across the parking lot like old and familiar friends. Dark clouds hovered above the mountains at the far western horizon and lightning burst like vultures claws across the peaks.

  The blistering desert sun bleached the back of Lucifer’s skull in ways for which the molten flames of hell never prepared him. He snapped his finger bones for Struggles to hand him his shades, only to remember he left Struggles behind to clean up his office after his latest tantrum.

  Even in the middle of the day he dressed in full, ornamental opening night glory—top hat, ermine lined opera cape lined with live ermines, evening coat with cummerbund, spats and pure onyx cane with carved dragon head that breathed fire on command. The perfect suit for any climate except, perhaps this one. The sweat poured from his calcified skeletal pores.

  The heat hovered above the desert floor in layers, like a bean dip into which no one wanted to dip. A dozen park patrons waited at the vacant entrance booth wiping their brows. Sweat flowed in rivulets down their shoulders and arms.

  Halfhooter’s combat gear fulfilled male pulp magazine fantasies—practically naked and useless in combat when swords struck her ample bare skin. With one breast lost to cancer and the other barely filling an A cup, Halfhooters would never emerge from the lush and fevered renderings of the Frank Frazetta school of teen masturbatory cover art (but no one could blame Lucifer for that).

  She braided her hair and bound it behind her neck to keep it from flying in her face. She wore only the g-string Lucifer graciously provided, leaving her barefoot for firm footing on gravel, asphalt or sand. Then again, Lucifer imagined, what were the chances of slippery flooring at a theme park, unless Pilgrim found staff motivated to mop or a child upchucked?

  She kept the Hellblazer scimitars strapped to her side, within easy reach, each with a leather loop fastened to the hilt (no doubt to accommodate her weak feminine wrists). Lucifer congratulated himself. All the more reason to believe she’d be well on her way to housewife hell before the tour ended.14

  “We’re in the Chijuajuan Desert,” Pilgrim said, waking him from his reverie. “West Texas. If a customer says it’s hot as hell, one of our cowhands tells them, ‘Cowboy up. This is nothing compared to life on the trail.’”

  Pilgrim wore a cowboy outfit straight from Hollywood in the fifties, complete with fringed vest and fringed shirt. His red cowboy hat, complete with pleated rim, held onto his round face for dear life with a drawstring pulled tight under his chin. He looked so absurd, that Howdy Doody would look like John Wayne standing beside him. He wrapped his belt three times around his minuscule waist and his red suede cowboy boots, the same suede material as his hat, slipped off his feet with each step his took. With the exception of his round face, Pilgrim lost ninety percent of his body mass since he arrived in hell and the total effect of his ensemble created the appearance of a kewpie doll tossed into a roadside gas station’s ninety-percent-off bin.

  “Whaddaya think?” he asked trying to keep up with Lucifer as they approached the park. Lucifer took longer and longer strides to avoid him. Twelve subservient demons lay prostrate between the limousine and the park entrance to provide him with a carpet. Pilgrim trotted to the side to avoid hurting them even more.

  “So, whaddaya think?” he continued to pester Lucifer as though His Satanic Majesty had time to think with his yammering.

  When he reached the gates he dugs his heels into the last prostrate demon’s head and ground the cane’s tip for good measure. “Ouch,” I mean, “Thank you, Your Most Malicious,” he cried (or something to that effect, since the sand in his mouth blocked most of the sound).

  Lucifer continued to grind the cane, for didn’t see a grand banner proclaiming “Hellelujahland” with flames and fireworks, he didn’t see a lighted, animated “Hellelujahland” marquee, but instead saw the paramountly perturbing, appetite suppressing, product placing premises of g.d.i.
Mondays.

  “What the Myself is this?” he demanded. For it seemed the fast food franchise,15 lured into hell by way of a franchising contract arranged by Pilgrim in another misbegotten attempt to please him, now had its hooks into his theme park too.

  The logo loomed large in the bleached bone barren sky.

 

  “Isn’t it wonderful, sir? They built booths in the park and they created an entirely new menu just for us.”

  Lucifer’s lower jaw banged back and forth against his thyroid cartilage. Draped under the M for Monday’s logo, a promotional display featured “Authentic Texas Cow Patty Pies.”

  He would have made it a mandatory meal in hell, but to sell cow shit for confectionary consumption here? How could Pilgrim think of it first?

  He draped his metacarpals and phalanges over his eye sockets so he wouldn’t see the rest of the menu, but Pilgrim listed the innovative delights anyway, delights “guaranteed to tie up the port-a-cans.”

  Lucifer tried to block the cheery cherry syrup voice out, but he could picture each item as Pilgrim called it. “Choco-Lax and Pepsid-Mint Bars, Frappuhistamine ice drinks, not to mention hot and iced Pepper-Bismol Lattefedrin and Cinnacialis.”

  Imagine the port-a-can franchise possibilities. The sales boosted by recommending order of consumption for least damage to the digestive tract. But Pilgrim could never conceive a plan this devious. “You’re joking.”

  “It’s in the contract: ‘food that they can overstuff their stomachs with and at the end of the day go home sick and diabetic. Sugary, high fat, bad for them. Nothing they can really enjoy.’ And since I didn’t have a budget to start my own concession, I just used who we had at hand.”

  A cloud blocked the sun, if only for a moment, but clearly foreshadowing the revelations to come. Lucifer knew the Hand of the All Ruin Your Day too well.

  The first mites of misgiving began to gnaw his bones. Until this moment he never doubted Pilgrim would cave under the contract. In fact, he pictured Pilgrim, swept away in his infectious enthusiasm, losing sight of the contract altogether. The shadows passed but his misgivings remained.

  “For a minute there I thought you turned white, but you’re nothing but bones, so you’d already be white.” Pilgrim laughed.

  Lucifer swept his arm straight to his side, parallel with his shoulders, cape draped, and pointed his cane to the entrance. “Enough of this. Show me what you’ve got.” But his gesture lacked the drama, the grand sweep, the Wagnerian sturm und drang he needed to restore his proper authority.

  “I suggest you close your eyes for the grand reveal, but I just remembered you don’t have any eyes,” Pilgrim babbled on as he always did.

  Lucifer wanted to see his grand entrance gate. The lights, the fireworks, the Hellelujahland marquee lights scrolling in glorious blazing color. Maybe they were saving it for the close, Yes, that was it. The epic final reveal. So far Pilgrim failed to produce a decent card trick.

  Pilgrim’s grubby hand tugged his right elbow. Lucifer swallowed the impulse to slice him into tiny pieces and serve him as a cheese tray. Not just swallowed the impulse but squeezed it into a electron-sized ball deep inside his pelvis where it only a prolonged fusion reaction could release it (hopefully preventing him from destroying his new park before he destroyed Pilgrim).

  A few yards away a girl said, “Look at that model roller coaster. It’s got pterodactyls chasing the cars.”

  “Those are flying demons, shit head,” a boy, maybe two years older, said. “The heads are gargoyles and they have bat wings. And if you really paid attention you’d see all the cars’ll crash because the rails loop to ninety degrees to the side which is aerodynamically impossible.”

  “Don’t call me shit head, dick wad.” The girl grabbed the boy’s hair. The boy punched her in the side of the head. Their mother tried to pull them apart, but they started kicking.

