Way Down There

Joe R. Lansdale

"Way Down There" is an exercise in weirdness. It's not a brain storm, though I would argue, lightly, that it does contain within it a number of philosophical and theological concepts, as if discussed by Groucho Marx in a thoughtful mood while drinking pure alcohol.

"Way Down There" may not change your life, but for better or worse, there aren't two just like it. I've always found the general view of Hell fascinating. And silly, really. And I thought, what if it was literal? In fact, what if all the hells that existed were literal? 

Which one applies to whom? What if God is an Existentialist?

That can't be good.

My own belief is that he/she/it doesn't exist, unless one wants to call an energy form that is mindless and thoughtless and therefore unconcerned with the lives of humans, because it doesn't even know we exist, and in fact knows nothing because knowledge and intent are not factors, God. Well, go ahead.

But where did it all begin?

Has God always existed?

If there is no God, how could nothing exist and become something?

And if there is a God, how could he/she/it always be?

Seems to me, you're asking the same question, and there is m answer.

But I love the basis of religion. I love the myths. It's curious to me that when one believes in a particular myth, call it Christianity, for; example, the believers think of it differently from Islam, or Greek myths, or whatever religion you want to name.

Christianity to the Christian is the real thing. The rest of that stuff, well, it's just made up, even if like Greek myths, it has people ascending to heaven via chariot.

I once had a friend give me his view of the Christian religion, and in it, God was always warring with the dark side. Light and Dark fought this constant battle with swords, the good and the bad.  Dressed the way they did in ancient times.

I thought, well, why swords?

Why doesn't God move with the times?

Why would God maintain primitive devices?

Why would he have primitive dress?

Why dress at all?

And if God existed before the times of swords and these particular outfits, what did he wear then?

Skins? The old ass hanging out? The stone knife and stick?

Entwining religion with history doesn't make it any more real.

In the Old Testament only Jews were saved. In the New Testament, a Jew named Jesus forms a new branch of the Jewish faith, and later, others make it into Christianity. Peter and Saul help bring it to Gentiles.

What happened before Gentiles received it?

Did they all go to hell just because the religion didn't exist?

Did they go to hell after it existed but was denied to them?

It's a quandary, and if you want to believe on faith that it's all real, go for it.

But, there're lots of things people believe on faith.

The world is flat.

Yep. Some folks still truly believe that, and no matter what you tell them, they believe it. But, believing it, having faith, doesn't make it so.

We never landed on the moon. It's all a big hoax.

Despite oodles of evidence to the contrary, plenty of solid reasons to know we went to the moon, there are still the faithful who disbelieve.

Faith, like patriotism, being a Democrat or Republican, Liberal or Conservative, is not necessarily a virtue.

I have faith in my wife and my dog, myself, and a few friends, but after that…

Still. The whole business fascinates me.

I also like comic books and pulps and cheap sf and honor movies and old style sf of the Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs variety. I also love the idea of a hollow Earth, and have read much about it. I'd like to have faith this is true, but alas, we've come back to that faith business again.

Comic books can make silliness seem real. But that doesn't always translate to fiction.
I know. I've tried.

The Batman series of the sixties with Adam West was camp, but in a way, it was just like the comic stones about Batman in the fifties and sixties. But, somehow, on those brightly painted comic pages, the stories and characters didn't seem camp. They worked differently in the head.

So, we come to "Way Down There." I'll let you be the judge.

Anyway, all of this business, comics, superheroes, religion, philosophy, the hollow Earth theories, me being in a fun mood, all came together and became this.

No need to have your pocket mythology book handy.

Or your pocket theology or comparative religion book.

No need to have your pocket book of philosophers at your fingertips.

Have fun.

Just don't get paint from the animation on your fingers.

And for heaven sakes, don't think too hard. You sure shouldn't need to.

Dedicated to Warner Brothers cartoons, Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, the pulps and comic books everywhere.

From the Special Archives of Weird but True Geographic Stories:

REPORT FILED BY JOHN GEORGE EMERSON UNDER the heading "The Profundity of Subterranean Life, Demonology, and Its Influence on The Outer Regions of the Planet Earth," read aloud to the meeting of the Special Archives by John George Emerson prior to the playing on CD of the tune, "Up Jumped the Debil and He Tossed Dem Bones," by Jimmy Joe Smith and The Hurricane Hunters, followed by quotes from Professor Edgar Rice Burroughs's treatise on Subterranean Activity at The Earth's Core, and this excerpt from John Cleve Symmes, creator of the Theory of Concentric Spheres and Polar Voids: "I declare that the Earth is hollow and habitable within."

The actual reports, however, are boring, so we will cut straight to the story, and it goes like this:

One day the wind picked up and blew cold around the world, causing much of the Northern Atlantic to chill over. In Scotland, sheep became wool-sicles and in barns cows dove nose forward into the dirt and didn't rise, their tails crooks of ice.

In Africa, heavy coats and ear-flap hats became the need of the day, and the Red Cross was on full-time alert delivering them by snowmobile.

It was so cold in North America, trucks with chains on their tires began driving over sheets of ice that covered the Great Lakes, or, as they quickly became known, the Great Ices. In fact, all the lakes up there went solid. Frozen fish were excavated from them with hydraulic drills and chugging back hoes, hauled off by dump truck.

These frozen fish became a standard food, considering they kept without rotting. Few crops could be grown, just a smidgen of vegetables brought up from South America, and even down south it was cold and the vegetables were small and sick and pithy as cork and the growing season was the blink of an eye.

Wind wagons were in, racing along on ski runners. Mutts went from lying about to sledding supplies and fat-ass couch potatoes over stretches of whiteness in search of food.
Air travel didn't work out so well. Had to be given up. Too much wind. There were all kinds of plane pieces in trees, dotted on mountainsides. Balloons, ultra-lights, and Zeppelins weren't even considered.

In Texas, short sleeve weather disappeared, and the Miami Keys were soon invaded by icebergs pushing down from the north. People took to living on that floating ice, wrapped up and padded, spitting frost that was as chilly as a meat-lockered side of bacon, These folks became known as Floaters. They drifted on their homes of ice, putting up tent cities, building wooden floors, heating with oil squeezed from the fish they could find.

There were no real vacation spots.

Some animals went extinct. Sloths for instance. They couldn't take it. Lizards took a dive too. But polar bears multiplied. They seemed happy. As did seals and walruses and foxes and arctic wolves. Amongst those groups was much happy mating. The whales adapted. A lot of insects went belly up and it was all over for the flea, the mosquito, and the blue bottle fly. No wakes were held.

Looting was common. Store owners carried guns and used them. There were rumors of cannibalism, and a TV show featuring ways to fix mystery meat became a hit.

Years rolled one into the other, each more icy than the last. The world shivered and shook. And still that uncommon wind blew.

Eventually came the shadows.

Long, lean, and wraithlike, wind-whipped and grimy, not quite flesh, not quite spirit, hooded, no coat, no shoes. They blew with the wind. Where they showed, disease popped up. Red pustules, white lesions, rips in the skin, bleeding from nose, mouth, and eyes.

The shadows came and went, delivering their unnamed misery like angry mailmen without vacations.

John George Emerson, the Brain, thought the answer was beneath the world. He had his reasons. He knew the best way to find out. That the only way to solve things was to drive down to the center of the Earth in his '57 Chevy and set things right.

The Chevy was black with super high beams. It had been stretched. Had six doors instead of four, extra seats, and in the back, a long, long trunk with four hammocks, a magazine rack, and a series of cup holders. Low ceiling back there. Watch your head.

The '57 was also wide. Much wider than the original. It had fine leather seats and a diamond-shaped suicide knob about the size of a lumberjack's fist, fastened down tight with a thick metal clamp on a false cheetah skin steering wheel cover.

There was an eight speed gearshift that would allow it to climb straight up the face of a wall, do the dipsy-do over lumpy topography, float in water, dive beneath, fly short distances, though not too high, and, of course, cruise on highways.

The '57 flexed in the middle if need be. This due to the Brain's special blend of metal and rubber and a goo of his own creation. The car had tires that wouldn't go flat and they molded with the terrain when needed, worked like grippers.

Windshields and side glasses were as thick as a rhino's head and could go dark when the need arose. Watertight when closed, of course. Or with the touch of a button, so clear you could hardly tell glass was there. As an added precaution, they were bulletproof.

Red, fuzzy dice with black dots hung from the rearview mirror, and the outside wing mirrors could fold in or out, controlled by buttons close to the driver, next to the steering wheel.

The lights were good, standard and infra-red. Fluids were up and the windshield wipers worked. There was a slight shimmy when it reached speeds at the max of six hundred and seventy-five.

John named the car after a scientist he had read about. He called the car the Abner Perry. A.P. for short.

Besides the car, John the Brain also had a map.

And a book with silver clasps. Much of the book was written in what his assistant Buck Shaver called deedly-bops. Hieroglyphics of a sort, but with more squiggles and slashes, and what John the Brain told Buck were some very rude passages that would give even Buck pause. And Buck had been the cuss-fight champion of Cut and Shoot, Texas.

Buck, though known for cursing, wasn't known for his math or science abilities, but, due to an accidental exposure to radiation while trying to find a cookie when he was five in his father's lab, he could twist a tire tool into a knot, bench press six hundred pounds for two hundred reps, take a blast from a .38 revolver full in the chest with no more concern than being hit by a speeding beetle. And he could wear cowboy boots for long periods of time without walking funny, even if his feet were like the feet of the ape. The rest of him was apelike as well. In fact, he appeared to be a six foot four, two thousand pound gorilla with a large penis. Because of this special attribute, he wore a loose pair of designer boxer shorts, hearts for Valentine's Day, Santas for Christmas, multi-colors the rest of the year round. His cowboy boots were special made, quite wide. Green and blue with the shape of Texas on the boot top.

The same radiation that gave him strength and apeness knocked his I.Q. off the shelf, left only two thirds of it standing, and that two thirds wobbled from time to time.

This book John owned had been spat up by a volcano. It was inside a rock. When the rock cooled, it split open. And there it was. The book. Big enough and heavy enough to give a fella a hernia. Drop that on a duck, you could then use him to sail like a Frisbee.

John could read the book, could translate the deedly-bops because he had been Down There —not Way Down There, but down enough —and had found an ancient stone that was a key to the language in the book. A language old as language, but without all the double meanings, puns, and no "exception" rules. It was what it was, and it was more than enough. It was the guide that led to the reading of The Book of Htrae Wolloh, which along with The Necronomicon, and The Book of Doches, was an essential for any evil bastard's shelf. And, of course, anyone interested in evil bastards, as was John.

The book was sandwiched between thick slabs of Formica. The pages were thin sheets of leather written on with an ink that appeared sometimes green and sometimes black and had a constant unpleasant aroma. Sometimes the words squirmed.

The book was how John decided he knew what to do. The book contained certain prophecies, explained there were powers beyond cable TV and missile ballistics. The book, in deedly-bops, talked of cold-making wizards, mean-spirited sprites, and disease-dropping shadows. John, using a special scanner he had designed, put the book on disk. This way, he didn't have to deal with the smell or its unwieldy construct. Could pop it in a handheld and read it.

When first the cold came, John remembered the prophecy. He had been working on understanding the book for years, and once he understood it, he believed it. But he had delayed to do anything about it. He was too busy with Andie, Buck's sister. He spent all his free time, which was minimal, dating her. Wining and dining and boinking. Talking about science, all his inventions. And boinking.

The same radiation that had made Buck strong and not too sharp, had affected her as well. She had been in the room when Buck pulled the towel on which sat the experiment.

They had crept in there together. Their father had locked the door, but they had watched and seen where he stuck the key. They got it, went in after their father's personal collection of cookies, and the accident happened.

Buck was the one who pulled it down on them. Because of it, as stated, he went dumb and strong.

Andie got the opposite end of the switch. She went real-damn-smart, grew tall and lean with golden skin. Her blue eyes turned silver with flecks of gold. Her hair was like a shoulder-length head of flame that whipped and turned and waved.

