Hell for Halloween (a special for Facebook) Every day in hell is bad. By definition. Let’s face it, Lucifer designed hell to make each day one which twists each testicle or ovary tighter and tighter until you think you can’t possibly stand it anymore and that’s when the electrodes and vice clamps attach. But, so far, as Lucifer was concerned, Halloween made it so much worse. Halloween with millions of ankle biting mites swarming the suburban swamps with their fists clinching bags the size of shopping carts and dressed like ghosts, goblins, pirates, demons, monsters, all of them pretending to be the denizens of hell and thinking they could scare you into giving them....sweets. How dare they? Lucifer rose from his desk to survey hell from his office window. Today he wore his John Wayne outfit, six-gun shooting sheriff of hell, complete with ten gallon hat, rhinoceros vest (horns protruding like breast plates), endangered snow leopard shirt, and two-gun alligator belt that wrapped around his back and then wound back and around and whipped behind him to form his tail. His skin tight baby seal skin pants were tucked into his whale skin boots and none of its delicious decadence consoled him as he pictured the infection of costumed kiddies spreading with their ceaseless demands to gimme, gimme, gimme.” This Halloween was the worst of all. He was knee deep in with Ted Nugent and the NRA preparing to launch his Guns in Every Christmas Stocking campaign only to realize he’d been hoodwinked once again by that deceiver pretending to be a demon of darkness, that lamb in a lionskin, that vinegar bottled as Bordeaux.... “Brooding about Pilgrim again, brother?” Mephistopheles cooed. She floated down to his desk and sat with her ankles crossed and her twelve inch spiked heels only inches from tipping over his inkwell. Knowing how much he hated Halloween, she was dressed as an angel robot with metallic wings and exaggerated breasts. Even her cigarette was metal, exhaling steam. “Who else? He really sold me a bill of goods when he convinced me to get Poppe Francis appointed. ‘He will be so liberal he will be a lightning rod for hate groups every where. The right wing bishops will hate him, the right wing will hate him. There will never be a more hated pope,’ he told me.” Mephistopheles said, “You have to admit he was right.” Lucifer wrapped his belt-tail around her neck and yanked her across the room. “And the church has never been more popular,” he shouted. He tossed he back against the desk, which, admittedly, did more damage to the desk than it did to Mephistopheles. Pilgrim was Lucifer’s arch enemy (and you can read about him by buying Raising Hell and the sequel novella The Worst Noel, by Phillip T. Stephens, on Amazon Kindle, iBooks and Nook Reader for only $1), who showed up in Hell for reasons no one has ever been able to ascertain. Determined to corrupt him to prove he belongs, Lucifer has assigned him any number of tasks, but Pilgrim has always found a way to make Hell, well, better. Mephistopheles brushed herself off and perched on the desk again. “Pity poor Lucifer,” she said. “You survive revivals. You always do. Look what you did with the Jesus movement. You commercialized it and flipped it into the moral majority. Most of those peace loving hippies are red state haters now and half the rest do drum circles and flute services for any deity who listen.” “Save your pity,” Lucifer snarled. “I want all those Bishops squabbling and hating each other. I don’t want them leaving the Church because of some open minded Pope and end up down here expecting me to arbitrate their squabbles for them.” Mephistopheles opened one of her metal breasts and pulled out a margarita and salted glass. “I know your problem. It’s Halloween. You’re scared of all those rugrats dressed like demons and devils but having fun instead doing real evil.” Lucifer drew his protected Chesapeake pearl handled revolvers and blasted the pitcher from between her fingers. “You know nothing of the sort.” Mephistopheles opened her other breast and pulled out another pitcher and glass. She didn’t bother to offer her brother any because she knew he would refuse if only to spite his own nose, which he had forgotten to wear this morning. “Rather than moping, why don’t you do something about it? Something to cheer you up?” If he didn’t know better, Lucifer would suspect Mephistopheles was setting him up for something particularly pernicious. After all, it’s what he would do. But, being Lucifer, it would be beneath him not to hear her out. In fact, she would remind him of the fact ceaselessly whenever the subject of Halloween came up in the future, which, in Hell, which stretched out for eternity, would be a long time indeed. “Like what?” he asked. Mephistopheles rolled her mechanical robot angel eyes, which, being a last minute Halloween costume donned mainly to irritate him, rolled loosely in her metallic skull. “How should I know? You’re the Lord of Hell. Besides, anything I come up with, you’d only mock mercilessly.” Lucifer was about to shoot the other margarita pitcher out of her hand when he realized that Struggles, his valet, had yet to appear to clean up the mess from the last pitcher yet. No doubt he was already out trick or treating. Normally, this would cause Lucifer to go ballistic and blow up from inside out, splattering brains and body parts all over his office, but with no assistant to clean his office that left the cleaning to him. “Humor me,” Lucifer said. Mephistopheles leaned her chin on her wrist and her head opened. A tiny light bulb rose from the dome and blinked on and off, presumably to irritate him with childish cartoon symbolism. After a few moments, she snapped her fingers, which, since she was metal, sounded more like a dull clink. “I’ve got it. You know how those Fundamentalists like to scare the the BeJeezus out of teenagers with their Hell Houses, showing them all of the things they do that will send them down here, and all it does it make the very teenagers they want to save more determined to do bad than ever before?” “One of my most brilliant inspirations,” Lucifer beamed. “I’ve got nothing,” she said. “But it certainly ruins Halloween for just about everybody but the fundamentalists.” With that she was out the window, flapping her metallic wings with a rusty squeaking creaky noise and crashing through the glass to let in the sulphur oxide