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Hell for Halloweenby Phillip T. Stephens
©2014
Every day in hell is bad. By definition. Let's face it, Lucifer designed hell to make each day one which twists each testicle or ovary tighter and tighter until you think you can't possibly stand it anymore and that's when the electrodes and vice clamps attach. But, so far, as Lucifer was concerned, Halloween made it so much worse.
Halloween with millions of ankle biting mites swarming the suburban swamps with their fists clinching bags the size of shopping carts and dressed like ghosts, goblins, pirates, demons, monsters, all of them pretending to be the denizens of hell and thinking they could scare you into giving them...sweets.
How dare they?
Lucifer rose from his desk to survey hell from his office window. Today he wore his John Wayne outfit, six-gun shooting sheriff of hell, complete with ten gallon hat, rhinoceros vest, endangered snow leopard shirt, and two-gun alligator belt that wrapped around his back and whipped behind him to form his tail. He tucked his skin tight baby seal skin pants into his whale skin boots, but none of its delicious decadence consoled him as he pictured the infection of costumed kiddies spreading with their ceaseless demands to "gimme, gimme, gimme."
This Halloween was the worst of all. He was knee deep into Ted Nugent’s NRA Guns in Every Christmas Stocking campaign only to realize he'd been hoodwinked once again by that deceiver pretending to be a demon of darkness, that lamb in a lionskin, that vinegar bottled as Bordeaux....
"Brooding about Pilgrim again, brother?" Mephistopheles cooed. She floated down to his desk and sat with her ankles crossed and her twelve inch spiked heels only inches from tipping over his inkwell. Knowing how much he hated Halloween, she dressed as an angel robot with metallic wings and exaggerated breasts. She smoked a metal cigarette, exhaling steam.
"Who else? He really sold me a bill of goods when he convinced me to get Poppe Francis appointed. ‘He’ll be a lightning rod for hate groups every where. Right wing bishops, right wing politicians, FOX News. There’ll never be a more hated pope.'"
"He was right."
Lucifer wrapped his belt-tail around her neck and yanked her across the room. "The church has never been more popular," he shouted. He tossed he back against the desk, which, admittedly, did more damage to the desk than it did to Mephistopheles.
Pilgrim was Lucifer's arch enemy (and you can read about him by buying Raising Hell and the sequel novella The Worst Noel, by Phillip T. Stephens for only $1), who appeared in Hell for reasons no one ever ascertained. Determined to corrupt him and prove he belongs, Lucifer assigned him any number of tasks, but Pilgrim always found a way to make Hell, well, better.
Mephistopheles brushed her outfit and perched on the desk again. "Pity poor Lucifer. You survive revivals. You always do. Look what you did with the Jesus movement. You commercialized it and flipped it into the moral majority. Most of those peace loving hippies morphed into red state haters and half the rest do drum circles and flute services for any deity who listens."
"Save your pity," Lucifer snarled. "I want all those Bishops squabbling and hating each other. I don't want them leaving the Church because of some open minded Pope and end up down here expecting me to arbitrate."
Mephistopheles opened one of her metal breasts and pulled out a margarita and salted glass. "I know your problem. It's Halloween. You're scared of all those rugrats dressed like demons and devils but having fun instead doing real evil."
Lucifer drew his protected Chesapeake pearl handled revolvers and blasted the pitcher from between her fingers. "You know nothing of the sort."
Mephistopheles opened her other breast and pulled out a pitcher and glass. She didn't bother to offer her brother any because she knew he would refuse if only to spite his own nose, which he had forgotten to wear this morning. "Rather than moping, why don't you do something about it?"
If he didn't know better, Lucifer would suspect Mephistopheles planned to set him up for something particularly pernicious. It's what he would do. But, being Lucifer, it would be beneath him not to hear her out. In fact, she would remind him of the fact ceaselessly whenever the subject of Halloween came up in the future, which, in Hell, stretched out for eternity--a long time indeed. "Like what?" he asked.