Andie was so good-looking, when supermodels saw her they cried. When men saw her they sat down, if they were sitting, they laid down. If they were lying down . . . Well, they cried, The really-weak ones opened their flies and got it and went to work.

There was another side effect: she could crawl up flat surfaces, across the ceiling like a lizard. She could flex her body and stretch it as if it were made of rubber. John, and everyone else, called her Stretch.

John had had his own intelligence boosted through electromagnetism and some kind of oily liquid the military had invented. You had to watch that liquid, got on your hands and in your eyes it burned, worse than jalapeno juice. And heaven forbid you should scratch yourself, you know, down there. That was some heat that stuff put out.

John was brainy to begin with, and not bad looking. Women didn't cry when they saw him, but they looked twice. He was tall, broad shouldered with a heroic face. How he came about the extra stack of brains was a college experiment.

Usually, in those experiments, you ended up with sugar pills or syphilis or some kind of psychedelic color explosion head trip. But this one had worked out. John didn't know it right away, though. It was the kind of thing where he hired on to be a guinea pig, and when it was over, nothing seemed to change, so the lab technicians destroyed their notes, gave him some dough and a handshake, told him not to let the door hit him in the ass on the way out.

Three years later. Bam! He got up one morning feeling as if his brain were bigger, hotter, and full of juice, He could learn languages quick as night to day. Mathematic problems were nothing, popped them into his head like popping jujubes into his mouth, spat out the answers.

Another side effect was prehensile toes.

Andie liked that.

Being a man of science had its benefits.

Already these three and the special '57 Chevy had a rep. They had taken up crime fighting. Whipped the pure-dee-ole dog shit out of bad guys using their powers, riding the streets in the black '57, ready to rock, ready to roll.

This world freezing business, however, was a little different. That and the wraiths. You didn't whip those wraiths' asses. No, sir. They didn't have asses. You couldn't get hold of them, but they could get hold of you.

The plague part was something else. One day you're you, next day you're a giant pustule. Even the Team, as they called themselves, were scared of that stuff.

It all had to be stopped at the source.

Way Down There at the center of the world.

The secret Team Center is one cool as hell spot in the mountains. You look up, you can't see it. It's hidden from below. For that matter, it's hidden from above. Just looks like mountains and trees. Worm's eye or bird's eye, you don't see dick.

There's a road winds up there, and cars go on it, but there's a stand of trees alongside it, and they're close to the mountainside. They're made of plastic, but they look real. They feel real. They even give off a scent. Pine and oak, and sometimes cinnamon.

A press of a button from inside the mountain, or from the console of the '57, and they sink into the ground, limbs, leaves, false blue jays that squawk and flap, the whole nine yards. They do this faster than a teenage girl can answer a phone.

The '57 can ride right over where the "trees" have been, and with another click of a button, the mountain opens up, slides back like an Ali Baba thing.

Open, sesame, baby.

Once inside, the mountain closes up.

And boy is it neat in there.

Chemistry set heaven. Glowing tubes and boiling beakers, fired by Bunsen burners blowing blue flame and red licks. A throbbing, humming, nuclear-powered generator that makes everything run smooth, keeps them warm during all this horrible coolness. If it were actually to turn hot, it could cool them.

Team's got their own pop-eyed dwarf who's their butler/valet, and no slow shakes at science and mathematics himself. All of his brains are natural, of course, as is the hump on his back. The cotton suit and bowler he wears are imported and tailored from London, England.

There's all manner of TV screens and videos, crime files on computer, a library and scientific doodads, and a nice little shop where you can park the '57 and work on it, if it needs it. Can't beat the tools there. Boxes of them. Stack them all together, they'd be twelve feet high.

Inside the mountain there's this jet sleigh ride on a runner. Get in that, you can ride a few miles through the mountain and come to a wall. With a touch of a button on the sleigh, the wall will part, the sleigh will stop, and you can walk inside a house to die for.

When you close up the mountain wall, you're standing in nothing but well-furnished glass walls and hardwood flooring overhanging a three hundred foot drop to the river below.

Buck likes to watch down there with high-powered binoculars, sometimes a telescope, because in the summer, on boats, women will occasionally get naked.

Or used to. Now all you see is ice and wraiths and the blowing clouds, low down and gray, like cotton balls that have been used to sop up pus.

Nice place, this room. Lots of talking goes on here. Superhero plans galore. And if you want, the hunchback dwarf will fix you a sandwich and freshen your drink.

He's got a stereotypical role, the dwarf does. Right out of central casting. (Needed: One dwarf. Domestic. Must cook. Must clean. Must be helpful. Respectful. Courteous.)

So, this day we're talking about, they're inside this glass room, the whole team. The heroes. Fact is, they haven't been out in ages. Not since the wraiths and all that cold. It's not safe out there. Not even for heroes.

They're in the glass room, as they call it, and Buck is sitting in a soft chair drinking a tall glass of milk, and John and Andie are sitting on the couch, snuggling, and the dwarf, who is named Montawn, is watching them carefully, as Andie is wearing a loose blouse and no bra and he's hoping a tit will fall out.

"So you're sure about this book," Buck asks. "It knows what it's talking about?"

"Oh, yeah," John says. "Just to make sure, I used a spell in it. I called up Virgil's ghost. You know, Dante's guide?"

"I don't know," Buck said. "You and Andie, you're the brains. Montawn too, he's got more brains than me. What I got is chest hair and a dong about the length of a ball peen hammer. Frankly, maybe because I'm dumb, I don't consider this a drawback." "Get Virgil, will you, Montawn?" John said. Montawn went away.

"Isn't a ghost able to walk through walls and shit?" Buck said. "Not when you summon him with a spell. I called him up last night, put him in the broom closet, told him to stay there. I was too tired to deal with him then. It was an arduous spell."

Andie grinned. "Yeah, it was a kind of anniversary for us." "What anniversary?" Buck said. "It's the first time since the last time," Andie said. "Oh," Buck said. "Well, your brother dear doesn't need to hear about it."

A wraith went by the window, turned its dark, eyeless face toward them.

Andie (Stretch) shot it the finger.

It made scootchy sounds against the glass, fluttered off leaving a spot of goo.

"Damn," Stretch said. "I hate those things." "We're safe in here, Stretch," John said. "An artillery shell couldn't break that glass."

"I know. But I just don't like them," "What's to like?"

Montawn came back with Virgil. Virgil was about five feet tall, wearing a white robe and sandals. He had too-black hair that smacked of cheap dye. It was cut short and combed down in front across his forehead. He looked a little bit like Moe Howard of the Three Stooges. He was carrying a lyre. He smelled like patchouli oil.

"Hello," Virgil said.

"Virgil," John said. "Please tell Buck here, and the others, about yourself."

"I am the shade of the great poet, Virgil," he said. 

Montawn said, "I don't know how great you were. The Iliad and the Odyssey read better."

"Written by committee," Virgil said. "There was no blind poet Homer. Well, there was, but he didn't write it. He just took credit for everyone else's work."

"Done by committee, and still better than the Aeneid," Montawn said.

"That's enough, Montawn," John said. "I'm proud to have an autographed scroll . . . Thank you, Virgil . . . Go wash the car, Montawn."

"But, of course, sir," Montawn said, and left.

"Summarize yourself, Virgil," John said.

"I am a guide through hell," Virgil said.

"That's where we'll be going," John said. "But give us a little more."

Virgil nodded, said, "There are several levels of hell. We can sidestep a few of them, not all. But, I assure you, I will make one hell of a guide. That's a joke."

"We get you," John said.

"Lot of sinners down there," Buck said. "Am I right?"

"Of course," Virgil said.

"Then maybe there's someone down there would like the idea of a little monkey business, if you get my drift," Buck said. "Oh, now, don't sour up. I'm just joking."

"You do not joke about hell," Virgil said.

"You just did."

"I suppose I did."

"Sure you did," Buck said. "Besides. It don't matter. I'm a Baptist. After we're baptized, we can do all manner of fucking around. We're already saved, baby ... It does work that way, doesn't it, Virgil? Baptists count?"

"Every religion counts."

"Even that Rastafarian business?"

"I suppose there are exceptions. I will say this. Hell is full of Methodists, so it can't be as choosy as some might think."

"Continue," John said. "And this time, Buck, no interruptions."

"Hell is a big place," Virgil said. "I have been summoned, and I should go on the record and say, against my will, to be your guide."

"How do you know English?"

"Buck," John said. "I asked you not to interrupt."

"Just this one question and I'll be quiet."

"I can do this in most any language you want, including signing for the deaf, or the use of American Indian sign language. Would you like it in song?"

"Just talk will do," John said.

Virgil looked disappointed, but he went on with it.

"To explain what's happening, there is a renegade demon who has decided to give the upper Earth . . . Well, hell. That's not the way it's supposed to work. Up here, you get choices. Make the right ones, depending on religion, and you get a reward or a punishment. Some religions, you don't get dick.

"But, we will not get into theological matters, I'm a Jupiter man, myself. Still go by the Roman Gods, you know? But, sometimes the demons want people who do not want to be down there. Satan, believe it or not, evil as he is, is a stand-up guy. He only takes those he can trick or persuade or those who want to go down there. In other words, he leaves it up to you."

"If there are other hells, wouldn't this conflict with them?" Stretch asked.

"Could," Virgil said. "Might. There are so many parallel worlds and hells and heavens. It gets to be quite confusing. But we'll stick to the Christian hell. Actually, there are different versions of that as well, and there are overlaps. But to make it simple, hell is trying to take over the world."

"Shouldn't it be hot instead of cold?" Buck asked.

"That one seems logical, but hell is not that logical," Virgil said. "But, Satan, he abides by certain rules. Good has control unless you give yourself to Evil. Satan is up with that. However, Beelzebub and a couple other guys, they don't like this way of thinking."

"Wait a minute," Buck said. "I don't mean to interrupt—

"Of course you do," Stretch said.

'—but isn't Beelzebub just another name for the devil?"

"People get that confused. He is actually a demon, and that is a very general way of describing him. Technically it's not accurate, but for your understanding, close enough. Excuse me, you are a gorilla, are you not?"

"Not," Buck said, "How many six foot four gorillas do you see that sit in chairs and wear boxer shots and cowboy boots?"

"Due to an accident, Buck sprouted some apelike DNA," Stretch said.

"You were telling us how Beelzebub is not the devil," John said.

"Beelzebub overthrew Satan some time back. No more Mr. Nice Guy. He wants to take over this world and move up here. Down there it's far too warm, another reason he's making it cold here by means of magic spells. Still, hell is nothing like you would think. You know, fire everywhere, people burning . . . Well, actually, that does go on, but it isn't like that all over. There are even people who are happy down there . . . though, I suppose you couldn't exactly call them people now. They are shadows, somewhere between spirit and flesh."

"Stick to the point," John said. "Now I know why the Aeneid is so windy."

"Et tu? To put it in a nutshell, Satan is under arrest and is being tortured and the world will continue to have all manner of bad things going on until he is freed, Beelzebub is disposed of, and the proper balance between good and evil is restored."

"So our mission," Buck said, "is to rescue the devil?"

"That's it on the nosey," John said.

"Guess I better change into my combat shorts," Buck said.

"We should all get on our duds," John said. "This business has gone on long enough. Now that I got the book translated, we can do something. No more time for messing around. It's time for ACTION," He pressed the intercom on the couch. "Montawn. Quit messing around out there in the garage. Come pack us a lunch. We're on our way to hell."

			Up jump the Debit
			and go hoo-boo-boo
			Lawd! screams the bad and the
			innocent too
			Look here, Debil says to all dem foks
			Gonna cast duh bones, see who
			gonna get the pokes

Jimmy Joe Smith and The Hurricane Hunters

The super long, super wide '57s ultra-generator buzzed like a super bee. Something about the sound of it, way it throbbed and vibrated the chassis, way it felt when you put your hand on the automobile, always gave Buck the sensation of needing to pee.

