Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming. Part 1
The bastards were shirking again. And Azzie had just gotten comfortable. He had found a place just the right distance between the fiery hole in the middle of the Pit and the hoarfrost-covered iron walls which encircled it.
The walls were kept close to absolute zero by the devil’s own air-conditioning system. The central Pit was hot enough to strip atoms of their electrons, and there were occasional gusts that could melt a proton.
Not that that much heat or cold was needed. It was overkill; overharass, actually. Humans, even when dead and cast into the Pit, have very narrow ranges (speaking on a cosmic scale) of tolerance. Once past the comfort zone in either direction, humans soon lost the ability to discriminate bad from worse. What good was it subjecting a poor wretch to a million degrees Celsius if it felt the same as a mere five hundred degrees? The extremes only tormented the demons and other supernatural creatures who tended the damned. Supernatural creatures have a far wider range of sensation than humans; mostly to their discomfort, but sometimes to their exceeding pleasure. But it is not seemly to talk about pleasure in the Pit.
Hell has more than one Pit, of course. Millions upon millions of people are dead. More are dying every day. Most of them spend at least some time in the Pit. Obviously, there have to be arrangements to accommodate them all.
The Pit Azzie served in was called North Discomfort 405. It was one of the oldest, having been put into service in Babylonian times, when people really knew how to sin. It still bore rusty bas-reliefs of winged lions on the walls and was listed in the Hell Register of Places of Historical Distinction. But Azzie cared nothing for serving in a well-known Pit. All he wanted was to get out.
Like all Pits, North Discomfort 405 consisted of a circle of iron walls enclosing an enormous garbage pit, in the center of which was a hole from which poured exceeding hot fire. Hot coals and burning lava spat from the hole. The glare was unremitting. Only full-fledged demons like Azzie were permitted to wear sunglasses.
And the torments of the damned were accompanied and amplified by music of a sort. Menial imps had scraped clear a semicircle in the midst of the dense, matted, moldy, and rotten debris. The orchestra was seated in this semicircle on orange crates. It was composed of inept musicians who had died in the act of performing. Here in Hell they were forced to play the works of the worst composers ever known. Their names are not remembered on Earth, but in Hell, where their compositions are played without stop, and even broadcast on the Kazum circuit, they are famous.
The imps worked away, turning and adjusting the damned on their griddles. The imps, like the ghouls, liked their people well rotted, and served up marinated in an admixture of vinegar, garlic, anchovy, and maggoty sausage.
What had pulled Azzie from his repose was that in the sector directly ahead of him, the dead were stacked only about eight or ten high. Azzie gave up his comfortable (relatively) berth and scrambled down through rotting eggshells and squashy entrails and chicken heads to the level ground where he could trample comfortably over the bodies.
“When I said stack ’em high,” he told the imps, “I meant a whole lot higher than that.”
“But they topple over when we try to stack them any higher!” said the head imp.
“Then get some bracing material to hold them in! I want those piles at least twenty bodies high!”
“Difficult, sir.”
Azzie stared. Dared an imp talk back to him? “Do it or join them,” he said.
“Yes, sir! Bracing material going right up, sir!” The imp ran off, shouting orders to his work crew.
It had started out as another typical day in one of the Pits of Hell. But it was to change dramatically, unexpectedly, in another moment. So it is with change! We go about our accustomed ways with lowered head and hangdog eye, tired of our accustomed round, sure it will go on forever. Why should it change when there is no change in sight, no letter, no Federal Express, not even a telephone call presaging a great event? So you despair, never realizing that your messenger has already been dispatched, and that hopes are sometimes realized, even in Hell. Indeed, some would say, hopes are especially realized in Hell, since hope itself is counted by some as one of the diabolic torments. But this may be an exaggeration of the churchmen who scribble about such things.