  Pilgrim pulled him past the skirmish and toward a set of double turnstile gates underneath a wooden sign with hand carved western style letters:

 

  “You can get a $2.00 discount with the secret code,” Pilgrim said. “UPC74CQL.”

  Lucifer needed less babbling and more pizzazz. He expected more than turnstiles and a stencil-cut plywood sign dangling from a garden-center sign post.

  He expected a longer walk from the ticket booth to the gates. To be honest (although honesty was the last thing to be expected ever in hell) he expected a grand procession, with patrons demanding his autograph, a band, speeches, a ribbon cutting ceremony. This was, after all, his park, his day, his celebration in his honor.

  He suppressed the tiny raging beast within, shedding his first layer of psychic skin. Before he lost it, he wanted to build up to a rage truly worthy of his megateratons of destructive capacity. He assured himself that he skipped ahead of himself in his mental park preview. In their well-deserved anxiety and self-loathing over their inability to deliver the epic scale—which he so obviously merited—his minions no doubt chose to wait until Pilgrim led him inside the park—until the last minute—to celebrate his arrival.

  Pilgrim pushed the turnstile handles. “We’re here, Your Most Salacious,” he said.

  This would be the moment. This would be the time of fireworks, of screams, when Night on Bald Mountain blasted in Dolby Digital® and begging for mercy for their absolute inadequacy. The time for something to bite Lucifer in the leg.

  A juicy bite. A deep enough bite to make him glad flesh didn’t cover his bones.

  An overweight twelve-year-old gripping a Nintendo 3DS in his plump fist, his face purple with rage, rubbed his mouth and shouted, “You took my place in line, asshole.”

  “I'm the Lord of hell.”

  The kid kicked him just above the ankle. “I don’t care if you’re Barack Obama. You’re an asshole.”

  His parents snatched the cretinous beast away, telling him, “Timothy, behave. You don’t want to go to hell.”

  “Oh, right. Keep threatening me. It's got to be better than having parents like you.”

  Only in that moment did Lucifer absorb in complete detail the drab, woebegone, decrepit, failure to inspire words “recreational” or even “disappointment” of a theme park before him; a dilapidated miniature golf park in a state of disrepair only two violations away from being condemned. The course offered twelve holes with garish concrete, latex rubber and papier mâché caricatures of dragons, demons and ogres with spinning windmills hanging bats by rubber threads and spitting sparks that barely simulated flame.

  On Hole 1, golfers aimed their balls through a dragon’s mouth, and angled it off the uvula so that it shot out the dragon’s ass and onto the green. Hole 6 challenged the golfers to time their balls past the ogre’s swinging penis and through his balls to pass under his low hanging cheeks onto the green.

  Not all the holes featured scatological challenges. On Hole 9, twirling bat wings batted the ball back to the tee. Hole 2’s maze required no fewer than six strokes to finish but listed at par 3. Patrons timed their balls for a swinging door only to have the door suddenly change direction and knock the ball back to the tee, or, if they holed the ball, the cup might cough the ball back onto the green or all the way on to the next course.

  Patrons might be a poor choice of words. Very few customers wandered through the park. Besides Timothy, who looked more like an overstuffed chicken breast swaddled in H&M Kids labels than a child, and his parents, Lucifer saw a single mother with two pre-teens who terrorized her for Slurpees at the southeast corner Monday’s, a man in his forties who looked so creepy no one would go near him, two toddlers running so wildly though the park their parents looked like they would drop dead on on the fairway, and two fathers smoking stogies while their preteens tried to poke their clubs under the Blasphemous Basilisk on Hole Nine.

  “What do you think?” Pilgrim asked, his voice pitched with excitement, like an ignorant Israelite showing Moses the Sinai desert as though it were the promised land.

&n
bsp; “What do I think?” Lucifer grumbled, his voice building from his hip bones and reverberating through his chest bones but unable to formulate an answer, his mind unable to comprehend the distance between his expectations and the cartoon carnival on display. “What do I think?…”

  Customers stepped carefully around the potholes and railroad spikes in the roads. Crudely painted warning signs made hazards look like park décor. Kids waited in line at Carney booths that never opened. Electric tiki torches simulated orange flames and the sound of simulated demonic laughter pealed at random from speakers recycled from drive-in theaters.

  A miniature electric train wound through the park with three wooden cars attached, its engine painted in a clownish rendition of an Americanized Old Nick Satan. Two plastic horns rattled against the engine cowl, jury rigged with bailing wire behind each headlight. The cattle catcher jutting from the front looked like Old Scratch’s beard. The sides of the cars once depicted Snow White’s seven dwarves, now covered with just enough paint to add horns and sharp teeth.

  Worst of all, dozens of dustpiggies infested the park, scampering between patrons, tugging their clothes, stealing their food, snatching their golf balls, chasing each other between people’s legs.

  Several groups of teenagers, their jacket pockets bulging with their personal pharmacies, meandered through the park like slow moving epidemics. Typical teens all of them—dressed in hoodies, jackets, high tops and bling—Lucifer couldn’t tell if they wanted to play the holes or case the joint. One of the groups drifted by Lucifer’s party. A tall boy, wearing an “Eat the Rich” t-shirt, said, “This doesn’t have any of the gnarliness of that Halloween Hell House in Dallas.”

  “At least Dallas had a pig fetus for their abortion play,” replied a girl with pink hair splayed into a wedge. “So, like, Eraserhead.”

  “That was a cow fetus, doofus,” said the blonde teenager, who may or may not have been a girl. Hshe wore sher hair in cornrows and ear loops so large they dragged sher lobes to sher shoulders.

  “Whatever.”

  Pink hair girl bumped into Lucifer and slipped her hand into his morning coat pocket. Lucifer twisted her wrist aside.

  “Watch your hands, Dia de Los Muertos,” she sniped.

  Halfhooters unsheathed one of her swords. “Shall I slice off her hands, your Most Displeased?”

  Pilgrim jumped between them, stopping Halfhooters before she drew blood. “No, no, no, no dismembering the guests. We’re not in the underworld any more.”

  Mortified that she might have created an intereternal incident Halfhooters threw herself prostrate at Lucifer’s feet. “Forgive me, Lord of Unforgivableness. Slice off my head and return me to my place in your lobby, humiliated and debased.”

  Lucifer lifted her by her hair and planted her on her feet. He dusted the sand from her front side, making sure to grope her like a sixteen-year-old boy to maximize her humiliation. “Nonsense, Halfhooters. I’m giving you every possible chance to earn your way Westinghouse Housewife Hell.”

  Halfhooters lost all her color. “Never that, your Most Capricious and Injudicious. I swear to sacrifice every joint, every tendon, every molecule before I fail you so miserably.” She bowed and, without rising, returned to her place at his side.

  “I take it back,” Eat the Rich said. “This is way more rad than Dallas.”

  Lucifer pushed the kids aside and marked off the park’s perimeter with his cane. “Where in he name of the All Lord it Over Us are we? Because I don’t see the my theme park.”

  Androgynous teen rushed behind him and fell in step. “We get it. Your shit’s too good for the likes of us.”

  Halfhooters stepped between them and pulled one of Hellblazers an inch from its sheath. Even that tiny glimpse of the flaming blade blade blinded them. The teens immediately backed away.