Mephistopheles rolled her mechanical robot angel eyes, which, being a last minute Halloween costume that she donned mainly to irritate him, rolled loosely in her metallic skull. "You're the Lord of Hell. Any idea I came up with, you'd only mock mercilessly."
Lucifer prepared to shoot the new margarita pitcher from her hand when he realized that Struggles, his valet, had yet to clean up the mess from the last pitcher. No doubt he was already out trick or treating. Normally, Lucifer to go ballistic and blow up from inside out, splattering brains and viscera across his office, but with no assistant to clean it that left the responsibility to him.
"Humor me," Lucifer said.
Mephistopheles leaned her chin on her wrist and her head opened. A tiny light bulb rose from the dome and blinked on and off, presumably to irritate him with childish cartoon symbolism. "You know how Fundamentalists like to scare the the BeJeezus out of teenagers with their Hell Houses, showing them all of the things they do that will send them down here, and all it does it make those teenagers more determined to do bad than ever before?"
"One of my most brilliant inspirations," Lucifer beamed.
"Then I've got nothing," she said. "But it certainly ruins Halloween for everybody but the Fundamentalists."
With that she slipped out the window, flapping her metallic wings with a rusty squeak noise and crashing through the glass to let in the sulphur oxide air. He particularly enjoyed the under odor of dibenzofuran and vinyl chloride. He knew he should blow off Mephistopheles, but she got under his skin. That and the thought of Pilgrim getting his goat with Pope Francis made his innards boil.
It did get him thinking. Haunted houses were as much a Halloween tradition as trick-or-treating--one at every Halloween church bazaar and school fair. But those trick-or-treaters loved Haunted Houses with bubble gum eye balls and spaghetti intestines. The moral majority had it right. Haunted Houses should scare the little imps into another state of consciousness.
Best of all he could inflict one on Pilgrim. And so he summoned him to his office.
***
Most of Hell's denizens avoid meeting Lucifer face-to-face, and, once summoned, take the most circuitous routes to their meetings, dragging their feet, hiding out, prolonging the inevitable as long as possible. Why? Because meetings with His Satanic Majesty Lucifer of the Morning Star; Ruler of the Lower Dimensions of Darkness; Proprietor of His Satanic Majesty's Hall of Everlasting Damnation, Torture and Never Ending Decay; and Sovereign Lord of the Devoted Knights of His Satanic Majesty Lucifer of the Morning Star (or so he referred to himself informally) never ended well.
They ended in torture, degradation, humiliation, pain, groveling, followed by more of the same.
But Pilgrim made his way to Lucifer's office as soon as he was called.
Why?
Because no torture, no humiliation, no pain, no groveling was too great for Pilgrim. He reminded Lucifer more than once, he was in Hell, Lucifer couldn't make things worse, so he might as well make the best of it. And no matter how hard Lucifer tried, Pilgrim found a way to do so.
Lucifer remained determined to turn that "can do" attitude into "can don't and never will again."
Just before eve on All Hallow's Eve, as the knee-high ghosts and goblins prepared to unleash themselves on the doors of countless urban and suburban doorways Lucifer faced the overly round, always smiling, sunny-faced Pilgrim. "I have a job for you."
"Glad to help," Pilgrim said. Lucifer was disgusted to imagine that he actually was.
Lucifer laid out the design of the Haunted Hell House he expected Pilgrim to usher unsuspecting children through--an inescapable labyrinth of terror and psychological mayhem designed to reduce children to psychotic babbling neurosis ridden patients who shit in their pants when the wind blew. The tunnel of nightmares where every creature who ever hid under their bed crawled out to drag children by their ankles under the bedsprings. Creatures with razor sharp claws, curling tusks and wings with stinging teeth at every joint. The maelstrom of quicksand, typhoons and whirlpools. The tree house filled with angry africanized honeybees. The fiery volcano pits. A ball pit teeming with maggots. And those were just the beginning.