He thought he might spend the entire trip on the toilet with that buzzing going on. But he knew in reality, after one good trip to the crapper he'd be all right. It was just the psychology of it.

And he never got used to John calling their ride a '57 Chevy. It only vaguely resembled the Chevy from which it was formed. He loaded in an ice chest Montawn handed him while Stretch and John loaded up the back and prepared the chemical toilet.

Virgil was lounging near the great television set, strumming his lyre.

"You could help us," Buck said.

"Not my department," Virgil said. "You want a guide through hell, a little song, a poem, I can help you out. I don't do luggage. You got a dwarf, use him."

"Ungrateful," Buck said.

"For what?" Virgil said. "I'm not getting paid. I'm having to respond to a spell. Tell him, John."

"That's right," John said, pushing a suitcase into a spot beneath a seat.

"You know, it's Good Friday. Last time I did work on Good Friday, it was for Dante Alighieri. He wrote a good account of it, though I don't suppose you've read it, have you, Ape Man? I doubt you'd read anything without pictures, and they would have to be of naked women, am I right?"

"I don't like the way you talk," Buck said.

"I don't like your looks," Virgil said.

"I ought to tie you in a knot."

"Hey, I'm a ghost. You can't hurt a ghost."

"You look solid to me."

"Well, I suppose I am. For now. The spell, you know, But you don't want to hurt the guide. That wouldn't be good. Tell him, John."

"That wouldn't be good," John said.

Soon they were loaded and in the car, Buck at the wheel. Buck didn't like the car much, but he could drive it better than any of them. He gave it the gas, and away they went, out of the hideaway, out there in the world.

The car went fast and it went through cold and it went through dark and wraiths flittered by it and smashed against it, went SPLAT, like big black bugs, and still the car rolled on.

It darted into the Rockies, a hidden crevasse its goal. A crevasse that led to the center of the Earth.

John knew this because of scientific articles written by Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Uri Lloyd's account of a visit to the underworld. As well as the works of Dante, and Arne Saknussemm.

He had studied them, deduced by all manner of math and geology, and just plain guessing, that there was a crevasse in this spot, and that it was in fact a path that led to the center of the Earth, and hell.

So they inched down the sides of the mountain. The car hung to the earth like a spider. They went between the trees and rocks, and the car flexed around them, eased about like a weasel, and went

down,

Way

down

there.

Over

All

Manner

Of

BUMPS

and HUMPS

and realtightsqueezes.

After the initial twistsandturnsand

D
R
O
P
S

they came to a wide tunnel with polished walls, and their speed -pickeduprealgoddamnquick, and soon they were cruising and Virgil was playing his harp, giving them a song of his own.

Jesus was a tough guy
Though it ain't well known
When they nailed him to the cross
You know he got a bone?
Jesus was a tough guy
Though it ain't well known
Bitch slapped money changers on the temple stones
Intimidated loaves and fishes till they multiplied
Fucked Mary Magdalene
It's in the book implied
Jesus was a tough guy,
Though it ain't well known
When they nailed him to the cross
You know he got a bone
Gave him wine and vinegar,
Stuck him with a spear
He said, oh hell that hurt,
Cut a fart and was out of here

"Perhaps something a little more melodious and sweet?" Stretch said. "Less sacrilegious."

"Sacrilegious?" Virgil said, strumming his lyre a few notes. "Only if that's your religion. How about a song about love? Looking at you, I think of love."

"Sure, love is good," Stretch said.

"All right, here we go:

Knew a gal named Alice 
Came from some place roun' Dallas 
Wore her hair in a bouffant way 
Stacked up high as a bale of hay 
I said Alice, suck my phallus, 
This pleasure she denied 
So I offered her another, though it 
Hurt my pride
She said, you ain't so hot, not from what I see 
Not a thing that you done offered, really appeals to me 
Ooooh, baby, ooooh, baby, ain't nothing you got good 
(Brief instrumental interlude on the lyre using a Coke bottle slide.)
I said now, baby, you know that done a lie
Way I can love you, will make a kitty cry
Oh, yeah, pretty baby
It's true to the bone
Bend over, Alice, honey
And I'll drive you home
Yeah, baby, I'll drive you home."

"That's enough," Stretch said. "That's not love. That's lust. And it sounds . . . Well, fucked up. Sing something in Creek. Sing the same songs if you must, but in Greek. At least I won't know what you're saying."

"I kind of like those tunes," said Buck with a shift of gears. "Makes drivin' more of a pleasure."

'Ton would like them," Stretch said. "Virgil. In Greek. Got me?"

"Anything for you, fair lady. Actually, I thought that last little ditty was catchy."

"What I think," John said, "is you resent being called up as a guide and are trying to make us uncomfortable so I'll get irritated and send you back to where you came from."

"I thought of that," Virgil said, "but actually, now that Satan is no longer in command, I'm not quite the favorite I once was in that section of hell. Before, I had free rein everywhere. This new guy, this Beelzebub, he’s got no sense of humor and doesn't like music."

"Maybe it's your music he doesn't like," Stretch said.

"I suggest we put in a CD," John said. "Give you a rest, Virg."

John flicked one from a CD box, stuck it into the player, hit a button. Jimmy Dale Gilmore began singing "Red Chevrolet."

Virgil was angry at first, but pretty soon, he too was tapping his foot.

Finally, the song came to an end.

John said, "This is as far as I been down."

"That was before the team, I take it?" Virgil said. "The time you went down before, I mean."

John nodded. "I wrote about it1. It's also been put on CD with a bad actor reading it. But this is nowhere as deep as we have to go."

"You must go beyond deep," Virgil said. "At a certain point, you go cosmic. Inside, way down, the interior shifts and all the worlds overlap one another. Like small hoops inside larger hoops inside larger hoops, and so on. Then there are tunnels."

"What exactly does that mean?" Stretch said.

"The best way to explain it," Virgil said, "is, you'll see."

"I'm putting the pedal to the metal, folks," Buck said, and he geared and geared, and the car screamed and moaned.

"Yee-ha," Virgil said. "Down we go."

Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here 
Dante's Inferno

The tunnel widened and the walls glowed with phosphorescent light and made the inside of the Chevy green as rank cheese. And it grew warm in the car, drip-sweat warm, and John said, "Crank up the air conditioner. It's on nuclear pellets. We need to, we can chill it in here enough to hang meat."

"Well, in the immortal words of someone," Virgil said, " 'Hell be a hot muthafucka' So, you may not be hanging all that much meat."

"Well," Buck said. "Personally, me, I can always hang meat."

"How gauche," Stretch said.

Buck flicked the conditioner on. Pretty soon it was cool and the sweat dried. And —

-DOWN

They

went.

ZIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIP

AND

D
R
O
P, and they're all thinking (except Virgil, well, Buck isn't thinking much either): Where's bottom?

Now, swelling up from the floor, jutting out of the walls, there were flames. They licked the Chevy like a treat, but all it did was boil a bit of paint, puff it up in bubbles. That Chevy, it was well-built and well-painted.

The Chevy kept going. Buck flipped some switches. Put the car on autopilot and feel-along-mode. That way, it could probe its way along the rocks, the tires molding and pulling the machine forward. Any fancy maneuvering, well, that had to be done by hand.

Way it was now, with the flames and all, thick as they were, red as they were, well, Buck couldn't see to do any fancy stuff anyway. Therefore, the autopilot.

As they continued, the flames grew thinner, and they saw along the cavernous walls, on narrow trails, naked men and women. They were sweaty and dirty, but didn't look any worse for wear. Buck liked looking at some of the women. When the hell folks saw the car, they waved.

Dropping another twenty miles, they saw men and women hanging from flaming chains by their eyelids, breasts, and genitals.

"How come they're like this?" Buck asked. "I mean, the ones above, they got it different. Easier, it seems."

"The ones above, on the trails, they're minor sinners," Virgil said. "They may even leave someday, take a ride up to the cool cloud place. Things they did, cheat on tests, lie to friends, that kind of stuff, it doesn't doom them for long. The ones hanging, they were greater sinners. They won't be leaving."

"But what did they do?" Buck asked.

"Wore white after Labor Day."

"What?"

"A joke. I don't know. Various things. Adultery. Rape. Incest."

"Adultery is a hell offense?" Stretch asked.

"Well, Bill Clinton got out of it. It's not entirely fair, way it works. But some people, they can talk their way out of almost anything."

"Richard Nixon?"

"Gets along with the boss. Or did. I don't know now. Boss isn't the boss anymore. But before the overthrow, Dick had it pretty cushy. Had a chair right up there by Satan himself. That Dick, what a cutup. Always with the jokes."

"Dick Nixon?" John said. "The ex-president. The crook. Jokes? I've seen vids of him. I've seen documentaries. Cutup? He didn't look to have a sense of humor."

"Oh yeah. Down here Tricky Dicky can be himself, and he's quite the jokester. One of my favorites of his is: How many Democrats does it take to roof a house?"

"I'll bite," Stretch said. "How many?"

"About twelve, if you slice them real thin."

Virgil began to hoot.

"Hey," Buck said, flipping off the autopilot, taking the wheel, laughing a bit, "That's funny. I like that. That ain't bad."

			Pitchfork's hot
			Pointy too
			When the Debil poke it quick
			It stick in you
			Oh, up jump the Debil, and he's
			Feelin fine
			Lawd screams the bad
			And the innocent kind
			Don't do it, Debil, we beg of you
			But, dat ole Debil, he go
			Boo, boo, boo—

Jimmy Joe Smith and The Hurricane Hunters

They went down, level after level, through flames and darkness. Sometimes one or two slept. One drove. And way up above, on the surface, the wind blew hard and the air stayed cold. And John, he remembered what he had read in the book. The big, heavy book of bad things he had found down here.

Remembering made him toss. Made him moan. Up there, it was bad now, but it was going to get worse, and in time, it would be so bad that bad or good was no longer significant.

The end of the world you could call it.

That's what it was.

No. Worse than that.

What it was, was the end of the universe.

The end of...well...The End.

Down there, even in their air-conditioned car, it was warm.

Towels were passed around to wipe sweaty faces. And they drove on.

The team came to places where it was clear of fire and the walls were lit with phosphorescence. And at each level of descent there was some horror or curiosity.

This is some of what they saw:

bodies on fire and mouths open in screams the team could not hear inside the comfort of the '57; bodies hanging by razor wire and little, red imps with little, sharp pitchforks, poking at skin that was forever festered with wounds, boiling with pus; pots containing men and women, boiling in oil; bodies on racks where demons with sharp knives peeled the skin away from victims in bloody, dripping strips (instantly to grow back again for a replay); cats being beat and flayed and mashed, which prompted Ape Man Buck to say:

"I don't see any dogs."

"Oh, no," Virgil said. "Dogs don't go to hell. Even the bad ones. That isn't right. Nor children under twelve. No matter what they've done."

"What did the cats do?"

"They're cats."

They came to a place where a man was tied to a stone and a large piano was being cranked up and dropped on him repeatedly.

"What a weird punishment," Stretch said.

"Oh, that's Barry Manilow. Crimes against music."

"All right," Stretch said. "I can see that."

The dark tunnel curved and Buck took them around it fast and furious, causing their seat belts to snap tight. As they went, John said, "Question. Hitler?"

"Beelzebub's butt-hole buddy," Virgil said. "Adolph's asshole is as big as a dinner platter, and he's in good with the man."

"You mean . .. ?" Buck asked.

"That's right," Virgil said. "He's Beezel's bitch."

"My guess is, 'cause of that," Buck said, "Hitler got to keep the mustache."

"Oh, yeah," Virgil said.

The tunnel leveled and widened and there were many forks.

"Which one do we take?" John asked.

"They lead to all the different hells of the different religions, different beliefs. That little tunnel over there. That's a hell one man believes in. He believes in it so strong, it has come to exist. He's pretty unique, that man. He's the only one that's got his own tunnel."

"Who is he?"

"You wouldn't know him. Just a guy. But he has a great imagination. You want the tunnel in the middle."

"Is it in the middle because it's the most important?" Stretch asked.