outside. He particularly enjoyed the under odor of dibenzofuran and vinyl chloride. He knew he should blow off Mephistopheles, but she had gotten under his skin. That and the thought of Pilgrim getting his goat with Pope Francis still made his innards boil. But it did get him thinking that haunted houses were as much a Halloween tradition as trick-or-treating. A tradition at every Halloween church bazaar and school fair. But those trick-or-treaters loved Haunted Houses with bubble gum eye balls and spaghetti intestines. The moral majority had it right. Haunted Houses should scare the little imps into another state of consciousness. Best of all he could inflict it on Pilgrim. And so he summoned him to his office. *** Most of Hell’s denizens avoid meeting Lucifer face-to-face, and, once summoned, take the most circuitous routes to their meetings, dragging their feet, hiding out, prolonging the circumstances as long as possible. Why? Because meetings with His Satanic Majesty Lucifer of the Morning Star; Ruler of the Lower Dimensions of Darkness; Proprietor of His Satanic Majesty’s Hall of Everlasting Damnation, Torture and Never Ending Decay; and Sovereign Lord of the Devoted Knights of His Satanic Majesty Lucifer of the Morning Star (or so he referred to himself informally) never, ever ended well. They ended in torture, degradation, humiliation, pain, groveling, followed by more of the same. But Pilgrim made his way to Lucifer’s office as soon as he was called. Why? Because no torture, no humiliation, no pain, no groveling was too great for him. He reminded Lucifer more than once, he was in Hell, Lucifer couldn’t make things worse for him, so he might as well make the best of it. And no matter how hard Lucifer tried, Pilgrim was determined to do so. Lucifer remained determined to turn that “can do” attitude into “can don’t and never will again.” Just before eve on All Hallow’s Eve, as the knee-high ghosts and goblins prepared to unleash themselves on the doors of countless urban and suburban doorways Lucifer found himself facing the round, overly round, always smiling, sunny-faced Pilgrim. “I have a job for you.” “Be glad to help,” Pilgrim said. Lucifer was disgusted to imagine that he actually was. Lucifer laid out the design of the Haunted Hell House Pilgrim was to usher unsuspecting children through. Once entered it would be an inescapable labyrinth of terror and psychological mayhem designed to reduce children to psychotic babbling neurosis ridden patients who shit in their pants when the wind blew. The tunnel of nightmares where every creature who ever hid under their bed crawled out to drag them by their ankles underneath the bedsprings. Creatures with razor sharp claws, curling tusks and wings with stinging teeth at every joint. The maelstrom of quicksand, typhoons and whirlpools. The tree house filled with angry africanized honeybees. The fiery volcano pits. A ball pit teeming with maggots. And those were just the beginning. Once Pilgrim left Lucifer relaxed and fired up a Cuban liberation theologian. He smoked it slowly while lingering overing a shot of 700 year old single malt Vatican Reserve and imaging Pilgrim’s excruciating agony as he watched child after child suffer at the hands of Hell’s Haunted House. Another theologian, another single malt and Lucifer couldn’t help it, he had to see for himself. He tossed off his vest, let his wings rip through his shirt and flew out the window toward the new Haunted Hell House. He was only a few mile away before he heard not screams of agony, but singing. Happy singing. And laughter. He landed outside the Haunted House to find Pilgrim surrounded by millions of smiling, ecstatic children jumping and dancing with delight, their faces sticky and smeared with maggots. “What is going on here?” he demanded. “Kitties!” the children shouted. “Puppies and kitties!” “And bees!” Pilgrim ran to him with children in his arms and dangling from his legs. “We had the best time, sir. What a wonderful idea. We taught the children to make forts under the beds and they tickled the bellies and toes of their pets until they came out and tossed them around.” One of the kids pulled his sleeve and said, “Tell him about the roller coaster.” The other kids chimed in. “Right. So we went out onto the water and went round and round like a roller coaster and every body had so much fun and then we found the beehives.” “Pets chase bees,” a little girl said. “That’s right,” Pilgrim said. Their pets chased the bees away so we were able to get the honey and the honey combs and mix it with the maggots which, when you fry them in the fires from the volcanos make great snacks.” “Pop bus,” the kids shouted in unison. “Pop bus,” the monsters shouted with them. “So we sat around the camp fire and sang songs and had a great time. Can you thank Lucifer, kids?” With that all of the kids swarmed Lucifer and hugged him around the knees, and the monsters swarmed Lucifer and hugged him everywhere else and he couldn’t even get them off him. It was the most horrible, degrading, painful, humiliating Halloween he could imagine. Finally, when they were all exhausted and wandered off to home, Lucifer stared at Pilgrim and said, “This is not what I had in mind.” “They weren’t supposed to be happy?” Pilgrim asked. “No,” Lucifer said. “They were supposed to be miserable.” “That was the idea,” Lucifer said. Pilgrim sighed. He always did this at this point in their conversations. He seemed genuinely disappointed that he let Lucifer down. He stared at the ground which was covered with sticky honey and maggot skins. Then he snapped his fingers. “I have it,” he shouted. “Why not have kids go to every house in their neighborhood and everyone gives them candy?” “What?” Lucifer demanded. “See, and then they come home with a bag full of candy and they get sick to their stomach from all that sugar and their teeth get filled with cavities. Is that evil enough for you?” Lucifer felt his entire body building up toward an explosion. “We could call it ‘trick-or-treat.’” ======================================= barnesandnoble/w/raising-hell-phillip-t-stephens/1113844562?ean=2940015782806 smile.amazon/Raising-Hell-Phillip-T-Stephens-ebook/dp/B0091Y9SRM/ref=sr_1_13?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1414813429&sr=1-13&keywords=raising+hell
Posted on: Sat, 01 Nov 2014 03:49:18 +0000
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