  ”Welcome to Hellelujuahland,” Pilgrim said. He said it as a matter of fact, with no apology. As though it should please the Lord of the Decrepitude. “With motifs to please both demons and damned.” He directed Lucifer’s attention to an above ground pool, five feet high and twenty four feet in diameter. “Behold, ‘Lucifer’s Whirlpool of Doom.’”

  A mother and twins floated in vinyl orcas and splashed the water showing all the exuberance of sloths waking from hibernation. She wore a fluorescent green monokini that died on the bargain rack and the twins’ suits almost matched their hair. A side-bound motor created a mild whirlpool effect on the surface. A brother in Bart Simpson trunks hustled down a vomit green sea serpent slide and splashed into the waves. The father stood by the side, sipping a lukewarm Bud Light Chelada from a can. He wiped his brow. “I didn’t know it could be so hot,” he complained.

  A dustpiggie in a cowboy hat jumped on the pool ledge and drawled, as best a dustpiggie with a voice like sandpaper and gravel could drawl, “Cowboy up, big feller, this is nothing compared to life on the trail.”

  A second dustpiggie lassoed the beer with a red, white and blue lariat. “Not beer. Piss tomato juice.”

  The bones in Lucifer’s skull trembled and quaked. Before he could calm them, his cochlear bones blasted through his ear canals. They knocked down the Hole 12 flag and the Styrofoam cup from a bewildered twelve-year-old’s hand.

  Lucifer slammed his cane against the side of the pool, knocking the piggies into the water. They sank like stones to the bottom. The mother and children dived to grab them. Pilgrim rushed to look over the edge, but Lucifer grabbed his hat’s draw string and snapped him back.

  “This is as close to Hellelujahland as a swirly to water boarding with electro shock therapy.”

  He shook Pilgrim side-to-side like a bottle of ketchup. “Where are the water rides with leaking cars dodging flying piranha? Where is the death defying roller coaster with no seat belts, no safety protocols and children flying into space?”

  The family rescued the dustpiggies and plopped them on the pool ledge. Lucifer kept Pilgrim’s drawstring snug to keep him focused while the mother dried the piggies off.

  “Where’s the Hell House tunnel with real axe murderers and and brain-eating baby dolls?” Lucifer shook him up and down like a soda he wanted to spray. “Or the THX theaters with 3D IMAX screens and eardrum splitting sound?”

  The cowboy dustpiggie popped his head from the towel and said, “Cowboy up, big fellers, this is nothing compared to life on the trail.”

  “The Whirlpool of Doom is your water ride.” Pilgrim said, choking through the drawstring. He waved at the wife, and children. The orca floats, tired of the inattention, snapped at the mother’s elbow.

  “That’s not a ride,” Lucifer snapped. “It isn’t even a Carny attraction.”

  Halfhooters placed her hand on one of the Hellblazer handles. “Shall I lop off his head, your Most Bestial? Maybe I can find a whip to lash his back.”

  “Pipe down you overreaching prostrating pushing for promotion platoon guard.” He poked Pilgrim in his round fat face with the dragon head on his cane. “Where are the weapons? I put them in the contract. Weapons they can strike with, slash with and weapons they can throw and bash with.”

  As soon as he said it, he began to calm down.

  The contract. Yes, the contract.

  Forget the park.

  The contract would nail Pilgrim. No disaster after all.

  The Mondays thing? A hiccup. The park? A mess, well, more than a mess, a cluster fuck, but no soul for His All Better Than You. Worth the trade off.

  “You’re looking at the weapons, Your Most Willing to Disembowel.” Pilgrim said. “Everyone has one.”

  Lucifer laughed so hard his teeth rattled in his jaw. “What kind of idiot do you take….”

  He stopped laughing.

  He knew. Without Pilgrim saying another word, the tiny light bulb flashed. Then a room with wall-to-wall neon. He knew as though someone painted “sucker’ across his fore skull in all caps with dayglo red.

  “You can strike with a golf club, or slash with it. Not cut, mind you, but
throw and….”

  Lucifer gripped Pilgrim by both arms and lifted him from the ground. He shook him like a limp Raggedy Andy doll in a Doberman’s jaws. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.” Considering the damage he wanted to inflict, Pilgrim escaped with little consequence, but only because Lucifer didn’t want to cause a scene under the watchful eye of His Peeping Tom on High.

  He dropped Pilgrim to the asphalt and threw his arms into the air in mock surrender. “Forget the weapons. Where’s the spectacle? I asked for grand scale. I asked for Disneyland to the power of twelve. This is…” He struggled for the words. “This is….”

  Lucifer stepped back. His boot squished into something soft and runny. An odor both rancid and acrid rose to his nasal concha. Like mud mixed with spoiled corn, potatoes, carrots, floor wax, carpet fiber, peanuts, popcorn, candy wrappers and even digestive acid…

  “Piggie shit,” squealed a dustpiggie with unbridled glee. “Stepped in piggie shit.”

  Three more dustpiggies hopped in succession, clapping tiny little piggie paws. “Spats and piggie shit,” they shouted.

  “Piggie shit,” the lariat looping dustpiggie chimed in from the pool ledge.

  “Shut up,” Lucifer snarled. He examined his boot, now covered with a black tar like substance eating through the leather.

  “For a quarter,” the first dustpiggie said. “PacMan.”

  Lucifer looked for someplace or someone on which to wipe his boot, but his demon entourage long since fled to the limousine (no doubt in a moment when he turned his attention from them).

  The other piggies chimed in. “Quarters. Quarters.” Quarters, Lucifer realized, for PacMan, Qbert, Space Invaders and other rusting and ancient arcade games lining the fairway.

  Lucifer kicked one piggie after the other in the side of the head, informing them that he would, under no circumstances give them quarters, a quarter or anything they requested. They shouted louder.

  “Wipe your boot on me, Your Most Self-Serving,” Halfhooters offered, once again prostrating herself.

  The one thing Lucifer loved about humans was their capacity for self-deception. In spite of the progress women made in women’s rights, they were still willing to grovel even with no possible chance for advancement.

  Lucifer picked the off dustpiggies one-by-one and tossed them across the course. He even drop kicked one past the Hole 11 demon dressed in Scotch golfing gear who putted balls back from the green to the tee. Then, rather than wiping his boot on Halfhooter’s back or someplace less offensive, he smeared the noxious piggie shit all over her braided hair.

  None of this stopped him from reciting his laundry list of complaints to Pilgrim. “I wanted a roller coaster that would rattle these peckerwood’s brains so hard they’ll come out scrambled and soft boiled.”

  A single mother put her hands around both children’s ears. “Will you watch your language? These are children and we’re paying customers.”

  The dude ranch dustpiggie leaped on her shoulder and said in his sandpaper drawl, “Cowboy up, liddle lady, this is nothing compared to life on the trail.” As soon as she saw the six-inch high, densely packed and animated dust ball on her shoulder, the woman screamed and ran toward the exit, dragging her children by the ears behind her.

  The piggies swarmed Lucifer’s ankles once more, only twice as many this time. “More quarters.”

  Lucifer ignored them. “No refunds,” he yelled at the woman. “And get used to it. There’ll be a no return policy when I see you in the after life.”

  It wouldn’t have mattered. Before she reached the exit even more dustpiggies herded her back toward the games on the fairway, begging for quarters. Pilgrim collected himself from the asphalt and brushed the muck off his sleeves and pants.