"No. The middle leads to several major religions. Once, way back, Hades was in the middle."

"Isn't hell Hades?" Stretch asked. "I'm still confused on all this."

"Yes, and no. Hades is my version of hell. It's the one I believe in. I'm an ancient Roman guy, you know."

"But don't you believe in them all?"

"I do. Because I am a guide. 1 don't live in hell. I just tour the dead about. Some to stay permanently, some in an astral state, just taking the tour. But for me, the one that is most real is the one most ingrained in my earthly consciousness. That's the same for you. The one in the middle comes closer to that. It's not exactly what you suspect, but there are connections."

"What about Muslim hell?" John asked.

"Mormons?" Stretch said.

"They all overlap," Virgil said, "Oscar Ziegler said: There are as many afterlives as there are caverns in the Earth, and each one is a unique ecology, godless and strange.' He was right."

"I've got a question," John said. "Atheists? Do they automatically go to hell?"

"They just die. They get their wish. They aren't punished or rewarded."

"I'll be damned," John said. "Agnostics?"

"They have to roll the dice."

"Dice?"

"Yeah, and sometimes the game is crooked. But that's how it works. They go to a waiting room, watch a little TV, nothing on there but game shows and a constant rerun of The Postman. Death shows up, gives them the dice, and they roll."

"Death?" Stretch said. "In a black robe? All bony? And he gives you dice?"

"Sometimes he wears a hat," Virgil said. "Pork pie. And leisure suits from the seventies. He is bony though. And yes, he has dice."

"That's different than I thought," John said.

"I thought Satan and Death were the same," Stretch said.

"No," Virgil said. "Death is a subcontractor."

"So, hey diddle diddle, right up the middle," Buck said.

The car jetted toward the tunnel and was sucked in. It was sucked in so fast it was no longer touching ground. That was okay. The car could fly. Buck flipped a switch and along they went. They came to a cavern so vast it was a world. A world of fire. There was a black, boiling sun above it all, and out of the blackness licked red flames, and in spite of the blackness, the world below was more than well lit. It was overlit. Everything appeared red and orange and yellow and tarnished gold, and shadows, creepier than the wraiths topside, flowed about like malignant oil spills.

'There were rocks and ledges and valleys of fire, bodies boiling in lava, screams and wails, razor blades blown on the wind like butterflies, cutting at men and women running like deer.

"Park it here," Virgil said.

They were no longer flying, but were riding along a ledge, easy as a goat, when Virgil pointed at a cavern. There were cars in there. In fact, it was a garage. One car was huge and black and looked somewhat like an old Cadillac, but wasn't. It was longer and wider than a Caddy.

There were other cars there as well. None of them identifiable, except for a De Lorean.

Buck whipped in next to the big, black car and jerked the Chevy in park.

"Who do those belong to?" John asked.

"Satan," Virgil said. "Or did. I guess Beelzebub now."

"Should we be sneakier?" Stretch asked.

"They are way under here. They don't like it hot."

"I thought they were devils, demons," Stretch said.

"Oh, they run the place," Virgil said. "But where they are, it's very different. Comfy, in fact. Warm by earthly standards, I suppose. But quite bearable. No worse than Texas. And in the offices, private quarters, cool, almost arctic cool."

"Course," John said, "you know what General Sherman said. He said if he owned Hell and Texas, he'd live in Hell and rent out Texas."

"Well, he'd be wrong," Virgil said. "We park the car here, in the garage, no one will probably notice. We can go on foot from this point."

"But why?" Buck asked. "We got the car."

"Well, the car has done well," Virgil said. "But it can't go where we need to go. Didn't John tell you?"

"No, I didn't," John said. "But now I am. That's why we brought the gear, team. Let's break it out and go. And, of course, I've got the Book. On disk."

Now, unknown and fearful dangers we were about to encounter. Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

Got air-conditioned body suits, miner hats with straps and lights, grappling hooks and ropes and pulleys, pegs and mountain picks, a six-day supply of food for four, a handheld computer with disks of information, including a copy of the Book, toilet paper, combs, a mirror, bottles of water, a canteen, all in fifty-pound packs strapped to their backs. And in Buck's pack, four to five girlie magazines. Boobs and Butts, Butts and Boobs, Tits and Ass, Ass and Tits, Penthouse.

And when the packs were on their backs, Virgil led them to a hole in the floor of the garage. Not a wide hole, just enough for folks with packs, but it was a deep hole, dropped way the hell down, so to speak, and there was a hot, strong wind blowing up through the hole, and down there, you could hear screams and sounds that were beyond the human voice. And it stank a little.

Virgil said, "When the wind dies. Just leap in. There's a down-draft that will carry us."

Stretch removed her pack, and stretched. Her elasto-plastic suit stretched with her. She stretched and stuck her elongated neck and head and upper body down the hole.

Stretch popped back out of the hole, compressed back to normal, slipped on her pack, said, "Man, it stinks down there."

"Even if there's a wind," Buck said, "won't it still drop us fast enough to go splat?"

"No," Virgil said. "It'll float us down. It'll be like cushions under our feet. It blows up for a while, then it drops down . . . There. It's dying. Jump!"

And in leaped Virgil, followed by Stretch and John and Buck.

On the way down, Virgil said, "I like this part."

They went for miles and miles. Buck even had time to take a candy bar out of his pocket and eat it. He also scratched his ape head and ate a few fleas. Finally the wind began to die, and just as worry set in, it lowered them on a narrow ledge. Looking over the ledge, all you could see was darkness. Behind them was a narrow cavern. The ledge was littered with dark piles of stinking refuse.

"We'll have to step in quick-like, before the wind reverses and carries us back up. It'll snap us off this ledge like a sheet of paper if we're not careful. Got to watch the back draft. You don't, up you'll go, through the hole."

"We don't want to ride it down anymore?" Stretch said.

"There's not much ride left. Dies out just below us. Then up it blows again. Come on, we're on foot now. And once we're in the cavern, we have to start climbing down. Just walking at first. Then the gear."

Just as they managed themselves inside the cavern, the wind blew back, burst up, warm and foul-smelling.

"Wow," Stretch said. "That stinks worse than before."

"Sometimes the wind catches more of the sewer smell."

"Sewer smell?" Stretch asked.

"Well, that hole is Satan's shitter," Virgil said.

"He don't have plumbing?" Buck said.

"He's modern in some ways, but there are some throwbacks."

"That's what's on the ledge, I take it," John said. "Satan mess."

"Correct," Virgil said.

"Man, if his ass fits over that hole," Buck said, "he must be some size."

"He's a big boy," Virgil said.

"Then I guess the De Lorean isn't his," Stretch said.

"Nixon's."

From there the going got rough. No car to ride in. No air to ride on. It was assholes and elbows, climbing down into heat and steam.

"I don't understand how all this works," Stretch said as they went. "These people have bodies. How do their bodies get here? Bodies rot."

"They are made flesh again," Virgil said. "Their spirits are made solid. Souls, if you prefer. That way, they can suffer the physical pain, but not die, due to the power of the soul. Sometimes they come here young, sometimes old. As long as they are contained in hell, a physical body will survive, and survive, but it will feel all the pain of damnation. American Indians, at least some, they have a hell where you come here the way you died. That's why they often mutilated bodies after combat. Wanted to send their foes to the other world without parts of themselves. If a person was killed and mutilated and was of another religion, it had no effect."

"But if we go to this hell," Buck said, "this Christian hell," how will that solve the problem upstairs considering there are all these other hells?"

"This is the one we want. This is the one causing all the trouble. Sometimes it's one of the others, but now, it's this one. The Christian branch of hell, in all its divisions."

"How come you know so much about all the hells?" Buck asked.

"I entertain in most of them," Virgil said. "Me and Woody Guthrie and a few others. We're troubadours. We get to leave when we want. The individual hells. But really, there's no place to go. I'm glad you called me up. It's given me a change of pace."

"Why not heaven?" Stretch asked. "Why can't you go there?"

"Well, unlike some," Virgil said, "me and Woody, we got a job. Various Gods got their heads together, decided we should be entertainers. We can occasionally visit heaven or Earth, especially if we're under a spell, but it's not our domain. Your God and Satan are mostly about choices. But now and then, they violate their own rules. Everyone likes a little music, so, we're on tap."

"Why would they want to make people in hell happy?" Stretch asked.

"I assume they are making the rulers of hell happy," John said.

"You assume right," Virgil said, "though now and then I play a tune for the masses. Not supposed to. Good deed and all."

"Good for you," Stretch said.

"Remember this, you might see someone you want to help along the way," Virgil said. "But most of the people here belong here. Now and then there's a mistake, but not often. Bookkeeping is not what it used to be throughout the hells. So many souls, you know. But don't help. Got me?"

Everyone agreed.

Climbing down became more difficult and the equipment came out and the talk stopped. They used picks and ropes and mountain climbing stuff and such to lower themselves farther down into the darkness. It grew so dark, without the fire and phosphorescence and all, it became necessary for them to put on their miner caps and flick on the lights.

Along the way, impaled on spikes in the shadows, identified by their moans and screams, they passed a series of politicians, mostly Republicans and political radio show hosts.

The impaled souls asked for help.

The group kept going.

After hours of descent, they stopped to rest in a cavern. It was. warm in the cavern and there was lots of steam, but it wasn't too uncomfortable. In fact, it made them drowsy.

They ate and slept. When they awoke, they continued on, using the ropes and the equipment.

But then, there was an accident.

Buck slipped. He put a peg in wrong, it came loose, and he fell, and when he fell, the safety line, which was attached to his companions, caught him. He hung in midair as the others held their spots and supported his weight.

Stretch stretched. She bent over backward, her whole body went down past John and Virgil to where Buck hung in the air, thrashing his ape arms.

She pushed up under and behind him and tried to lift him. He was a little too heavy. John began to pull on the rope as Stretch pushed. Virgil just remained still, clinging to his place on the rock wall.

Finally they pushed and pulled Buck up. Then they all climbed up a piece, sat on the ledge above them, and rested.

"Man," Buck said, scratching the fur on his head. "That was close."

"I'll say," Stretch said. "You okay, brother?"

"I am. Hey, you won't believe what I saw. When I fell, I saw something really strange."

"We're in hell," John said. "What do you expect?"

"No. This was strange in a different way. When we go back down, you ought to see it. It's in a cavern, directly below us. That's how I got messed up. I put a foot out and it went into a cave. I sort of, well, panicked, grabbed at my peg, and instead of hanging to it, pulled it out. When I dropped, turned upside down, my light shown in there, and I saw it."

"What?" John asked.

"I don't know. But I think we should take a look, Are you guys having flea trouble? I mean, is hell full of fleas, Virgil?"

"Parts of it are, in fact," Virgil said. "But these fleas, you brought them with you. They belong to you."

"Whatever," Buck said. "But you guys, you got to see what I saw."

"This is not a sightseeing tour," John said. "Upstairs is going through a real mess. We got to find Satan, cut him loose, let him make things right again."

"All right," Buck said. "But I think you ought to look."

The worked their way down on the ropes and swung into the cave and found what Buck had seen.

A large clay shape in the image of a man lying face up.

"My goodness," John said. "It looks like —

"It is," Virgil said.

"Is what?" Buck said.

"The Golem," John said.

"I thought it was a myth," Stretch said.

"Oh, no," Virgil said. "It is quite real. But I'm surprised to find it here."

The Golem was large, made of dark clay, and its features were cut into it in a crude manner. A line for a mouth, circles for eyes. No nose. No ears. A smudge on the forehead. No penis; it was as smooth down there as a Barbie doll. It had fingers like frankfurters, thick hands, chunky arms, a barrel body, and legs like oaks, feet that were wide and flat, stubby toes. There was a pile of mud above its head and the pile went up in a thick, dried line, up into the darkness of a tunnel.

Virgil leaned forward, looked up the tunnel. He had been given a lighted helmet, same as the others, and after a moment of looking up there, he said, "My guess is, way above us, is the city of Prague. And our friend here came down on a mud slide."