Once Pilgrim left, Lucifer relaxed and fired up a Cuban liberation theologian. He smoked it slowly while lingering overing a shot of 700 year old single malt Vatican Urine Reserve and imagined Pilgrim's excruciating agony as he watched child after child suffer at the hands of Hell's Haunted House.
Another theologian, another single malt and Lucifer couldn't help it, he had to see. His wings ripped through his shirt and he flew out the window toward the new Haunted Hell House. He was only a few mile away before he heard, not screams of agony, but singing. Happy singing. And laughter.
He landed outside the Haunted House to find Pilgrim surrounded by millions of smiling, ecstatic children jumping and dancing with delight, their faces sticky and smeared with maggots. "What is going on here?"
"Kitties!" the children shouted.
"Puppies and kitties!"
"And bees!"
Pilgrim ran to him with children in his arms and dangling from his legs. "We had the best time, sir. What a wonderful idea. We taught the children to make forts under the beds and they tickled the bellies and toes of these wonderful new pets. Then they came out and tossed the kids around."
One of the kids pulled his sleeve and said, "Tell him about the roller coaster." The other kids chimed in.
"So we went out onto the water and went round and round like a roller coaster and every body had so much fun and then we found the beehives."
"Pets chase bees," a little girl said.
"That's right," Pilgrim said. Their pets chased the bees away so we got the honey and mixed it with the maggots. If you fry them in the fires from the volcanos they make great snacks."
"Pop bus," the kids shouted in unison.
"Pop bus," the monsters shouted with them.
"We sat around the camp fire singing and had a great time. Can you thank Lucifer, kids?"
The kids swarmed Lucifer and hugged him around the knees. The monsters swarmed Lucifer and hugged him everywhere else. It was the most horrible, degrading, painful, humiliating Halloween he could imagine. Finally, when they were all exhausted and wandered off to home, Lucifer stared at Pilgrim and said, "This is not what I had in mind."
"They weren't supposed to be happy?"
"They were supposed to be miserable."
Pilgrim sighed. He always did this at this point in their conversations. He seemed genuinely disappointed when he let Lucifer down. He stared at the ground which, was covered with sticky honey and maggot skins. Then he snapped his fingers. "I have it," he shouted. "Why not have kids go to every house in their neighborhood and ask everyone to give them candy?"
"What?" Lucifer demanded.
"Then they come home with a bag full of candy and get sick to their stomach from all that sugar and their teeth get filled with cavities. Is that evil enough for you?"
Lucifer felt his entire body building up toward an explosion.
"We could call it ‘trick-or-treat.'"
You can download a smaple chapter of the novel to get started.You can read the an early draft of the free short story the Hellelujah Trail
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ddi0uc9i7su...
You can also get character profiles to inspire the characters on the g.d.i. Monday site or create a crazy character of your own.
You can also follow the bonus stories I posted and other fans posted for ideas.
Feel free to discuss ideas and themes in the novel, how you can't wait to get to hell and make things even more wonderful, talk about how you could have written Raising Hell better than I could (and you know you could) or suggest improvements for Raising Hell 2.0: The Deluxe Edition where I might actually charge money.
…continuedThe mere thought of it made Lucifer want to explode and splatter everyone in the room with acid blood and stinky guts. And he would have if they weren't already being consumed by fire. Lucifer had sent Pilgrim topside to corrupt five souls, a simple job at it's worst. Instead he redeemed countless thousands. (To learn more about this, read Raising Hell Part Two: Making Waves.)
Lucifer turned the iPhone over. There, on the back, in addition to the glowing silver apple were two horns—one extending from each side.
"He said they were presents for the Halloween holidays, sir," one of the demons wailed from the bubbling pile of demon entrails that made it impossible to distinguish any of them any more.
Lucifer began to stamp on the sizzling and smoking remains with his foot. "Halloween is not a holiday, you ignorant, in-sightless, inbred, insipid, inspiration-less idiots. There are no holidays in hell."