  Lucifer reached backward to grab his collar. He swiveled on his hip bones to face Pilgrim and continue dressing him down about this disaster of a theme park, which, he added, had no state of the art IMAX 3D, no killer whales, no animatronic sharks to snap off the patrons heads.

  For all his indignation and energy, he lost momentum to the tugging, grappling, wrestling, seemingly geometrically multiplying number of dustpiggies. They demanded quarters for games, for gum balls, for condoms from the bathrooms. The more they demanded, the more he kicked and swatted. The more he kicked and swatted, the more they bit, crawled, chewed, demanded and multiplied.

  Halfhooters rose from her prone position, not even bothering to clean the piggie shit from her hair. She drew the Hellblazer swords, slipped her wrists through the leather loops and spun the blades in parallel figure eights. “I’ll save you, Lord Lucifer,” she challenged. With those words she charged into the melee to slice the creatures from her master’s body.

  “Don’t touch the suit,” Lucifer warned her. “It was hand stitched from the skins of four generations of Russian Czars. It will take centuries to grow them back.”

  Too late.

  Halfhooters sliced through the first piggie with her fiery blade. It sounded like fatback sizzling on a cast iron skillet. The odor, however, smelled nothing like bacon or ham. The park filled with a stench resembling burnt cat hair clustered with lint clinging to a thick layer of household grease collecting dead skin and spider legs left to ripen under your grandmother’s couch when she spilled her TV dinner watching Queen Elizabeth’s coronation.

  The dustpiggie squealed, its squeal pitched high like a roman candle soaring through a neighbor’s yard on New Year’s. Three piggies jumped her back, pulling her hair, croaking and squealing like wild boars in a frenzy. “Dustpiggies not bacon,” one of them screamed.

  The two single fathers dragged their children to watch. “No shit it’s not bacon,” the one with the Coors shirt and ACLU fishing hat said. “What is that smell?”

  His buddy slapped his kid’s hand as he tried to snatch his wallet. “Smells like the back of my great aunt’s closet.”

  Hellblazer slashed through another attacking pig, sizzling so loud it sounded like a slice of ham popping in an inch of frying grease. The pig ran away split from its head to just above its hips, each half crispy brown and screaming, “Burned, baby, burned.” Halfhooters hacked through a dozen more, their body parts crackling and peeling away like flaming mosquitoes from an arc lamp.

  Pink-haired punk teen whipped out her iPhone to record the melee. She asked Eat the Rich. “You Tweeting this?”

  “Dead,” he said. “This place is slayin’. Like literally.”

  MrMs Androgynous added, “Hashtag BurntPork, Hashtag ChokeDust, Hashtag HellPiggies.”

  The piggies dropped from Lucifer’s tux like fleas from a dog on Revolution. They faced Halfhooters then swarmed her in a dust storm.

  She retreated to Hole 3, leaping atop the grinning Demonic Jack-O-Lantern. She raised her arms high above her shoulders. The Jack-O-Lantern cackled a static-filled digital laugh. She slashed downward at an angle then outward to form an “x” as the piggies leaped, drop kicking as many as she could out of the zone of combat.

  Across the course, an untended teenager jumped to the top of Hole 9. He began to strike the Goblin King to knock loose the ball he lodged in the moldy green teeth. “That’s cheating,” his friends shouted.

  “This is the hell golf course,” the kid yelled. “Cheating’s allowed. And who’s looking with that fight going on anyway? Asswipes.”

  In spite of her dropkicking and downward slashing, the dustpiggies successfully scaled the Jack-O-Lantern. Still trying to draw them away from Lucifer, Halfhooters leaped into the commons and somersaulted across the miniature railroad tracks—releasing the swords to push off the ground with her fingertips—then into the sweeping tentacles of the Sacrilegious Squid on Hole 4.

  “So that’s what those leather tethers are for,” Pilgrim said with no small degree of reverence.

  “Do you expect me to accept this as your fulfillment of the contract?” Lucifer demanded of Pilgrim as though Halfhooters weren’t even in the park.

  “Excuse me, Your Most Se
lf-Centered, but your bodyguard’s fighting for her life..”

  Lucifer brushed off his cape and studied his boot to make sure he had, in fact, cleaned off all of the offending pig shit. “She volunteered. She knows the consequences.”

  The battle drew everyone in the park to watch—men with iPhones shooting video, mothers covering their children’s eyes or pushing them behind their legs to block their view. The children, in the meantime, did their best to pull their mother’s fingers apart or peek through their knees. Several tens, twenties and even a few fifties exchanged hands.

  The vendor from the southeast corner Monday’s booth popped up in the middle of the crowd with a cooler strapped to his waist. He pitched, “Choco-Lax Bars, Pesid-Mint.” Even though he somehow boosted the price from five to ten dollars, bills flowed in his direction.

  Halfhooters trebled and cut through the squid’s lashing latex tentacles like a Riverdancer. She cut a wide rightward arc through the oncoming tide with her right hand. More dustpiggies swarmed the squid’s mantle for a rear assault. She flipped the sword in her left hand and sliced upward, scoring the lead piggie crotch to forehead so that it peeled, shrieking, into two halves.

  “Do you consider fighting a swarm of creatures spawned by couch cushions while completely naked one of the usual benefits of the job, sir?” Pilgrim asked.

  Lucifer grabbed Pilgrim’s Cowboy hat drawstring and yanked him up to face level. “Don’t change the subject. Where’s the roller coaster guaranteed to scare the Love of His Pain in the Ass out of anyone who rides? Where’s the water boarding water slide guaranteed to make families sell each other souls in order to get off? Where’s the theater with an apocalypse so real the audience leaves their pants and underwear behind?”

  The piggies chased Halfhooters to Hole 7. She paused for an instant to mark her timing before diving through the blades of Dr. Frankenstein’s windmill. This gave her a moment to catch her breath.

  She tried to estimate the dustpiggies’ numbers as they navigated the tower. They batted at the rubber bats and pawed at the nylon spider webs before one of them grunted, “Fuckit under.” Once they realized their stature allowed them to duck under the blades without damage, they poured on top of her..

  Her wind recovered, Halfhooters kicked a wooden trap door designed to cover the three routes to the hole. The piggies rambled and scrambled over the board to reach her, which brought them into her trap. With her left blade edge slicing upward and her right slicing downward, she rapidly chopped away like a deli chef working his most delicate cuts. She arranged their pig pieces on the trap door like a giant charcuterie board.

  She won the battle of Hole 7, but their numbers continued to grow.

  Pilgrim, realizing her victory would only cost her in the long run, held his hands to his mouth. Lucifer poked him in the belly like a Pillsbury Dough Boy. “Well?”

  Pilgrim hid his face behind his cowboy hat and mumbled something. Lucifer pulled his hat away until the draw string stretched as far as it could go. The hat snapped back into his face. Lucifer pulled the hat back again. The snapping hat left the center of Pilgrim’s face embossed with an oval in the shape of his cowboy hat’s crown.

  “Speak up.”

  “This was the best I could do on the budget you gave me.”

  Lucifer smothered Pilgrim’s face in his hat for a moment. Then pulled it away once more, leaving the embossed ridges even more red. “A budget of nothing, as you recall.”