"And why would you guess that?" Buck asked.

"The Golem was kept there," John said. "In Prague."

"And who is the Golem?" Buck asked. "I still don't get it."

"The word is Hebrew," John said. "It means unformed mass."

"Or fetus," Virgil said. "There may have been more than one Golem, but the one that is for sure is the one created by Rabbi Low, in what you call the sixteenth century."

"And what makes it so famous, other than being ugly?" Buck said.

"To simplify the story, it was made for vengeance," John said.

"Then later hidden away," Virgil said. "In Prague. Until needed again. See the smudge on its forehead. A word in Hebrew was marked there in the clay. That's what brought it to life. When it was no longer needed, the mark was rubbed out."

"No shit," Buck said.

"No shit," Virgil said.

"It might be handy," John said.

"True," Virgil said.

"The word is 'Emet,' " John said. "Meaning truth. Am I right?"

"You are," Virgil said. He leaned forward, and examined the Golem's forehead. "Water," he said.

John provided some from his canteen, pouring it gently on the Golem's head.

"It's still not soft enough," Virgil said. "Loan me a knife."

John did. Virgil cut crudely into the Golem's forehead the Hebrew word "Emet."

Immediately the Golem's circle eyes filled with light and its mouth moved from side to side as if it were tasting a sour persimmon. Its great chest heaved. It made a sound like thick goo gurgling down a drain.

"Commands must be simple," Virgil said. "The Golem is very literal."

"Stand," said Virgil, and the Golem stood. Its clay body made a cracking sound and thin lines ran all through the body like veins.

"Wow," said Buck. 'That sonofagun must be…What, eight feet tall?"

"More like nine," Stretch said.

"How do you think it got here?" John asked Virgil.

"My guess is, without anyone knowing it, its hiding place eroded some century or two ago and it began a slow slide down to hell on a trail of sometimes dry, sometimes slick mud. That's my guess. It has been sliding this way for centuries. The mud, perhaps made wet by a water leak in the synagogue, must have loosened the ground beneath it. Underneath was a natural tunnel, and in it went. With the Golem's hiding place in the synagogue long forgotten—they've been looking for him for centuries, you know—the Golem is lost without being known to be lost. It's down here in hell."

"Cool," Buck said, "But I have a feeling it isn't going to climb down so good."

"I don't think we need to climb down any more," Virgil said. "I haven't been in this tunnel, but I know this vicinity well. This most likely leads to where we need to go. The underground River Styx."

"Isn't that in a different mythology than the one we need?" Stretch asked.

"The River Styx runs through all the mythologies," Virgil said. "It's the sewer system. Where do you think Satan's bowel movement goes after he drops it through the hole up there? The stuff that misses the ledge."

"Yuk," Stretch said.

"I still think," Buck said, "if you're Satan, got all those powers, you ought to put in some real plumbing. Something you can flush."

"If all works out," John said, "you might have an opportunity to discuss it with him."

The three of the Earth, Virgil the Guide, and the man made of clay began to walk. They went deeper into the cave, and soon it widened and inclined. After a while, Buck said, "Golem, pick me up and carry me."

The Golem turned, grabbed Buck by the head and lifted him, started walking.

"Put me down!" Buck said, and the Golem dropped him.

Buck, lying on the ground, rubbed his hairy neck. "Damn," he said.

Virgil said: "As I was saying. He takes things literally."

The Dark Design had no pattern.
From The Dark Design by Philip Jose Farmer

When they started out again, Buck looked down, and there on the ground, he saw a quarter.

"Look here, a bit of luck," he said, and put it in his pocket.

"Let me see that," Virgil said.

Buck produced it.

"Look close," Virgil said.

Buck looked. "Hey, whose head is that?"

"It's imprinted with Satan's head," Virgil said.

"Wow," Buck said. "He is one ugly dude. But, hey, it'll spend down here, won't it? I mean, surely they got a concession stand."

"Not while Beelzebub is in control," Virgil said. "Right now, it's like Confederate money. Well, maybe not. Not in other sections. It is silver."

"What would you buy here anyway?" Stretch said.

"Ice water," Buck said.

"Well, actually," Virgil said, "sometimes Satan does favors. He does allow a bit of money to be earned, in a fashion. And spent at the General Store. Ice water is popular. Most, however, well, they never get a break."

"Hell is nothing like what I expected," Stretch said.

"It's just like life," Virgil said. "That's what makes it scary."

In time the great tunnel emptied out into a larger cavern, the walls of which were lit up with phosphorescence. A wide, dark river ran through the center of the cavern and twisted between great rock walls and out of sight, enveloped by darkness.

Rows and rows of people, and things unidentifiable, stood on the bank of dirt and stone, looking out at the brown, churning water.

"Who are they?" Stretch asked.

"Souls and demons waiting to take the trip," Virgil said. "They made the trip here, same as we did, only slower. Some have been traveling for centuries. They're waiting on Charon."

"I thought we were in Christian hell," John said. "There's no Charon."

Virgil shook his head. "Like I said, this river winds through all the hells. Some demons just use it for travel, when they're on vacation, want to visit different sections of hell."

"They get vacations?" Stretch said.

"If they work for one of the hells," Virgil said. "They get paid vacations. Also, a hundred sick days a century, paid. Lot of other health benefits as well. Also, now and then, visitors from Heaven take the tour. Makes them feel superior."

"So, we want Charon and his boat?" John said.

"Exactly," Virgil said.

"We could swim across," Buck said.

"Well, you, John, and Stretch might try it," Virgil said. "Stretch could stretch across it, pop on over to the other side. You and John might even swim it, strong as you are. But even with your strength, I don't think so. Rapids. Sharp rocks in spots. And it's deep. And, it's the sewer. That's why it's brown . . . and lumpy."

"Oh, my," Stretch said.

"And even if you could swim it, I couldn't. I'm not up to that. I don't have those kinds of powers. I'm very limited, even more so when I'm under your sway, your magic. As for Golem, well, it'd sink like .. . like a lot of clay."

"Look," Buck said.

Out of the dark end of the cavern came a great, black, paddle wheel boat. It was large, and on the deck, at the wheel, was a shape in black.

As the boat paddled forward, mixing turds in the water like a buttermilk churn, they saw that the shape was a hooded robe with a skeletal face in it. Bony hands held the wheel.

"We better hustle on down closer to where it docks," Virgil said.

They went down and got in line behind some very strange-looking people. Virgil said, "Oh, shit."

"What?" John said.

"We have to pay Charon to take the ride."

"Hey, I got that devil's quarter."

"It's silver," Virgil said. "Charon doesn't care what kind of silver. He'd take silver spoons, you had them."

"And I'm the one's supposed to be stupid," Buck said. "I knew that quarter would come in handy."

"Will it work for all of us?" John asked.

"Well, maybe you could leave him something else," Virgil said. "Hey, you have a spare flashlight?"

"I do." John said. "A pen light."

"He might like that."

The boat paddled up to a wooden dock and stopped. The dock hadn't been there a moment before.

A plank, unassisted, jammed out of the side of the boat. Charon locked the wheel with a chain, came down the ramp and stood on the dock. He took coins of bronze and silver as the line entered onto the boat. When it came to Buck, he gave Charon the devil's quarter. Charon's face, though skeletal, had features, as if the bones were made of rubber. He bit the coin Buck offered him, jerked a bony thumb over his shoulder, and Buck boarded.

"Charon," Virgil said. "Hey, man, how's the old bone hanging. So to speak. We don't all have silver—"

Charon raised his arm quickly and one bony finger poked out of his robe. Poked in the direction they had come.

"No. No. Now listen. We got something really cool, A light. A little light. A pen light. Wouldn't you like that? Look, I know three of the group here aren't dead. And one is, well, neither dead nor alive. It's clay. But, hey, a pen light. Think about it."

Charon held up three fingers.

"He'll let three of us on," Virgil said.

"Then we leave the Golem," John said.

"We might need him later," Virgil said. "We'll need all of us."

Virgil looked back at Charon.

"What else," Virgil said. "We got packs full of things here."

Charon shook his head, bared his teeth, leaned forward, put his mouth near Virgil's ear.

"Oh," Virgil said.

After a moment, Virgil turned to John and Stretch. "Well, he will let us on, but…Well…"

"What?" Stretch said.

"You got to show him your tits."

"For heaven's sake," Stretch said. "The lecher."

"He does work in hell," Virgil said.

Stretch sighed. "Very well. You two go on board. Don't look back . . . Not that you haven't seen it all before, John, but it's undignified enough."

"I don't like it," John said.

"No time to get prudish," Stretch said.

Virgil took the pen light from John and gave it to Charon. It disappeared inside Charon's robe. John, grumbling, went on board, Virgil behind him. When the Golem stepped on board, the boat lowered a full foot in the water.

"All right," Stretch said, unfastening her air-conditioned body suit, lowering it over her shoulders. "Does this work for you?"

Charon stuck his bony hand in his mouth and bit it.

After a moment of ogling, he stepped aside and poked his bony finger at the boat.

Stretch readjusted herself, stepped on board.

"I really hate that guy," John said.

A three-headed dog came out of the cabin and went over and stood by Charon as he unchained the wheel. Steam charged out of the pipes, and the paddle wheel began to turn, thrashing the turd-water. The boat rolled forward.

John said, "Isn't that Cerberus?"

"Yep, that's him," Virgil said.

"I thought he guarded the entrance to the underworld."

"Did you see him as we went down?"

"Well, no."

"Then he doesn't. He's actually quite tame. Or, pretty tame. He used to do that some, guard the opening, but he's such a favorite of everyone, he just wanders around down here now. I mean, why guard the opening? People are dying to get in."

"You're such a comedian," Buck said.

"I did do a little stand up. I was all right. Again, why guard the place? Satan always says: 'Everyone's welcome.' He's the only dog down here. Like I said, dogs don't go to hell. He's free to leave at any time. He likes it here. Lately, Cerberus spends a lot of time on board with Charon. He likes the boat ride, I guess."

			Paddle like a motherfucker 
			Do what you will 
			No matter how you do 
			You go there still

Jimmy Joe Smith and The Hurricane Hunters

The heroes and the souls churned down the great river and as they went, it widened. Soon they were on an inland sea. The brown water stretched beneath the phosphorescent kingdom as far as the eye could see.

"I'm getting seasick," Buck said.

"I have some Dramamine," Stretch said, dug around in her pack till she found it.

Buck took it and they churned on.

And on.

And on.

And on.

They came to a place where the river was on fire, and they went right through that. John, Buck, and Stretch had to go inside because they were flesh and not spirit of flesh, and they watched through the glass as the boat went through the flames.

The inferno wrapped around Virgil, Charon, Cerberus, the Golem, and the others. A few jerked back in fear, but after a moment, stood up, bathing in it, realizing they were not to be consumed.

"If the fire doesn't hurt these souls," Stretch said, "what's the punishment?"

"I think it hurts when the powers that be are ready to punish them," John said, "That's when they crank up the juice. Right now, those powers are just scaring them. Showing them Charon, all dark and spooky, the river of shit, the fire on the river. They will be sorted out later, sent to where they need to go."

"It's scaring me," Buck said.

"Yeah, me too," John said. "Thing that surprises me is what Virgil said about vacationers from Heaven. That's hard to believe."

John was tapped on the shoulder. "That would be us."

He turned to see a man, a woman, and a young girl clumped up together. "Car wreck got us. On our way to church. We were very pious. We're from up there, you know. Way Up There. But, we thought we'd see how the other half lives. Well, actually, it's quite a bit more than half down here. But here we are. Super really. Quite the vacation. Just thought I'd let you know. Didn't mean to eavesdrop."

"No problem," John said. "Thanks."

After some time—though time was hard to judge, and in fact non-existent now—the boat paddled toward shore. The fire on the river had long gone out, and when they arrived at the shore, there were naked bodies writhing in the mud, howling in agony. As souls disembarked, they stepped on the bodies, which continued to twist and squirm, but never rose up.