One of the demons pled with him in a voice that faded into the carpet with the rest of their remains, "Don't be jealous, your most unpleasantness. I'm sure he got one for you too."
Lucifer tossed the iPhone into the wall. It bounced back harmlessly into his fingers. So he peeled the pink foam skin away from the iPhone and hurled the device again. This time it shattered into a thousand satisfying shards.
He waited until the last bubbling bit of demon flesh dissolved into the carpet, and then stormed down the hall to the reception area. Every six feet, and in a place as infinitely large as hell every six feet seemed to last forever, he found more demons with their noses buried in their iPads and iPhones.
"I can't believe it. I installed We Rule Quest and they set my level back to 1. I lost everything," an imp complained to a demon. The imp had his tail wrapped around a steam pipe and dangled from the ceiling.
The demon scratched his head, scooping out a large section of his brain and wiping it on the wall. "We don't you post a comment on The Hidden Grimoire?"
The imp rolled his eyes. They fell from his head and bounced on the floor for several seconds until he could retrieve them. "A lot of good he is. All his does is spout off about buying rubies."
"You should buy rubies. Pack your realms with them, although you can't stack anymore, which really pisses me off."
"Don't you have work to do?" Lucifer demanded. His voice fell into the low registers and then rose quickly toward the end, raising the heat until the imp and demon couldn't touch any surface without singing their sensitive skins.
"We're doing product reviews for our afterlife styles blogs, Your Most Heinous," both said at the same time.
Lucifer flipped his hand, releasing all eight razor sharp nails and slicing them like cucumbers. The slices wriggled at his feet, prostrate with apologies which they couldn't speak because their speaking parts were no longer assembled. "No one has time for blogs or style," Lucifer hissed. "Your afterlives should be devoted to monotony, suffering and perpetual regret for sins you can't even remember."
With another flick of the wrist he banished them to the Hell of Trying to Connect to the Internet with a 600 Baud Modem and a Handspring Visor While Internet Connection Fees Continued to Rise and Wrap Users in an Inexhaustible Contracting Bandwidth of Fibre Optic Feedback Frustration.
Lucifer had no idea what that even meant, but he was in no mood to make Hell either meaningful or comprehensible at the moment.
Even after his two little object lessons, his minions seemed to miss the message.
"Do you think they should have gotten rid of the aliens in We Farm?" a demon asked him before Lucifer pounded his head into the wall and then pushed the rest of him through so that he would plunge into an infinite web of asbestos insulation.
"Did you see the eighty percent sale on mojo?" another asked him before Lucifer pulled his tongue through the balls of his feet and stapled him to a KISS poster.
"I bet you could make ngmoco;( give us storage space and let us move buildings," another said before Lucifer grabbed a vacuum cleaner and swept him—tonsils first—into a bag that hadn't been changed since Struggles had vacuumed the ruins of Pompeii.
Six thousand, six hundred and sixty six permanently punished and plundered demons later, Lucifer arrived at reception to find a Fed Ex delivery boy waiting with the electronic signing pad and a box the size of a large book.
"You Lucifer?" he asked without looking up. "Sign here." He shoved the tablet at Lucifer. Lucifer ripped the tablet from his hand, his hand from his arm and his arm from his shoulder.
"You couldn't have just left this with my receptionist?" he demanded.
The delivery boy tried to staunch the bleeding with his remaining hand. "It's Apple, sir. They're really anal about who signs for their products. That's why I have an Android."
Lucifer signed the tablet and handed it back. Before the delivery boy could leave, Lucifer removed the iPad from its box and stuffed him inside, making sure to wrap the box with three rolls of clear plastic boxing tape. Then he tossed the box with the delivery boy inside into the incinerator.
"Apple is anal indeed," he snarled. He looped his neck to stick his head under the receptionist's desk and demand, "What the hell are you doing there?"
"Hiding, your most disagreeable. I didn't think you would be happy to see me after I made you come all the way to the front."