  Lucifer snapped the hat back and forth against Pilgrim’s face like a paddle ball until the string finally broke. He tossed the hat onto the asphalt and ground it underneath his heel, making sure to use the boot that stumbled into the pig shit.

  “Do I hear excuses? Do I hear paltry, pitiable, piddling, pathetic whining?” Lucifer twisted the drawstring, which still dangled around Pilgrim’s neck, and pulled so it tight that his round face bloated like a carnival balloon overblown with helium.

  Pilgrim’s voice even raised an octave. “In your own words, ‘You'll have to do what you can,’ and this is what I could.”

  Halfhooters retreated Hole 10, the Gulping Gargoyles, who sucked balls from their paths and spit them into new lanes. The pigs scrambled after her, climbing over each others butts, backs, shoulders and heads, all growling and squealing at once with battlecries such as, “want that ass,” “more slut shaming,” “pig up pardners” and “friends with benefits.” They gathered so much momentum that dozens were soaring like flying squirrels and singing like Valkyries.

  She dropped to one knee to avoid colliding with piggies in flight, and raised her blades to slice them as they passed overhead.

  Several piggies fashioned makeshift swords from loose detritus around the park, railroad spikes with wood scrap hilts, half garden shears, women’s nail files sharpened and fixed into pen barrels. If Halfhooters slashed overhand, they ducked under and thrust at her knees and shins. If he cut vertically, they parried from her side attacking her thighs and calves, forcing her to vary her angles, attack over and under, watch from all sides, dull her blades on metal as well as bone.

  With Pilgrim’s neck still knotted firmly, Lucifer slapped him back and forth to focus his attention. “So how did you even manage this, you long-term, dependable in your ineptitude serial loser?”

  Pilgrim squeezed his eyes shut and his face turned blue. His mouth looked like a fish, lips flapping open in a tight figure eight. “Made a deal…Crusty McCanker…owned course and trailer park…door…going into foreclosure…willing to donate… reasonable price.”

  “And what was the price?”

  “Get out of hell free.”

  Lucifer never imagined bones could spontaneously boil. Combust, yes, but boil? Never. Yet he felt his bones turning to liquid and rushing to steam state. He squeezed Pilgrim’s neck so hard the buffoon’s face popped off and shot a mile into the sky.

  Halfhooters sliced through the onrushing pigs in precise wide arcs, no longer attacking from a face-on position but switching to a pirouette, her ams extended and moving in opposition as she slashed away, twirling her swords at the wrist, from head to knee and knee back to head. Piggie legs flew to the left, piggie arms flew straight up, piggie torsos flew to the right, piggie hands clutching piggie nail file swords spun out at odd angles, piggie heads—well piggie tops because piggies don’t really have heads just bulky piggie bodies—spun out the back.

  The crowd followed the fight around the entire course, keeping a cautious distance to avoid the sprays of blood and possible backlash in the form of a stray biting dustpiggie. The mothers made sure to herd the children from danger and the children more than once tried to get in the way of the blood spatter insisting this was way cooler than the water splashing at Sea World.

  The dustpiggies stepped up their rush like Alabama linebackers, their numbers refusing to thin. They bared teeth and claws, which turned out to be fine and small—sharper than vaccination needles. Halfhooters dropped to one knee, this time to support her tiring body. Blood splatter and offal formed a crimson ring around around the growing pile of piggie refuse.

  All three Mondays vendors moved through the crowd hawking ice cold Frappuhistamines, the perfect thing to cool the blood lust, and iced Pepsid-Mint drinks to calm the rising bile, only twenty dollars for a 12 oz souvenir take home glass.

  Wagers escalated to four and five C-notes.

  Halfhooters weakened under the porcine barrage. The beasts broke through the slicing blades. Tiny bites appeared on her calves and ankles, knees, shoulders, neck and cheeks. The swarm gained momentum as a swell of dust encircled the scene like a whirlwind gathering strength.

  Lucifer looked back and forth between Pilgrim’s form receding into the upper atmosphere and Halfhooters, about to wind up worse than Joseph ibn Naghrela at Granada. And both still had hell to pay. He couldn’t remember when he’d relished his day more.

  He clapped his hands together but the sounds of phalanges on phalanges sounded like little more than clumsy castane
ts.

  The whirlwind rose above Halfhooter’s waist as more and more dustpiggies piled on to support their comrades. Her body wobbled. The blades drooped into narrower and slower arcs. Blood dripped from her chest and spurted from her neck. One piggie sank his teeth into her wrist.

  A particularly fat beast scaled her head to claw her hair. He ripped a handful from behind her ear. A half dozen more leaped from the whirlwind and pull her swords free. Three more piggies pulled apart her braids and yanked her hair out by the roots. Dozens swarmed her chest and shoulders.

  Then the whirlwind covered them with a roar like the ocean crashing against a cliff. When it drifted away six minutes later, the dustpiggies all dropped off, no longer interested, leaving Halfhooters kneeling, arms to her sides, her scalp bald and bleeding, shoulders stripped of skin, both breasts gone. Another minute later and she pitched face forward into the dirt.

  Lucifer wrapped his fingers together and squeezed. He leaped for joy. He did it. She failed.

  “Did you get that?” Eat the Rich asked.

  “Which?” Pink-haired girl said. ”The guy shooting into space, or the woman taken down by the pigs?”

  “Hashtag SheGotBothStupid,” Androgynous girl said. “You were too busy checking out dead girl’s ass to notice.”

  Lucifer felt extra generous. He produced three passes to a Marilyn Manson concert and handed them to the teens. “Take these and be gone. I have business to attend to.”

  Eat the Rich held the passes at a distance as though they might infect him. “Dude, he makes reach arounds with suppository enemas look mainstream.”

  Lucifer picked up a dustpiggie by what he assumed to be the nape of its neck and said, “Fine, I’ll feed you to them.”

  “I need to edit this anyway,” Pink hair said, and the three teens headed for the exit.

  Lucifer kneeled by Halfhooters’ body. He ran his phalanges up and down her buttocks and spine to test for a tickle response. Delightfully, he found none. “Looks like you screwed the pooch. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. It’s the hell of Westinghouse Commercials for you.” He reached for her body.

  Only it turned translucent.

  Halfhooters stood, looked upward, sprouted wings and a halo.

  With no warning at all, she ascended in a beam of light.

  Before Lucifer could react, Pilgrim re-entered the atmosphere. He touched down in flames, flattened into a pancake, directly in front of Hole 10 just as a ten-year-old holed his ball for a score of 15. The child fell back onto the green, hitting his butt so hard his tears landed in the next hole.

  The same child, Timothy, who bit Lucifer earlier.

  The dustpiggies rushed over to gobble Pilgrim’s extremities.

  “Hot meal.”

  “Not tasty.”

  “Better than hungry.”

  They all agreed as they gobbled, which terrified Timmy so much he peed his pants.

  Lucifer kicked the piggies off Pilgrim. He lifted him from the ashes and shook him back into his proper shape, much as he preferred to leave him flat as a pancake. With his entire outfit burned off except for his boots, Pilgrim looked like a plastic toy on a gas station shelf—a big round head and a wiry yellow body.