John, Buck, and Stretch came out of the viewer's port, looked out at the bank, the bodies in the mud.

"What's their problem?" John said. "A little mud never hurt anybody."

"They aren't allowed to get up," Virgil said. "They can't get up.  They have a spell on them. So, here they lie, day after day, with biting worms and sores from the bites. They are the mat for everyone who disembarks. Forever. It gets old. And by the way, that isn't mud. It's dung. Hence all those flies."

"I thought that was stinky mud," Buck said.

They stepped off the boat plank, onto the bodies, found it hard to keep their footing.

"Don't fall, or you stay," Virgil said.

"Shit," Buck said. "That one grabbed at me."

"Kick him," Virgil said. "Better yet, Golem, come."

The Golem came down the plank and the boat rose two feet in the water. The heroes stepped aside. 

The Golem came and stood by Virgil. "Golem. You lead the way, and we will follow in your path."

The Golem walked, stepping on the contorting souls, who disappeared beneath its heavy feet, bogged deep in the dung and mud.

"Follow it," Virgil said.

It flickered eternally in a state between flesh and spirit. "
The Mound" by H.P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop.

They went along briskly, moving over the mashed-down bodies, and by the time they were through the muck and to the other side on solid ground, they looked back to see a few souls go down, their clothes torn from them by the wallowers. Soon, these unfortunate souls had joined the squirming.

"Man," John said, "that's got to suck."

"In the case of most," Virgil said, "it wouldn't matter. They're going to be punished anyway. But if you're just here on holiday, that has to suck."

"Big time," Buck said.

Virgil turned and led them on, commanding the Golem to follow behind. The moaning masses moved along with them.

"We're getting close to our goal," Virgil said. "There will be fire, then there will be all manner of ugliness. In other words, you haven't seen anything yet."

"You're saying we need our helmets?" John asked.

"I am. I, of course, am immune. As is the Golem."

"Are you immune from death?" Stretch asked.

"Death, yes. Pain? No. For helping you, even though it is against my will, I will be punished."

"I didn't realize that," Stretch said.

"He did," Virgil said, nodding at John the Brain.

"I did," John said. "I thought the world was worth the price of one lyre player. And three superheroes."

"I don't feel all that super right now," Stretch said.

"Me either," Buck said. "I feel like an itty-bitty ape man in a hot place."

"I can give you one bit of peace, Stretch," Virgil said. "Hell must function the way it is supposed to. Magic isn't supposed to be a daily part of earthly life. The wraiths, the disease, they are supernatural. The Earth is made only for the natural. If the natural order fails, Earth is doomed, and so are heaven and hell. The wraiths, the plague, it's nothing. John knows this."

John nodded.

"So, my choice is to maintain my cushy life as tour guide. And to make sure those who are supposed to be punished for eternity, are. And that the world doesn't end."

"The world would actually end?" Buck said.

"The universe will collapse on itself," John said, "and in the end, nothing will remain. Neither heaven nor Earth nor hell, Satan nor God, demon or angel. There will be only void."

"You kind of left some of that out," Buck said.

"I know," John said. "It was just to take the edge off worry."

"Well, now I'm worried," Buck said.

"Sorry," Virgil said.

"It doesn't matter," Buck said. "We came here to do a job, and no matter what, we'll do it as well as we can."

"That's the spirit," Virgil said.

"Doesn't Beelzebub know all this?" Stretch said. "That the universe will end?"

"It's what Beelzebub wants," John said.

"And I thought Satan was the bad guy?" Buck said.

"He is," John said. "But he is a bad guy with a job to do, and he knows his limits. Beelzebub doesn't."

"Why can't God stop him?" Stretch asked.

"Because the God you're talking about, all the Gods, have their limits," Virgil said. "The all powerful business. . . Well, it isn't true, you know. For that matter, God doesn't really mess much in the lives of individuals unless it's for his own amusement. God's job is to keep the universe in order when possible. Satan keeps up with the trivia. Who's fucking who. Who killed who. He's really responsible for knowing who goes to heaven, and who comes here."

"Like Santa Glaus," Buck said. "He's making a list and checking it twice."

"You got it," Virgil said.

"Does God know we're here?" Stretch said. "That we're his emissaries?"

"He does," Virgil said. "And he really isn't a he, or a she, or exactly an it. But he is as good a term as any."

"Did ... it... he, send us?"

"Do you remember him asking you?" Virgil said. "He doesn't make choices for humans. Unless, as I said, it's for his amusement. You know, like giving babies AIDS. He's sort of got it made, you know. Something goes well, he gets credit. Goes wrong, it's God's will. Guy's in a wreck, loses a leg, both arms and his dick, but if he survives, it's a miracle. I don't think so."

"Will God help us?" Stretch asked.

"To do what?" Virgil said.

"Succeed."

"It's up to us. That's the way it works."

"It seems evil has all the power," Buck said.

"If it's not stopped, it does."

"But surely, the end of the world, all that, God would want to intervene," Stretch said.

"It's not up to your God," Virgil said. "He works as part of a multi-faceted heaven. He allows. He rewards. In the meantime, might I suggest a bit of air-conditioning. Those helmets."

The heroes took off their miner helmets, fished from their packs little flat helmets with flexible plastic face plates and headlamps, shook them so they were full, put them on, fastening them to the shoulders of their air-conditioned suits with snaps and flaps. They adjusted near-flat knobs on their belts, picked up the level of air-conditioning. When they spoke, their voices came through the little speakers in the face plates loud and clear, if a bit metallic sounding.

"I sound like a throat cancer victim," Buck said.

"You sound like a talking ape," John said.

They moved along with the moaning, trudging masses for a while, then Virgil said, "I've been on this spot many times. There's a little path. You can't see it from the main tunnel, but it's behind that large boulder shaped like buttocks. We can go that way."

"So could the others, couldn't they?" Buck said. "I don't know what all these people did, but I feel sorry for them. Maybe we could let them use the path with us, as a way out of where they're going."

"Don't feel sorry for them," Virgil said. "They deserve their punishment. They must travel that way. They can't go any other way. Not once they reach this point. And, even if they could go the path, it doesn't lead to something pleasant."

"Great," Buck said.

"But we can go that way without problems?" Stretch said.

"I am a guide, the Golem is supernatural clay, and you are living, so, we can. But not without problems."

It was a narrow trail and they had to turn on their headlamps to see. As they went down it grew warmer, even inside their suits, so they knew the temperature outside was phenomenal, because the suits were designed to handle heat beyond any known to man. In those suits, you could have walked into the face of the sun and felt nothing.

As they worked their way down, the rocks glowed red with fire, and finally they turned white hot. Beneath their boots they could feel the heat, and their toes sweated.

Virgil and the Golem moved through the heat without problems. Virgil tucked his lyre under his arm, said, "If you were to remove your helmets, you would he eaten by flames in less than an instant. The very air is alive with heat. Even I sweat. It's a kind of sympathy thing, I believe. Careful not to touch the rocks at all. Some of them are sharp and could tear your suits, and the heat has been accumulating in them forever. Literally. Gather yourself. Down here, you can never be certain what's just around the corner."

As they turned the corner they came upon a dancing troupe, singers and actors.

They were not attractive people, not by any means, though Buck did notice that a couple of the fat women in chain mail had nice legs, in a kind of dirty, over-muscular sort of way. They were dancing from one side of the trail to the other, and they were bad. They danced hard and fast, and as the heroes tried to pass, the dancers moved in a chain in front of them.

"Bad summer stock," Virgil said. "Dance theater. Goddamn Renaissance Festival folk. They go straight to here. Do not pass Go. Straight to here. They don't even get to ride on the boat."

"God," Stretch said, "they're awful. I thought I was dance impaired, but they're actually dreadful. Why won't they let us pass?"

"It's their job," Virgil said.

The troupe, the number of which was impossible to determine, and seemed to change at any given moment, moved faster and faster, and then they began to sing.

They were really bad.

"Jesus," Buck said. "I just thought I hated opera."

"It isn't opera," Virgil said. "It's worse than that. It's contemporary show tunes,"

Buck slugged one of the dancers, a woman. She went flying back and out of sight, mixed into the heat waves and was gone. But then, another, perhaps even a worse singer and dancer, took her place.

Stretch said, "I can't do anything. Not in this suit. I can't stretch. It's not made like my body suit."

"Yeah," Virgil said, "you're pretty much fucked there."

The dancers flowed back, and the actors moved forward, began to perform Pal Joey.

"Jesus," John said, "I never thought anyone could be so bad as to make you weak. Oh, my God, look. They've got clowns and mimes with them."

"You have to expect that," Stretch said. "It is, after all, hell."

The crowd of dancers, singers, mimes, and juggling clowns closed in on the heroes. The music of John Tesh echoed through the air. The mimes touched nothing with their palms, feigned being trapped by invisible walls, pretended to climb. The clowns honked horns and juggled balls, made with inane skits. Even through their air-conditioned suits, the heroes could feel the wind from their fast dancing, the sourness of their singing voices, the horrible embarrassment of seeing mimes perform, the overwhelming sadness of clowns. The horrible recitations of Hamlet and Macbeth by voices non-sublime.

There were even bad rappers2, making stupid gang signs, throwing fingers left and right, sounding one and the same, modern man's commercial Gongorism.

"Growing weak," Stretch said, and she went to one knee.

The other heroes sagged.

John the Brain thought even the Golem looked sour.

"Play," John said to Virgil.

"What?"

"Play, Virgil. Play something. Strike back. Play Barry Manilow. No. Kenny Loggins. Some rap or heavy metal. Do something."

"They love that shit," Virgil said.

"Then play well," John said.

Virgil swung his lyre up and began to play, and soon he began to sing.

The music was divine, and Virgil's voice was.. . Well, it was the voice of Caruso, Streisand, Patsy Cline, and Elvis and every beautiful voice that had ever sung. Nothing like the way he had sung before, and the lyre was sweet, And finally Virgil sang no more, but played the blues, almost as fine and pure as Eric Clapton and B. B. King.

Slowly, the crowd moved back, hands over their ears.

"It's too good for them," Buck said. "They can't stand it."

Virgil played, walked ahead of the others. John helped Stretch up, and they followed.

"Stay close," John said.

As they went, the crowd of rejected summer stock, performance artists, mimes, clowns, and small-town theater actors, Renaissance idiots, closed in around them for a moment. But they couldn't stand it, not when Virgil took on the voice of Roy Orbison and hit a note so high the heat waves trembled. The bad performers leaped aside, were sucked into the heat, and were, except for one red clown nose, gone.

Stretch kicked the clown nose ahead of her, and as they went forward, she kicked it again. And again. Until she managed to knock it behind some rocks and out of sight.

They went along for a ways, then came to a room of flying paper. The papers were pages from books, and the books fluttered about and whipped this way and that. Chained to rocks, dangling, were human shapes, bloody from where the pages had darted against them, administering paper cuts to the bone.

"My God," Stretch said. "Who are they?"

"The parasites of literature, and of the talented. Editors, publishers, agents, and critics."

"Surely there are good ones?" Stretch said.

"Yes, and all four have a place in heaven," Virgil said.

"How do we get through?" Buck asked. "Figure we get these suits cut, we can just add barbecue sauce."

"You wouldn't have time," Vigil said. "The paper won't bother us, though. We're not their prey . . . Uh, none of you work in publishing in any kind of way, do you?"

Everyone shook their heads, including the Golem.

"Good," Virgil said. "Let's proceed."

They howl against Things As They Are, like monkeys in a tree, but they never give constructive criticism. They want to destroy without any thought of what to do after the destruction.

From Sexual Implications in the Charge of the Light Brigade, by Philip Jose Farmer.

They saw all manner of horrors. There were rock walls on which continuous reruns of bad television shows were projected by a bright red light. Young men sat in chairs and watched and screamed. There were rooms full of acne-pocked teenage boys playing video games. Their eyes weeped blood.

"How is watching TV and playing video games a punishment, especially to teenagers?" Buck asked.