He reached from underneath the desk and clicked an icon on Lucifer's new iPad before Lucifer could disembowel, dismember or do something equally disagreeable to his person.
The screen began to glow and Lucifer saw a picture of an iron maiden with a little devil beside it. "We Rule in Hell" the type display said. Underneath, in smaller letters, it said "Iron Maiden at Level 32."
The receptionist stuck his head out from underneath his desk. "Isn't it cool, sir? I mean, wickedly hot."
Before Lucifer could answer, he crawled out from under his desk and showed Lucifer how to plant corn, build farms, add a mine and expand his kingdom at Level 10. He walked Lucifer through his first quest, ordering from a barn, a lumberyard and butcher to earn a pig pen.
Lucifer kicked the receptionist back under his desk and sat down to play. Within minutes he had his tailor shop and butcher and three customers waiting to order from his kingdom. He quickly worked his way to Level 20 where he could install the prisons.
Lucifer wanted to install lots and lots of prisons. He had already earned 150,000 points and thought that would buy plenty of prisons. That way he could get to Level 32 faster and install the iron maiden. But when he clicked on the prison icon a dialogue said, "You need to purchase this with mojo. Buy more at the mojo store."
Lucifer was flabbergasted. He had spent all his mojo harvesting crops and returning orders like the tutorial told him to do. Now he had to buy mojo. He clicked on the mojo store. "Five dollars for thirty lousy mojo," he shouted.
The thought of spending cash in hell infuriated him, especially since he had banned cash. The only way to buy mojo in hell was on credit, and he had set the floor on credit in hell at 120% interest compounded every half-second.
Credit might be acceptable for a demon, but he sure as himself wasn't going to pay 120% interest compounded every half-second for 30 lousy mojo.
Lucifer responded as Lucifer was best equipped to respond. He trashed the iPad, the desk, the mail slots, the portraits of himself smiting Michael, Gabriel and a couple dozen minor angels. He smashed the phone, the intercom, the receptionist, the remaining limbs of the receptionist, the remaining pieces of the torn limbs of the receptionist and even the pulp that remained after he trashed the torn limbs.
When all that remained of the lobby was dust and blood, especially the finally ground dust of his iPad, Lucifer's rage finally subsided. He took a deep breath and straightened his Speedos. His only regret was that there was nothing left to trash.
That was the moment another Fed Ex delivery boy appeared with a book-sized box under his elbow. "Are you Lucifer?" he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he shoved the signing tablet into Lucifer's stomach. "You need to sign in person. Apple's really anal about who signs for these."
Flabbergasted, Lucifer took the box and looked inside. Bundled in the box was a brand new shiny iPad with the misprinted logo.
And a note.
A note from Pilgrim.
A note that said: "I figured you would need a new one about now. Don't worry. I ordered several for you since I know how you are with your toys."
Lucifer stared at the iPad, speechless with horror. He could take just about anything from His Most Self-Righteous. Anything but this. He smashed the new iPad in the delivery boy's face and stormed back to his office where he found two dozen more brand new iPads waiting for him, each with a happy note from Pilgrim.
He settled into the carpet, launched an iPad, bought a cask of mojo for 25 percent off and filled his western kingdom with prisons.
The Shipping Shipwreckby Phillip T. Stephens
© 2012 for iPad Envy
Lucifer hated boredom, and the sad truth about Hell was that it was almost always boring. Oh, sure, he could find a fire to kindle somewhere if he looked hard enough—Fundamentalists plotting the second coming, logical positivists trying to create the perfect linguistic formula to prove hell couldn't exist by definition and so (by definition) they couldn't be there, a revolt by some new terrorist group who thought they could bomb their way out of hell the same way they bombed their way into it, one of the Bush's campaigning for Lucifer's job, the prospect of having to deal with Sara Palin when her time was up.