  Lucifer wondered if Pilgrim really looked like this, or if he had just conditioned himself to seeing the happy faced bastard this way for so long, he couldn’t picture him any other way? (No, he thought. Pilgrim did this to himself, and deserved the humiliation.)

  “What happened to Halfhooters?” Lucifer demanded.

  The dustpiggies turned their attention toward Timothy. He pushed his pudgy body away, trying to call for help, but not finding any voice.

  “How should I know what happened to Halfhooters?” Pilgrim asked. “Where is she?” He looked around and realized she was nowhere to be seen. “Did you send her away? Did she get upset and leave?” He scratched his head. Lucifer couldn’t be sure, but he seemed to fight off a smile. “But, no, you would never allow anyone to just walk away without permission and you would never give permission.”

  He threw up his hands. “You’ve got me, sir. After all, I wasn’t here.”

  The piggies looked back and forth between Pilgrim, whom some had tasted and found to be not all like chicken, and the plump morsel Timothy who suddenly decided to get to his feet. Unfortunately, since he left a large puddle of pee, he found it harder to rise than he expected.

  Lucifer stretched his neck and skull until he loomed into Pilgrim’s face with an overawing, oppressive osteo-onerous leer. “She had one task and one choice. Defend me against these foul-smelling, maddeningly squealing, razor clawed, dagger-toothed puff pillows. Or spend eternity as Betty Crocker appeasing insincere males with more hands than octopi have tentacles. And she failed.”

  Pilgrim backed away. “Then she’s back in hell fending off more hands than tentacle.”

  Lucifer felt the a crack running the circumference of his skull and enough steam building up inside to blow it to the capitol of Texas. “No, she’s not.” He said it patiently. Matter of factly. As though explaining it to a dimwit, which he sometimes thought provided the only possible explanation for Pilgrim’s continued ineptitude. He dropped his cane, wrapped his boney fingers around Pilgrim’s throat and shook him so hard his eyeballs rattled from the back of his head to his eardrums. “ I saw her sprout wings and ascend in a beam of light and it must be your fault and I want to know what you did.”

  “Self-sacrifice,” Pilgrim said, but Lucifer couldn’t understand him because the words couldn’t escape through the choking.

  Pilgrim tried several more times with no more success until he finally, with a sense of desperation, pointed with both hands to his throat. Finally, Lucifer tossed him to the putting green. Perhaps he hadn’t shown quite the patience he pictured in his mind.

  The closest dustpiggies, too tempted to resist, immediately latched onto his fingertips.

  “Fingernails.”

  “Cuticles.”

  “Skin mites.”

  “Blech.” They all agreed at once.

  The confrontation also drew another crowd again. The golfers must have decided the course provided costumed sketches and plays, much like Six Flags and Disneyland because this time they came with drinks and popcorn and everyone recorded with their iPhones. The mothers no longer tried to shield their children’s eyes, convinced the violence belonged to the play as a special effect.

  Except for Timothy, who finally managed to reach his feet, but kept a watchful eye on the piggies.

  Pilgrim brushed the dissatisfied piggies off and reached into the reentry debris. He pulled a handful of Yorkie Bars from the pocket of what remained of his western jacket.. He tossed them into the air and the piggies tore after them in a frenzy, doing more damage to the chocolate than eating it.

  Lucifer whacked him on the forehead. “What was your pitiful, pointless, pinheaded excuse of an answer again?”

  Pilgrim produced one last Yorkie bar from his jacket and offered it to Lucifer. Lucifer knocked it upward from his hand. Pilgrim still managed to catch it, and tore the wrapper open.

  “My guess would be self-sacrifice.”

  “You must be joking.”

  He took a bite, offered some one last time to Lucifer and, sensing his reaction, immediately withdrew the offer. “You see, we’re not in hell anymore. This is neutral territory.” Talking through the chew, he added, “I bet you told Major Halfhooters she would have been condemned to the worst hell possible if she failed you, but she put her life on the line anyway.”

  Lucifer grinned to think of it. As much as a skull could grin.

  He began to admit to himself that the skeleton persona did have its drawbacks which may be why he hadn’t used it since the Roman era. But, yes, for once Pilgrim divined, as much as he hated that word, his intentions completely.

  Having completely demolished the Yorkie bars the dustpiggies slowly inched toward Timothy. Even though the other children watched the play with their paren
ts, none had the delicious high body fat content that he provided.

  “Well, pardon me, your Most To Be Feared,” Pilgrim said, “but isn’t self-sacrifice the one thing His All In Your Business loves more than anything?”

  Lucifer felt the crack around the circumference of his skull close the circuit.

  “Wouldn’t it have been her get out of jail free card, so to speak?”

  Had Pilgrim stopped before that last sentence, Lucifer might have let it go.

  No, who was he kidding? The steam in his skull boiled over and blew his crown east past Midland, past Abilene, past Dallas, past Shreveport and all the way into Louisiana. It ricocheted over a train carrying toxic waste, created a massive spill in Jackson, and veered ninety degrees south to New Orleans to shatter a levee and flood a neighborhood recently gentrified after relocating Black families who had lived there for generations.

  The rest of his skull shattered into ninety-seven separate pieces which he managed to pull together only by extreme force of will. He reached into Pilgrim’s mouth, down his esophagus, past his stomach, all the way through his intestines and past his anus, grabbed his testicles and yanked him inside out.

  With Pilgrim’s huevos still firmly in his grasp, and grinding them between the middle and ring phalanges and the trapezium of his right hand,16 he twirled him over his head like a cowboy’s lariat. Instead of just twirling him for show, however, Lucifer dashed in, out and around the audience, bashing Pilgrim’s exposed organs against the Hole 7 windmill, the ogre on Hole 3, the punishingly painful bamboo spikes on Hole 5, and into the mouth of the ultimate, climactic spiked, armored fire-breathing dragon on Hole 12.

  Lucifer dragged him along the asphalt, he dragged him in the sand, he dragged him across cactus, he threw Pilgrim down and stomped on him, he tied his intestines to a pole and used him like a punching bag. And then he started to kick.

  Lucifer kicked Pilgrim, he kicked the Hole 12 dragon, knocking it off it moorings and setting the green on fire. He kicked the wall of the Whirlpool of Doom, causing it to split open and flood the grounds. He kicked dustpiggies. First one, then another, then by the half dozen until they bounced off walls, they bounced off food stands, they bounced off each other, they bounced up, down and at began to spin like off-flavored quarks.

  “Watch your foot,” one complained.

  “What’d we’ver do’ta you?”

  Lucifer continued to kick them until they bounced around him as though they were gaining momentum in a perpetual motion machine. And that’s when the piggies began to squeal with glee, snorting and clapping, jumping and pushing off each other to add even more momentum.

  “Whee!”

  “Jeez-o-peet.”

  “Holy macaroni,”

  “Better ’n beatin’ off.”

  When Lucifer realized how much fun they were having, he yelled, “Oh, Myself, just get the hell out of here.”

  Before he realized what he said, and before he could stop them, the dustpiggies poured out of the park and into the world at large.

  “Where we going?”

  “How ’bout England?”

  “What’s in England?”

  “Horseradish?”

  “What’s horseradish?”

  “How’d’I know?”

  “Cowboy up, big feller, this is nothing compared to life on the trail,” the Cowboy dustpiggie said.