"Oh, the ones watching TV," Virgil said, "they're the ones who created those shitty shows. They were little more than teenagers when they did it, so now, they're always teenagers. And they have to watch their own garbage, over and over. And as for the video games, they may look like teenagers, but they're actually honor society students who crossed the good and bad line somehow."

"That warrants this level of hell?" John said,

"Oh, yeah," Virgi! said. "You betcha."

"What happens to video game fans that cross the line?" Stretch asked.

"They work in the library," Virgil said.

There were rooms of endless snacks, full of sweetness and calories. Fat people lay bloated and sugar-stained amongst them, and still they were poking the junk down.

There were so many other terrible things, the heroes had to look straight ahead, lest they be mesmerized by the horrors.

They heard a terrible racket ahead of them, and finally they came to a vast crater. They crept up on the noise and laid down on the edge of the crater and looked below. Except for the Golem. It stood stiff and silent as always. Way it stood, the color of its false flesh, it nearly blended in with the cavern walls.

Down there, fastened to a rock by twisting vines of poison ivy and anklets and bracelets made of hissing snakes, was the face on the coin. Satan.

Satan was huge and dark red and had little, knobby black horns and cloven, hairy feet. His black, greasy wings were folded against his back and pressed against the rock wall. He was muscular with knees that bent the wrong way. A ropy penis hung long and large between his bowed legs and dragged the ground. The head of it was the size of grapefruit. It oozed infection. It writhed like a snake. Stuck through it was a pitchfork, white-hot and smoking. Satan's testicles were missing, and where they should have been was a bloody wound. You could have dropped a bowling ball into that wound and it wouldn't have touched the sides of the rip.

Satan screamed and moaned and groaned, and the little devils, wearing ear muffs, leaped and laughed and poked. Some stood on his chest and jammed into his eye sockets with white-hot pokers, pinched his wide lips with pliers. Others urinated on his legs, and some just stood in a bored line and called him names.

Still others read aloud from a Rod McKuen poetry book, read it straight.

"Cover your ears," Virgil said.

The heroes did. After a moment, without being asked, the Golem did the same.

Finally they eased back from the ledge, away from the poetry. When they were safely distanced, Buck said, "Where's Beelzebub? I want to hit him."

"My guess, the room beyond," Virgil said. "Notice that it's cooler?"

"Now that you mention it," John said.

"There's cool air blowing up from a cavern nearby," Virgil said. "That's where he will be."

"Should we go down there and kick some ass?" Buck said. "Throw devils this way and that, save Satan."

"No," Virgil said. "We'll go to the source."

"But wouldn't it be nice to have Satan himself for an ally?" Stretch said.

"What holds him is not the vines or what those demons and imps are doing to him," Virgil said. "It's a spell. We wouldn't be able to break that spell. We have to destroy Beelzebub, steal the Orbs of Gandar, say some magic words from the book, which, if done right, should fix things up. Then we head out while our good will is working."

"What are the Orbs of Gandar?" Buck asked.

"Actually, they're Satan's nuts," John said. "I read about the ritual in the book. That's because after he was subdued by Beelzebub and his cohorts, they de-nutted him. His power is in his gonads. Much bad and powerful magic can be brought forth from those. They're the Orbs of Gandar."

"Eeeeeewwwwww," Stretch said. "Unwashed Satan balls."

"Why are they called that?" Buck asked. "The orbs of whatcharnacallit"

"Satan's pet names for them," Virgil said. "He calls his penis Leroy."

They took a little tunnel through the rock, and soon the air was cooler yet.

"We can leave the suits here," Virgil said.

"Damn," Buck said, "who would have thought hell had air conditioning."

The heroes removed the suits, folded them up, found a place to hide them in the rocks. After John removed his handheld computer from his pack, they stowed their packs away as well. John the Brain and Stretch wore only skintight blue and red suits. Buck wore fur and a pair of shorts. The Golem, as always, stood at attention. Virgil said, "I should have asked you for one of those suits. They look good. Especially on Stretch."

"Thank you, Virgil," Stretch said.

"Now," John said. "Pay attention. We can't beat Beelzebub. He's too powerful —

"Whoa!" Buck said. "Then what's the point? I could have died Up There just as good as Down Here, and without all the effort."

"Point is," John said, "we can't beat him alone. Not the way we've beaten others in the past. We have to have the book. The book's spell is our only chance. But, Beelzebub and his forces have to be held at bay long enough for me to read the spell. Trick is, not only do I need time to read the spell. Beelzebub's got to bleed, and I have to have some of that blood to make the spell work."

"That won't be too fucking hard," Buck said.

"Actually," Virgil said. "It will. The blood's acidic."

"I was worried about that," John said. "I read about the blood. Its qualities. But, we've had a stroke of fortune."

"How so?" Buck said.

"The Golem," John said.

They turned their heads and looked at the Golem standing mute and still in the shadows.

"Ah," said the others.

"One other thing," Virgil said. "It just occurred to me. I know you brought candles. We'll need to get back in a pack so I can have one. And we'll need a match."

They went into a large cavern by means of a wide, open archway. It was mucho air-conditioned in there. The walls were white and the floor was covered in beautiful Moroccan tile. There was pleasant music playing. The air was scented with jasmine and strawberry.

Beelzebub, huge and reptilian, a crest of bone on his head, a bowler hat containing one long, white feather perched on that, had Hitler bent over a couch and was porking him in the ass while red, horned imps cheered him on, leaped and cavorted, clicked their goatlike hooves on the smooth tile floor.

"You the man," one imp cried.

"Give him the root," said another.

Hitler, wearing his classic mustache, bored-looking, his head toward the heroes, was smoking a large stogie and blowing smoke swastikas from out of his nose.

In a cage, naked, swinging from the ceiling, was Dick Nixon, peeling a banana.

The heroes strolled in. They could have been on their way to church, way they came. Just walked in, upright and eager-looking, humming "Up Jumped the Devil" by The Hurricane Hunters. Doing that, because that's the way they always worked. Looking cool, even if they weren't.3

John held the computer book in his hand, Virgil his lyre, the others were empty-handed. The Golem puffed bits of dried clay dust as it walked.

Virgil jerked up the lyre, hit a note so high, Beelzebub jumped back, whipped his forked dick out of Hitler's ass, sprayed black jism. The imps screamed. Hitler hopped back three feet, did a little knee dip and put his hands over his ears. Dick Nixon made a hooting sound, shit in his hand, threw it on the floor, and passed out.

The heroes were affected not at all. Virgil had melted candle wax and filled the human's ears. He and the Golem hadn't needed any. They were immune.

Hitler bolted, showing them his ass, which hung open like a puffer fish's mouth.

Stretch began to expand after him.

Virgil said, "Let him go. He's of no use. We want the big guy."

Beelzebub slapped his hands over his ears and began bellowing. He snatched up the couch and tossed it.

Virgil tried to leap out of the way, but it was too late. The corner of the couch caught his jaw and knocked him back. His lyre went skittering across the tile floor. Virgil, unconscious, went skittering after it.

Stretch stretched, long and lean, her beautiful head looking large and unwieldy on her flat elastic neck; her body was as thin as a stretched piece of chewed gum. She wrapped herself around Beelzebub's legs, pulled them together tight, brought him down.

Beelzebub's bowler went flying. His head cracked on the floor like a rotten watermelon, and out of the crack a clutch of fat, juicy spiders rushed. They went straight for John and Buck. The imps rushed them too.

Beelzebub shivered and twisted. Next instant, Stretch was no longer squeezing his legs, but squeezing the body of a barrel-thick, twenty foot long snake with a cracked open head.

"Hold him, baby," John said, and flicked open the computer book as Buck went to work stomping spiders, slapping at imps. The spiders smashed to black goo. The imps to red goo. The spiders were so thick, they managed to run up Buck's legs and disappear into his fur, their positions identified only by painful bites that made Buck yip like a pup. The imps swarmed his head. Some of them leaped onto John.

John pulled imps from his hair as if they were burrs. He tossed them hard against the wall. They exploded like pouches of strawberry Kool-Aid. John punched a key on his handheld. The screen lit up. Black and red symbols rushed across the lighted "page," began to squirm like ants on a hot skillet, skipped and hopped like fleas.

Struggling to concentrate on the racing glyphs, John read the symbols, yelled out the words, the long-lost names. Hiddly-diddly, Cthulu-Dooloo. Or so it sounded to Buck's ears. He wasn't all that concentrated on it. He was slapping and stomping at the biting spiders, the clutching imps.

The snake (Beelzebub) twisted and squirmed, wrapped around Stretch's legs, which up until this point had not left their original position. She had merely elongated her upper body, left her legs anchored. But now the snake had them.

Stretch went thin as thread, slid out of the snake's coils, sent one arm out way long, grabbed at the edge of the room's entrance, jerked herself forward, allowing her body to whip back into shape. This resulted in her being popped forward at an incredible rate. She just managed to avoid colliding with the wall. But it was still enough to swing her through the archway, cause her to drop on her back, which, at the last moment she arched and made wide and flat, so it was like dropping a large piece of elastic. She fell to the floor so softly there was no sound.

The snake lifted its head and lifted half of its great body off the floor, slithered forward, its tail thrashing this way and that.

"Golem," John said, but the Golem did not respond. It stood still, as if it were a new piece of furniture in the room.

"GOLEM!" John said. But the Golem didn't move. 

Buck leaped forward, spiders biting at him, imps clinging to him, and grabbed the snake. He wrapped his short, powerful legs around it and squeezed. The snake let forth with a hissing sound that sounded as if all the tires in the universe had suddenly lost their air. Its great triangular head split open to show fangs dripping with poison. Its yellow eyes squirmed in their sockets.

Buck let go of the snake long enough to sock the head a good one. Knocked it so hard it flew back, then slammed against the ground. With a leap, Buck grabbed the snake's body again, began to squeeze.

Writhing, the snake beat its own body on the ground to do harm to Buck. It worked. Beelzebub knocked Buck lose. It widened its mouth, dropped it over Buck's head, lifted him high in the air. The fangs were so wide, they just missed Buck, coming down on either side of his shoulders.

Stretch grabbed Virgil, was lifting him up by coiling her body around him. She spat in his face. "Wake up!" Virgil's eyes opened. "We need the Golem," she said.

"Hey, baby," Virgil said. "I like kisses, but not that wet." Stretch let loose of him, whipped back into shape. Virgil fell to the floor. "Ouch," he said.

"Now," she said. "We need him now."

Virgil took in the situation, said, "Golem. Fuck up that snake." The Golem turned its head, looked at the snake waving its head in the air, Buck's body and feet sticking out of its mouth.

The Golem went forward. Its pace was deliberate, but not fast. It grabbed the snake with both hands and squeezed. Squeezed so hard the rocklike muscles in its back clashed together and dust exploded off its back and made a brief clay cloud.

The Golem squeezed so hard Buck's head shot out of the snake's mouth like a cannonball. Buck hit the floor. His head was lathered up and he blinked his eyes as if he were coining out of a darkened theater.

"It stunk in there," he said. The snake wasn't a snake now.

It split into two snakes, connected at the tail. The tail sprouted a rattler. The rattle rattled, loud as an entire civilization working maracas. Both of its heads whipped forward, snapped their fangs at the Golem. One head hit so hard the fangs snapped off, hut the Golem didn't move.

"Stand on its tail, Golem," Virgil said.

The Golem moved between the snakes, stood on the creature where the tail connected to the two elongated bodies. The snakes wrapped around the Golem and squeezed, high and low. Clay dust puffed. The snake strained so hard coal-black snake shit shot out of it ass and slid across the floor. But the Golem didn't move.

Both snake heads hissed around in front of the Golem, and the Golem, moving surprisingly fast, grabbed them and banged them together. The snake dropped to the floor and there was a twist and a turn and whip and a whirl, and there lay Beelzebub, unconscious, forked tongue hanging out on his cheek, forked dick hanging out on his thigh.

Buck was standing now, still picking spiders and imps from his fur. Stretch came over to help him.

John said, "We need its blood."

