Rincewind steeled himself and patted the thing on what he hoped fervently was its back.
“Don’t you worry about it,” he said.
“That’s very kind of you.”
Rincewind looked across the shuddering heap at Eric.
“We’d better go,” he said. “So we’re not late for our appointment.” He made frantic signals over the demon’s head.
Eric grinned. “Yeah, right, appointment,” he said. They walked up the wide passage.
Eric started to giggle hysterically.
“This is where we run, right?” he said.
“This is where we walk,” said Rincewind. “Just walk. The important ting is to act nonchalant. The important thing is to get the timing right.”
He looked at Eric.
Eric looked at him.
Behind them, Urglefloggah made a kind of I’ve-just-worked-it-out noise.
“About now?” said Eric.
“About now I think would do it, yes.”
They ran.
Hell wasn’t what Rincewind had been led to expect, although there were signs of what it might once have been – a few clinkers in a corner, a bad scorch mark on the ceiling. It was hot, though, with the kind of heat that you get by boiling air inside an oven for years –
Hell, it has been suggested, is other people.
This has always come as a bit of a surprise to many working demons, who had always thought hell was sticking sharp things into people and pushing them into lakes of blood and so on.
This is because demons, like most people, have failed to distinguish between the body and the soul.
The fact was that, as droves of demon kings had noticed, there was a limit to what you could do to a soul with, e.g., red-hot tweezers, because even fairly evil and corrupt souls were bright enough to realise that since they didn’t have the concomitant body and nerve endings attached to them there was no real reason, other than force of habit, why they should suffer excruciating agony. So they didn’t. Demons went on doing it anyway, because numb and mindless stupidity is part of what being a demon is all about, but since no-one was suffering they didn’t enjoy it much either and the whole thing was pointless. Centuries and centuries of pointlessness.
Astfgl had adopted, without realising what he was doing, a radically new approach.
Demons can move interdimensionally, and so he’d found the basic ingredients for a very worthwhile lake of blood equivalent, as it were, for the soul. Learn from humans, he’d told the demon lords. Learn from humans. It’s amazing what you can learn from humans.
You take, for example, a certain type of hotel. It is probably an English version of an American hotel, but operated with that peculiarly English genius for taking something American and subtracting from it its one worthwhile aspect, so that you end up with slow fast food, West Country and Western music and, well, this hotel.
It’s early closing day. The bar is really just a pastel-pink paneled table with a silly bucket on it, set in one corner, and it won’t be open for hours yet. And then you add rain, and let the one channel available on the TV be, perhaps, Welsh Channel Four, showing its usual mobius Eisteddfod from Pant-y-gyrdl. And there is only one book in this hotel, left behind by a previous victim. It is one of those where the name of the author is on the front in raised gold letters much bigger than the tittle, and it probably has a rose and a bullet on there too. Half the pages are missing.
And the only cinema in the town is showing something with sub-titles and French umbrellas in it.
And then you stop time, but not experience, so that it seems as though the very fluff in the carpet is gradually rising up to fill the brain and your mouth starts to taste like an old denture.
And you make it last for ever and ever. That’s even longer than from now to opening time.
And then you distil it.
Of course the Discworld lacks a number of the items listed above, but boredom is universal and Astfgl had achieved in Hell a particularly high brand of boredom which is like the boredom you get which is a) costing you money, and b) is taking place while you should be having a nice time.
The caverns that opened before Rincewind were full of mist and tasteful room dividers. Now and again screams of ennui rose from between the pot plants, but mainly there was the terrible numbing silence of the human brain being reduced to cream cheese from the inside out.
“I don’t understand,” said Eric, “Where are the furnaces? Where are the flames? Where,” he added, hopefully, “are the succubi?”
Rincewind peered at the nearest exhibit.
A disconsolate demon, whose badge proclaimed it to be Azaremoth, the Stench of Dog Breath, and moreover hoped the reader would have a nice day, was sitting on the edge of a shallow pit wherein lay a rock on which a man was chained and spreadeagled.
A very tired-looking bird was perched beside him. Rincewind thought that Eric’s had it bad, but this bird had definitely been through the mangle of Life. It looked as though it had been plucked first and then had its feathers stuck back on.
Curiosity overcame Rincewind’s usual cowardice
“What’s going on?” he said. “What’s happening to him?”
The demon stopped kicking his heels on the edge of the pit. It didn’t occur to it to question Rincewind’s presence. It assumed that he wouldn’t be here unless he had a right to be. The alternative was unbelievable.
“I don’t know what he done,” it said, “but when I first come here his punishment was to be chained to that rock and every day an eagle would come down and peck his liver out. Bit of an old favourite, that one”
“It doesn’t look as though it’s attacking him now,” said Rincewind.
“Nah. That’s all changed. Now it flies down every day and tells him about its hernia operation. Now it’s effective, I’ll grant you,” said the demon sadly, “but it’s not what I’d call torture.”
Rincewind turned away, but not before catching a glimpse of the look of terminal agony on the victim’s face. It was terrible.
There was worse, however. In the next pit several chained and groaning people were being shown a series of paintings. A demon in front of them was reading from a script.
“- this is when we were in the Fifth Circle, only you can’t see where we stayed, it was just off to the left there, and this is that funny couple we met, you’d never believe it, they lived on the Icy Plains of Doom just next door to -”
Eric looked at Rincewind.
“It’s showing them pictures of itself on holiday?” he said.
They both shrugged and walked away, shaking their heads.
Then there was a small hill. At the bottom of the hill there was a round rock. Beside the rock sat a manacled man, his despairing head buried in his hands. A squat green demon stood beside him, almost buckling under the weight of an enormous book.
“I’ve heard of this one,” said Eric. “Man who went and defied the gods or something. Got to keep pushing that rock up the hill even though it rolls back all the time -”
The demon looked up.
“But first,” it trilled, “he must listen to the Unhealthy and Unsafety Regulations governing the lifting and moving of Large Objects.”
Volume 93 of the Commentaries, in fact. The Regulations themselves comprised a further 1,440 volumes. Part 1, that is.
Rincewind had always liked boredom, treasuring it if only because of its rarity value. It had always seemed to him that the only times in his life when he wasn’t being chased, imprisoned or hit were when he was being dropped from things, and while falling a long way always had a certain sameness about it, it did not really count as “boring”. The only time he could look back on with a certain amount of fondness was his brief spell as assistant Librarian at Unseen University, when there wasn’t much to do except read books, make sure the Librarian’s banana supply wasn’t interrupted and, rarely, help him with a particularly recalcitrant grimoire.
Now he realised what made boredom so attractive. It was the knowledge that worse things, dangerously exciting things, were going on just around the corner and that you were well out of them. For boredom to be enjoyable there had to be something to compare it with.
Whereas this was just boredom on top of more boredom, winding in on itself until it became a great crushing sledgehammer which paralysed all thought and experience and pounded eternity into something like flannel.
“This is dreadful,” he said.
The chained man raised a haggard face. “You’re telling me?” he said. “I used to like pushing the ball up the hill. You could stop for a chat, you could see what was going on, you could try various holds and everything. I was a bit of a tourist attraction, people used to point me out. I wouldn’t say it was fun, but it gave you a purpose in the afterlife.”