  “Jesus Christ, will you cut it out?” demanded a small piggie, producing a cigar from his marsupium.

  “Hey, we can talk in sentences now,” one said, jumping on the cigar smoker’s shoulders.

  “And we have gender and can invoke the other guy,” said a piggie, who found a pair of pants somewhere before bounding over the gates.

  Lucifer fell against the shattered but still standing Whirlpool wall, drenched with sweat, crown still missing, top hat lost as well—no doubt somewhere between Abilene and Dallas—staring at Pilgrim still swinging by his intestines from a pole.

  “Are you pleased with yourself, sir?”

  With those words, Timothy ran back to his parents. “Mamma, mamma, I swear I’ll be good. I never want to go to hell. I promise to be good from now on.”

  Silence fell over the park. And then from the back of the audience came a single clap. Clap, clap, clap, clap. Then another pair of hands joined in. And another. Within half a minute the crowd broke into applause and cheering, even a horse whistle or two.

  The sleazy child molester walked up and took Lucifer’s hand. “Hell of a show,” he said. “Great costume too. Don’t know how you did it.” He leaned in and whispered. “I’ll be recommending this place to all my friends with a special love for children.”

  The single mother walked up with a napkin and pen. Without thinking Lucifer signed it. “I really thought this place was a dump,” she admitted. “But the plays are terrific. Maybe for older kids though.”

  From the corner of his eye socket Lucifer noticed the other group of teenagers asking Pilgrim how they did the special effects for his costume.

  He snapped the pen in two and torched the napkin. “Out,” he yelled.

  Everyone stared with disbelief. He split through his tuxedo and grew to thirty feet. Let Czars grow new skins. “I am the Lord of Hell and I want you out of my park at once.”

  One of the teenagers said, “I haven’t seen anything that cool since Harryhausen did Jason and the Argonauts.”

  Lucifer let loose a blast of flame that incinerated him on the spot.

  “Is the show not over?” Timothy’s dad asked his wife. Timothy tugged at his sleeve trying to get him to go.

  “Sir, I don’t think you should kill any more civilians right now,” Pilgrim said.

  As annoyed as he was, Lucifer realized he was right. Instead he set fire to Holes 9, 7 and 4. “Stick your hand in that and see if this is a show.” He then proceeded to kick down the western g.d.i. Monday’s stand, making sure the debris landed on them.

  And that got them moving.

 

  “You look really annoyed, sir,” Pilgrim said.

  Back to his normal nine foot size, and still wearing his cape and boots, if nothing else, Lucifer granted himself permission to calm down. While he experienced one bitter defeat with the loss of Halfhooters, he unleashed the dustpiggies onto the world and the All-In-Your-Face was welcome to them. Most important, however, he achieved his real objective. Pilgrim, at last, belonged to him. For good.

  Let the All Annoying come calling. His Satanic Majesty Lucifer owned the contract to rub in his face. Let Him run home crying. Boo Hoo.

  “Look on the bright side, sir,” Pilgrim said, still dangling from the pole. His intestines looked like suspenders wrapped around his freakish fat face, allowing his sad round eyes and stupid unreadable smile to peer through.

  Time to wipe that smile off his fat face.

  “Whatever might the bright side be?”

  ”You’ll have a good excuse to punish me, which is your favorite thing in hell to do.”

  Oh, to hear him say that. Lucifer felt lighthearted for the first time since stepping from his limousine. Deep down inside, even though inside was an empty shell of bones, he feared Pilgrim would find a way to outwit him. But this time Pilgrim failed. Colossal fail.

  Lucifer snatched his cane and launched into an inspired rendition of Fred Astaire’s ceiling dance, leaping about the holes, perching on the character heads, spinning about the flag poles and thrusting his cane into space.

  “I’ve never seen you in such a good mood, sir,” Pilgrim said.

  Why not cut to the chase? Lucifer thought. He high-stepped over to Pilgrim and pulled the contract from his cape pocket. At the moment it fit between his scaphoid and phalanges. “Of course, I am. You failed, failed miserably. You’re off to the Hell of Dithering Dillweeds Who Dawdle When Opportunity Is Offered By Babbling On and On About Obscure and Off The Point Analogies Only to Find Yourselves Missing The Boat Entirely and Swimming in Shark Infested Waters Where the Octopi
Pull You Under and Suck Off Your Skin With Razor Sharp Tentacles And Deliver It To The Ed Gein Tanning Plant To Be Hand Sewn With Overly Large Bone Needles Into Poorly Designed Articles of Clothing Worn By Men With No Taste Who Think They’re Women and Who Chase Innocent Girls In the Woods To Their Doom While You Experience Every Moment and Feel Excruciating Guilt That Your Skin Enabled Them to Commit Such Heinous Crimes.”

  Lucifer snapped the contract. It expanded to full size and rolled its full length well past the park entrance. Lucifer pricked Pilgrim’s finger and pointed to the line at the bottom. “I just need you to sign in blood that you failed to fulfill the terms.”

  Pilgrim stretched his arms through his intestines, grabbed his scrotum, stuck two fingers into his nose and and another into his ear. With a little twist he managed to pop himself right side out. He dusted off his knees and said. “But I didn’t.”

  Lucifer dropped the contract and his phalanges dropped with it, one-by-one.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You remember how I reminded you that you gave me no budget?”

  Lucifer’s metacarpals followed his phalanges onto the asphalt. “Not at all,” he lied.

  Pilgrim beckoned with his finger and led him to the entrance booth. He pulled open the sliding door at the back. It swung to the side, revealing the display of a giant theme park, with waiter slides, trains, theaters and the roller coaster Lucifer heard the kids discussing when he approached the park earlier. Lucifer commanded his finger bones to reattach, but for some reason they refused. He stormed to Pilgrim’s side.

  “I called your lawyers and asked what you would do if you had do fulfill a contract with no budget,” Pilgrim prattled.

  Steam gathered at the base of Lucifer’s skull, but without his crown capping his skull it dispersed and drifted away.

  Pilgrim led Lucifer to a model water ride with sinking craft. Piranha chewed the legs of clay passengers.

  “They refused to answer of course. So I asked if you’d build a model to scale and then say ‘I’m the Lord of Hell and you will take this or else.’”

  Enough steam built up to drift through his ear canal. “But you aren’t the Lord of Hell.”

  “True, and, once again, they refused to answer. So I asked it the contract specified that the rides had to be real rides, with real people, or if it specified a scale for the rides and buildings.”

  The remaining bones in both of Lucifer’s hands fell to the ground.

  “I expected real rides with real people. What’s the point of Hellelujahland if people pay good money to look at Play-Doh?” He gestured with his wrist.

  Pilgrim picked up a boat and held it out for Lucifer to see. “It’s clay, sir. And the contract never specified ‘real rides with real people.’” Pilgrim returned the boat to the display. “So I present you the finished water ride with leaking cars dodging flying piranha.”

  He pointed to a tiny clay fish dangling by thread from a toothpick. “I even put wings on the flying piranha.” He pointed to tiny wings barely bigger than a pinhead.

  He grabbed Lucifer’s ulna and lead him to the ticket window. “Get a load of the death defying roller coaster with no seat belts, no safety protocols and children flying into space.” Lucifer yanked his arm away in disgust, but Pilgrim didn’t notice. He pointed to clay children hanging by thread. “I dug up the clay myself, and painted them with the same materials used in cave paintings because they were free. Red and yellow ochre, charcoal, hematite and manganese oxide.”