But every new fire seemed like a fire he'd seen before. And his arsenal was becoming increasingly tiresome: pee gasoline on them to make them toast faster, find some new hell with a new name at least a dozen words long ("How about the Hell of Having to Come Up With a New Hell With a New Name Only to Find That Hell's Already Been Used, or Some Variation Thereof, Only to Find Yourself Further Behind Quota and If You Thought This Hell Was Bad, Wait Until You See the Next One?")
He leaned back in his arm chair made from the arms of Peddler John from the thirteenth century, the first peddler to shake down people with both hands extended as though to double the perception of his desperation. Every evening he would leave the London square with his pockets sagging with donations, change into his evening wear and join his wealthy friends in a game of kick the beggars who are so poor they have to keep begging even after dark.
Lucifer liked his new armchair. It was a comfortable armchair. But it had an annoying habit of grabbing at Lucifer's wallet whenever he pulled it out to use his credit card number.
Lucifer leaned back in his armchair with his ankles draped across the corner of his desk, dangling his Manolo Blahnik leopard-print shoes sewn from the genuine skin of Manolo Blahnik. Struggles had brought him a bucket full of deep-fat fried popcorn priests who loved His All-Arrogance but loved little boys even more.
He cracked them between his teeth like pistachios and then spit the bones into a chamber pot at his feet. He really loved the fat ones because they squealed the most when he bit down hard.
Lucifer dithered like this through most of the Twentieth Century and into the first decade of the Twenty-first. Finally, he decided he should probably do something. Swagger down the halls of the Homeland Insecurity Complex tossing grenades into office doorways. Convince some crazy to launch a nuclear missile top side. Not that he would convince them, really. Deep down inside they had convinced themselves and were only waiting for someone to give them an excuse.
He rose from his desk, and kicked off his Blahniks. Poor Manolo gave a little squeak when the left shoe landed in the fireplace. Let him sweat some of that extra weight off, Lucifer grinned to himself. It's not as though he can suffer any permanent damage.
He pulled his Osama Bin Laden Speedos from his underwear drawer. "This is most degrading to the man who brought down New York City," Bin Laden complained. Lucifer adjusted his Speedo so that Bin Laden's face was smashed against the spiny midsection of his dismember.
"My, aren't we crotchety? You should be honored to be so close to me," Lucifer replied. He struggled to climb into his lizard skin pants with the lizard still in them. He decided to go shirtless to show off his new velociraptor tooth nipple piercings, so he pulled down his bling necklace with the heads of Tupak and Biggie Smalls. He finished his ensemble with razor sharp roller blades, the better for rolling over the toes of demons too slow to get out of his way.
His intercom buzzed. "Not now," Lucifer swore and skated toward the office door. Too late, Lord Byron reached from underneath his desk calendar to push the speaker button.*
"Lucifer? Lucifer? Are you there, sir? Are you there? Lucifer, sir, are you there? Lucifer? Lucifer? I have a question. Are you there, sir?"
Damn it, Lucifer thought to himself. Ever since that show "Big Bang Theory" reached Hell's airwaves with the announcement that Chuck Lorre thought he signed a deal with the devil to get three series broadcast on the same network, the imps had decided to emulate the character Sheldon. They thought that if they pestered him until he acknowledged them they would somehow avoid punishment when he blamed them for not bringing something to his attention.
Lucifer wished Lorre had sold his soul to him so he could send him to the Hell of Being Locked in an Echo Sound Chamber while Skinny Nerds Pound on the Door Ceaselessly and Shout "Chuck, Chuck" Until Your Ears Bleed Endlessly Only They Don't Stop Pounding and Shouting.
Unfortunately, Lorre's deal was only with CBS, and His All-Stuffiness had been a fan since Dharma and Greg. Even masturbation jokes on Two and a Half Men couldn't get Lorre on His Most Arbitrary's shit list so that Lucifer could finally get his hands on him.
"Yesssssssss," Lucifer hissed, hoping his venomous acknowledgement would intimidate his receptionist into deciding the message wasn't worth relaying after all.
"There's a Fed Ex package for you, sir."