Virgil pulled a little knife from inside his robe, went over to the snake and cut its throat.

"Golem. Catch that blood in your hands."

As dark blood spurted from Beelzebub, the Golem squatted, held its hands together. Blood filled them, began to run over the sides, hit the tile floor, eat right through it, making holes that went on forever.

"Have him bring it here," John said.

"Bring the blood to him, Golem," Virgil said, pointing at John. "But don't get it on him."

"Everyone stand back, please," John said.

"It's about time you did something," Buck said.

"He's doing what we can't do," Stretch said. "He's translating the book."

John had been reciting the words as he was able to read them, but now, even though they jumped and squirmed on the screen, he recognized a pattern, and he could translate them more quickly.

"Indonreluxtaderron. Godollacon, Jorolla Corolla, Coun-der-tapcondientharytimsubell."

The Golem thudded over to John, carrying the blood in its palms.

"Won't it burn through its hands?" Stretch asked.

"I don't think so," Virgil said.

After a moment John read a word. Hesitated. Made a clicking noise with his tongue. Whistled. Then read another word. He made a kind of scratching sound inside his mouth.

"What the fuck?" said Buck.

"Quiet," Virgil said. "It's a language few know, and fewer yet can make the sounds. Don't distract him."

The air hardened. Turned thick and gooey as amber.

"Tell him to pour the blood over my head," John said.

"Are you crazy!" Stretch said.

"He knows what he's doing," Virgil said. "Golem. Carefully, pour the blood over John's head."

"Does he know who John is?" Buck asked.

"He does," Virgil said. "He is literal. But he has insights. He is, after all, supernatural."

The Golem poured the blood over John's head. To do so, it had to move slowly because the air was dense. The blood came out of its hands slow and thick as fresh molasses. It seemed to hang in the air before trickling down in lumps and bumps, and just as it was about to strike John's head, it spread and flowed around him in a kind of gooey, dark barrier.

John read more glyphs, said more chants.

And then an odd thing happened in a series of odd things. Beelzebub's forked tongue expanded, slithered toward its crotch. His forked dick got long and hard and stuck upright. Tongue and dick collided, embraced one another, and began to tug at one another. They pulled until head and crotch were close together, then Beelzebub's asshole flared open and puckered and trembled like a volcano about to erupt, made with a sucking sound. The air turned foul as a chili supper in an old age home. And slowly Beelzebub's ugly head was pulled toward that sucking asshole, and slowly, the asshole expanded and took in the head and pulled and sucked and slurped.

John kept reading the incantation.

He finished with a powerful noise that made everyone in the room but the Golem's bowels loosen (technically, it had no bowels), in spite of the wax in their ears. Even Virgil felt a twinge.

Beelzebub was pulled completely into his own asshole, and there was a popping sound.

The asshole fell to the floor, puckered a couple of times, as if gulping air, then unpuckered and was an empty, flesh ring lying on the floor.

John said, "Virgil, tell the Golem to step on that."

Virgil told him.

The Golem did it. The asshole ring crunched under the Golem's foot with a sound like the dried skin of a locust. When the Golem lifted its foot, there was only dust.

"Man," Buck said. "That was some cool shit."

They looked about the room until they found Satan's balls in a large fruit jar. A piece of white tape had been put across the jar, and On it was written, ORBS OF GANDAR, AKA, SATAN'S NUTS.

They left Nixon in the cage. The imps and spiders had disappeared somewhere during all the chanting, and when they re-suited and got back to the devil, the imps were gone. The Rod McKuen poetry book lay open face down on the ground.

The devil lay weak and ugly against the wall. The vines had died. The snakes were gone. The devil's blind orbs filled up with yellow, black-slitted eyes. He rose slowly, stretched and flapped his wings.

He stood easily twenty feet high on his cloven hooves. The wound between his legs dripped black blood.

Virgil held up the big fruit jar. "Got your balls, big guy."

Satan was happy. The balls were replaced. Virgil burned the poetry book with a match borrowed from John. Satan, powerful now, got on the telephone in his office, recently the office of one Beelzebub, now popped out of existence.

Everyone was on Satan's side now.

Satan ordered up a hot air balloon manned by imps. The same imps who had tortured him. But they were forgiven. A thing that surprised the heroes.

"Damn," Buck said. "We had this guy all wrong."

Virgil leaned over, said, "Don't expect too much. He's feeling friendly right now. Got his balls back. Best thing to do is just move on."

The hot air balloon arrived just outside of Satan's air-conditioned office. The men shook hands with Satan. Even the Golem. Satan parted Stretch on the ass. He was, after all, Satan.

They climbed into the big basket with six little red hopping imps. The imps were all over the place, firing up the burner, filling the balloon with hot air.

Up they went.

"I never heard Satan speak," Buck said. "Not even when he was on the phone."

"You can't hear him unless he speaks directly to you," Virgil said. "And it's best if he doesn't."

"He didn't say thanks, you know."

"Don't push it."

The balloon rose and drifted, sailed high over the great River Styx. It floated down a dark tunnel, and then it rose again, and Buck said, "Hey, we're inside Satan's shifter."

And they were.

They rose up and hung for a while until the updraft came, and up they shot, through the crapper hole, into the garage.

The imps said nothing. Just made chattering noises. But the heroes understood. They climbed out quickly.

The downdraft came. The balloon was sucked down and away.

"What do we do with the Golem?" Stretch asked.

"It will stay here with me," Virgil said. "I'll find a place for it, erase the name on its forehead, send it back to sleep. Or back to its nonexistence."

"I'll miss him," Stretch said. She leaned forward and kissed Virgil on the cheek. "And I'll miss you too."

Virgil blushed. "Not since I met the daughter of Zeus, Helen of Troy, have I met such a beauty and a charmer as you."

"Oh, that's sweet," Stretch said.

"Let me draw you a map," Virgil said.

The cold went away. Airplanes and flying devices took to the air. Wind wagons went into museums or were recycled or burned. Polar bears headed north and far south, depending on where they were at the time. Along with them went other cold-loving animals. Some people had the nerve to complain about the change. Mostly looters and snowmobile salesmen.

From a history book of a later century

They took a different route out than the way they came. John asked Virgil for that. Wanted to go out the arctic opening he had heard so much about.

They drove the Chevy hard, climbed up from hell into a tunnel that widened so gradually it was hard to realize they were rising up, coming out of the center of the Earth and into a great, green valley.

Along the sides of the enormous, earthen bowl they entered were all manner of mechanical ruins. Crashed zeppelins. Biplanes. Even a few semi-modern planes. Dog sleds. As they rose up higher and ice began to appear, they even saw a great ship.

"Must have got caught in the ice," John said. "Then, over the years, the ice floe carried it down into this valley."

"My God," Stretch said. "What is that?"

John, who was driving, slowed. They looked. There, frozen in the ice was a huge, scarred man.

"I believe, friends," John said, "that is the Frankenstein Monster."

"Neat," Buck said. "Shall we look?"

"No," John said, gunning the motor. "This is close enough. It's time to get back."

They drove and came to the ice of the polar cap, but the Chevy handled that. They came to the sea, and the super Chevy navigated that as well. It did what it had to do. It rolled on tires, it swam with fins, it flew on wings, and in a short time, the heroes arrived at their mountain sanctuary, slid in through the secret passage, pulled into the garage, took the elevator up to the great room where their hunchback served them cocoa and cookies.

They watched at the great windows all day. Saw that the wraiths still whipped and wisped through the sky.

But early the next morning the day turned clear and the sun shone bright, and down below, they noticed the frozen river was melting.

No wraiths were seen.

They flicked on television. There had been no new cases of the plague. People were wandering about more freely. Green grass had been seen poking through melting ice.

Down below them they could see boats on the river, women wearing bikinis. Buck spent a lot of time with the binoculars checking this phenomenon out. Hell, it had been a long time since the river below had wiggled boats and ass on its mighty stream.

"It's going to be all right, isn't it?" Stretch said.

"I think so," John said.

Montawn cleared his throat. "Well, sir. There is one thing."

"And what is that?" John asked.

"Your friend, Professor Bazza, called."

"And?"

"Seems, sir, that there's a disturbance on Mars."

"What kind of disturbance?"

"An alternate disturbance."

Buck said, "What?"

John said, "You mean the alternate universe Mars, don't you?"

"I do, sir. As you know, the professor has been traveling there from time to time. Well, sir, things have gone haywire, and he's contacted you, using that device similar to the Gridley Wave. You know the one, sir."

"Of course."

"I thought I'd wait until you had your cocoa, but, his messages sounded quite desperate."

John looked at Stretch and Buck.

"Hey, I'm for anything after what we just did. We saved the goddamn world. I could do with saving Mars. Even if it's an alternate Mars."

"A quickie first," Stretch said. "Then Mars."

"Sounds like a plan," John said. "Montawn, check out the car. Make sure she's ready to go. And pack some sandwiches. And ease up on the pickle loaf."

Below is a list, not in alphabetical order, of references that were used in reconstructing the events of this true adventure. In some cases, publications have been so many, and are such well known works, that I haven't bothered to list dates or publishers. This is meant to be nothing more than an informal guide.

ACME PRODUCTS AND THEIR USAGE, A Definitive Examination and Price Guide, by Wilie Coyote, Translated from the Original by Mel Blanc. SUBTERRANEAN PRESS, 1999.

Musical references:

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF JIMMY JOE SMITH AND THE HURRICANE HUNTERS (On Pellet Drive Connections), from BOOGER-DOODLE PRODUCTIONS, 1956.

VIRGIL'S GREATEST HITS, by Virgil, AENEAS RECORD-INGS, (date?)

SONGS TO ACCOMPANY THE READING OF THE AENEID, by Virgil, AENEAS RECORDINGS, (date?)

Nonfiction:

AT THE EARTH'S CORE (First published as "The Inner World") by Edgar Rice Burroughs, 19B), 1922 as the novel.

TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE, Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1930. (Burroughs' acquaintances David Innes and Abner Perry, like Verne's explorers, only succeeded in exploring the level above hell, and thought it was the core. Several massive pockets, or worlds, as well as natural "suns" exist throughout the Earth. But the true core, is hell. Burroughs also wrote other books about the center of the Earth, and though certain truths are hidden within, they are generally fiction based on the early adventures of Abner Perry and David Innes best described in the volume below.)

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD, Abner Perry, 1918, SUBTERRANEAN PRESS. (A tedious but informative work said to have been submitted via Gridley Wave from the center of the Earth (see above), outlining their adventures in a land called Pellucidar.)

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, by Jules Verne, 1871 (English Version).

FIVE THOUSAND MILES UNDERGROUND, Roy Rock-wood, 1908.

PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, John Bunyan, Part One, 1678. Part Two, 1684.

THE ART OF HELL, by Adolph Hitler, BEELZEBUB PRODUCTIONS, 1948. (Very rare.)

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SUBTERRANEAN EXPLORER CAVE CARSON, by Cave Carson, SUBTERRANEAN PRESS, 1965.

A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM, by Edgar Allan Poe, 1841.

THE NARRATIVE OF A. GORDON PYM OF NAN-TUCKET, by Edgar Allan Poe, 1850.

BLACK AS THE PIT FROM POLE TO POLE, Howard Wai-drop and Steve Utley, from OUSTER'S LAST JUMP, and Other Collaborations, GOLDEN GRYPHON PRESS, 2003.

THE SECRET PEOPLE, by John Benyon Harris, 1964.

THEAENEID, 19 B.C.

THE ARMOR OF VULCAN, A Descriptive Price Guide. Date written is unknown, but only two of this volume are known to exist. The book is transcribed on sheet metal so thin at first glance it looks like paper. The transcription was done by use of a small hammer and an even smaller chisel. THE ARMOR OF VULCAN is bound in bull hide and bronze clasp. Considered priceless. Found in a volcano near Mt. Etna in Sicily. The author is rumored to be Vulcan himself, known to the Greeks as Hephaestus.

Scnned/OCR/proof: meatisgood V.1 (any errors please fix and change version number)