  He pointed to the flying dragons dangling next to the children. “Part dragon, part bat and gargoyle. Check out how the rails run sideways and upside down.”

  Pilgrim grabbed a dust pan next to the display. “You might be able to gather your fingers with this. I’ll look for a broom.”

  Every bone in Lucifer’s body trembled. “Don’t bother.” He fought to keep his teeth from battering each other when he spoke. He surveyed the display for any detail that he could use to hang Pilgrim. Alas, each time Lucifer thought he spotted something, Pilgrim pointed out a new toothpick or thread with a booger-sized detail he overlooked.

  Pilgrim pointed out each of his proud little accomplishments, checking them off the contract as they passed. The Hell House tunnel with real axe murderers and brain-eating baby dolls; the quicksand treasure pit with nothing but empty promises; the sea of mermaids who suck your soul through your navel and your digestive tract with it; the THX theaters with 3D IMAX screens broadcasting satanic subliminal messages, eye blistering strobe effects, and cochlea shattering sound; and the animated muppet theater where the Muppets eat your children.

  With each tick, Lucifer knew Pilgrim fulfilled the letter of the law and delivered entertainment worthy of Donald Trump and trailer trash, which, in Lucifer’s opinion were on a miniature golf course par.

  Lucifer wanted to rip his displays from their shelves and stomp them into splinters.. He wanted to make Pilgrim eat them. Not just eat them, but chew each tiny little figure 32 times until the taste became so vile he never wanted to look at another theme park ride. He wanted to drag Pilgrim out and nail him to the Hole 8 green so that people putted right into his mouth. But that would be too kind. And, lacking meat on his bones, Lucifer discovered he lacked the energy to carry out any more real threats.

  “Are you pleased with yourself?” Lucifer asked, his voice rattling his Cricoid cartilage against his hyoid bones.

  As usual, this always deflated the eager-to-please Pilgrim, like watching air seep from a balloon. His round face drooped into his wire hanger shoulders. “Your Most Inelastic. You spent no money. You thrilled the crowd until you kicked them out. I delivered every thing you asked for as deviously and dishonestly as yourself, I might add.”

  He looked down at his cowboy boots, now dull brown from piggie combat and intestinal entry. “Except for that one little glitch with Major Halfhooters.”

  Lucifer slapped him both ways with the dustpan. “Little glitch? You let a soul escape hell.”

  “To be precise, sir, she did it doing what you asked. And I fulfilled the contract. So am I off the hook for that Dilweed, Octopus Chainsaw Massacre hell?”

  “Oh, no,” Lucifer said. He patted the dustpan against his shin like a minstrel tambourine. “You see, I learned something from watching Broadway. Particularly the play, Damn Yankees.17 And that’s always give yourself an escape clause.” With that, he damned Pilgrim to the Hell of Dithering Dillweeds Who Dawdle When Opportunity Is Offered.

  He knew he’d have to dredge him back up and deal with him later. The All Up In Your Face never give up gracefully. And no doubt Pilgrim would have Ed Gein singing in the rain with the octopi and sharks so the little molested girls could turn them into pets. But he’d enjoy a happy face free office for a millennium or two.

  Lucifer patted the rough edges of his skull. Maybe he could play with the Cthulu look. He left that in the closet after he fed Lovecraft to the Neanderthals in preparation for Stonehenge. After five millennia, he might give that a try.

 

  Lucifer used his cane to rap on the driver’s door of his limo. His idiot chauffeur lay passed out across the seat, scraping his toe claws against the glass. He rapped again.

  Someone cleared his throat behind him.

  An old man, sixty at his youngest, chewed a wad of tobacco so thick it looked like his jaw was about to give birth. He wore overalls with no shirt, a straw cowboy hat that died before it saw better days, and he smelled of cheap home brew. He stuck out his hand as though Lucifer looked like the kind of being who acknowledged a hand shake.

  “Name’s Crusty McCanker. Sold that there golf course to that Pilgrim feller.”

  Lucifer stared at him, waiting for the punch line.

  Crusty let a gob of something as noxious as anything hell could produce fly onto the desert floor. It sat like a toxic puddle ready to dissolve a hole to China.

  “Got five acres of trailer park land ’jacent to the course. You’c’d rent it to people who wan
t to stay at yer theme park. Another two hundred thousand dollars and we’c’d build this into sump’n special.”

  Didn’t matter how good their bargain, Lucifer thought, humans always traded down.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my wife Carol who puts up with my shit everyday, including proofreading this book. And to my mother, who put up with my shit until I left home and who will be really embarrassed when she reads some of the scenes in this book.

  About the Author

  Phillip T. Stephens left home at the early age of forty-five when his parents said, “Get a job.” After his two highly successful sisters refused to support him, he landed a job as a comedy writer for Esther’s Follies in Austin, Texas. That job lasted for six months, during which he failed to write a single skit that appeared on stage. Nor could he collect unemployment since the writer’s job was paid in sandwiches, beer and potato chips. The aliens abducted him while offering one-liners in trade for spare change on Austin’s Sixth Street only to return him when they realized his brain possessed no useful knowledge, only the drafts of three novels, which he already published.

  His wife Carol, who rescues Siamese for austinsiameserescue.org, found him sleeping in a cat shelter and adopted him as well. Since he can’t afford a divorce lawyer she lets him stay in an abandoned cat tower in her rescue room with an iPad he found in a dumpster.

  One day he hopes to hit it big and prove everybody wrong, but for now he writes.

  Follow Phillip @stephens_pt

  Join the Fun

  Have the urge to write? Do you like to draw?

  You can continue the Raising Hell storyline. Pilgrim’s best friend on earth, the author, is putting together an anthology of stories and by collaborative artists to celebrate the rebellion in hell. The best pieces will be paid, and Stephens’ favorites will appear in the anthology or Raising Hell 2.0 The Deluxe Edition. Log on to the official Raising Hell website at g.d.i. Monday’s for more details.

 

  Jump over to g.d.i. Monday’s for more gags and and hellish fun.

  Also by Phillip T. Stephens

 

  Raising Hell

  A clueless optimist ruins a perfectly good hell.

  Pity poor Lucifer. He rules hell with a vice grip. Demons and damned scatter at the sound of his foot steps. The Supreme Butt In hasn’t pestered him in eons. Lucifer’s future looks perfect, pitch black, until an administrative error sticks him with an innocent soul—an overweight optimist who calls himself Pilgrim and who believes he must be in hell to do good.

  Lucifer never considers sending him back. He orders his subordinates to torture, degrade and humiliate Pilgrim until he promises to become evil if only it will ease the pain. Unfortunately, Pilgrim makes the best of the worst possible experiences. Always polite and well-mannered, he makes Pollyanna seem like a prophet of doom. Even worse, the damned start catching on, and set about making hell into the most enjoyable place of everlasting torment they can.

  Lucifer can’t let Pilgrim continue to wreak happiness, but he can’t send him back untainted, either. When God arrives with a deadline for Pilgrim’s return, he enlists fellow fallen angels Screwtape, Azazel and the gender morphing Mephistopheles in a plot to corrupt Pilgrim’s soul before the deadline expires.