Lucifer's skullcap separated from his skull and blew into the ceiling on a crest of foaming hot steam. He closed his eyes and waited until it fell back into place.
"Well, sign for it and don't bother me," he said.
"I can't," the receptionist pleaded. "The delivery guy says you have to sign for it personally."
Lucfer placed his hand over his skull cap to hold it in place. His anger swelled back down into his brain, down through his throat into his legs and blew out both knee caps instead.
"Tell him I'll be right there," he growled. Right there, he thought to himself, meaning anytime in the next million years.
He grabbed his baby seal cape, the baby seals still mewling, and threw it around his shoulders. He stormed out of his office and swept majestically down the hall so that demons and imps would scamper in every direction just to avoid him.
Not only didn't they notice him, they were all standing around in groups, each one holding a small square device in their claws or a device about the size of a tablet.
"You already installed the haunted house?" One was saying. His tail was wrapped over his shoulder and eyeing his palm sized device with the eye in its tip.
"No, I don't have the coins yet and I didn't want to spend the mojo," another replied. His tablet sized device was cradled between his second and third tongues. "How can you play on that tiny little iPhone anyway? You can barely see anything."
"It's easier to hide when my supervisor drops in. He's already incinerated three iPads."
"Tell me about it," a third demon said, dangling by his toes from the ceiling. "I spent four hundred dollars on mojo last week alone and I still didn't move past 200,000 on the leader board."
"It's just a cynical ploy by ngmoco;( to keep us in debt," the second demon said. All four nostrils flared and a puff of smoke rolled from each. "It gets me all fired up just to think of it."
A fourth demon, who had been running while pushing a cart of souls reduced to essential oil during the weekly anaerobic aroma therapy training session, stopped to look over the first demon's shoulder.
"I like the way you've stacked those cemeteries," he said. "I bet it makes it especially hard for humans to touch on one to order."
The first demon's claws bled with pride. "I managed to stack one hundred straight across," he said.
"I don't know how you do that," the second demon said. "I can barely stack two ruby groves on top of each other."
The demon's tail uncoiled fully and stretched forward so that the two demons could see eye-to-eye. "Well, don't expect me to tell you. If I give my secrets away you could get ahead of me on the leaderboard."
A fifth demon squeezed through a ventilation grate in thirty-six segments. Once he was free he reintegrated and pulled out his iPhone. "I'm at 300," she announced. The other four dissected her with their eyes. Buy the time she could pull himself together, the others had stolen her iPhone were staring at her kingdom.
"Unholy Lucifer," the third demon said. "She must have six thousand diamond groves packed into her western realm. That's like...." He squeezed his third eye so tightly Lucifer thought it would pop like a zit. "...That's like...."
"Sixty thousand mojo," the fifth demon said, finally managing to reassemble into something that resembled her former self.
"No, way," the second demon said. "I was thinking more like six million mojo."
"That would be my guess," the third demon said.
The fifth demon rolled all seven eyes. "Six thousand diamond groves times ten mojo each. That's six hundred thousand."
The second demon dropped his iPad and squeezed her throat with all four tongues. "Are you making fun of my math skills?"
Lucifer came to his senses and realized he'd been watching this entire scene without frying, flaying, filleting or flambeing a single one of them for dereliction of duty, dereliction of ambition and dereliction of judgment, which was actually doubly derelict since he was standing right in front of them.
Lucifer picked each one up by the nape of the neck, each with a single sharpened claw, making sure to painfully pierce a body part in the process. "Don't you have jobs to do?" He made his voice rattle like their bones should rattle as he shook them.
"Pardon me, you most dishonorable," the first demon said, his eye opened wide from the tip of his tail. "But we finished our jobs."
Lucifer tossed them all against the wall, making sure to keep them secured on the tip of one claw.
"You," he said to the first. "How can you possibly have scrubbed the puke off the walls of our thousand perpetual vomitariums since, I might point out, the vomit in the vomitariums is perpetual?"
The demon waved his iPhone in front of Lucifer's face. "Pardon me, your most disagreeable, but there's an app for that."
The demons shook their heads in unison. "There's an app for the urinarium as well," the second demon said.
The first demon pushed an icon on the screen of his iPhone and the retina display showed an image of a thousand mops scrubbing the vomitarium walls. "I even earn points," the demon assured them.
Lucifer dropped them all to the floor and scratched his tail across the white phosphorous coated carpet. The carpet immediately ignited and consumed them in flames, but not before Lucifer snatched the iPhone away from his screaming subordinate.
He looked at the device seven ways from Saturday. "Where did you get these?" He demanded. Even before he heard the distressed answer warbling from six voices in unison, it occurred to him that he already knew.
"Pilgrim," they all said.
Even as they said it, he swore the name Pilgrim under his breath.
Pilgrim, that monstrously obese perpetually happy pain in the ass assigned to hell on a clerical error. The Supreme Butt In's personal punishment for Lucifer's superb administration of perdition.
"How could Pilgrim possibly," Lucifer stuttered, "possibly get these."
"When you sent him topside, sir. To corrupt five innocent souls. Evidently the factory that manufactures iPads and iPhones screwed up an entire production line by stamping the wrong logo. He said he made a hell of a deal to get the rejects rerouted to us."
_______________________________
*Too learn more about Lord Byron and how his wish to rule in hell rather than serve in heaven turned out, you will have to read the novel, which will be posted in the Pages section.
continued...
• Add your own stories or poems. • Try your hand at flash fiction.
• Create your own characters. Add to the population of hell.
Create your own vision of a character or scene from hell. And, with luck I'll find a way to assemble the best pieces into an e-anthology.
I will also pay $25 for his favorite two stories and works of art and $15 apiece for at least 5 more of my favorite submissions. Even if the anthology doesn't come off, I will pay if I include those pieces in Raising Hell 2.0: The Deluxe Edition and that will be happing.
Remember the spirit of Raising Hell is dark, witty and fun not gratuitous violence and torture. I will take serious stories and poems if they fit the spirit of the characters.
You can download a smaple chapter of the novel to get started.
You can read the an early draft of the free short story the Hellelujah Trail
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ddi0uc9i7su...
You can also get character profiles to inspire the characters on the g.d.i. Monday site. But I would love it if you create a crazy character of your own.
You can also follow the bonus stories I posted and other fans posted for ideas.
Create your own vision of a character or scene from hell. And, with luck I'll find a way to assemble the best work into an e-anthology. I will also pay $25 for his favorite two stories and works of art and $15 apiece for at least 5 more of my favorite submissions. Even if the anthology doesn't come off, I will pay if I include those pieces in Raising Hell 2.0: The Deluxe Edition and that will be happing.
Keep your originals. Remember the spirit of Raising Hell is dark, witty and fun not gratuitous violence and torture. I will take serious art if it fits the spirit of the characters.
You can post art by linking to photobucket or another site using html similar to that below:
img src="site link" width="" height=""
I'm not sure they're the same audience. Raising Hell fans are likely to be more into comic books. But with Jen posting a review and the paperback coming out, this seemed like the time to at least get started. I've been planning to do this for a long time and the only block was what to use for a fan forum (assuming I could ever find a way to find fans)
I hope momentum will build as I sell copies of the book. I always wanted a forum for the website, and it only this weekend dawned on me I could link from the website to a Goodreads forum.
Here is a sample of some character art I created when working on the series pilot for Amazon (which they didn't even pick up for filming).
I will be releasing Raising Hell in trade paperback for $11.99 as soon as we finish proofing, which hopefully will be by Friday August 7. I will make a free short story available with a discount coupon.I created this group as a forum to draw fans together to build a community to add their own characters, fan art and even their own stories to make hell the best place of eternal damnation ever. Or at least bring a little joy into the hell of our school and workplaces which inspired the novel to start with.
