Chapter 25

Hell was a waiting room with fading fluorescent lighting and out-of-date Good Housekeeping and Redbook magazines. Also: hell smelled like a doctor's office, that sharp, sting-y smell that promised you were gonna get hurt, one way or another, before the visit was over.

"Uh." Laura was looking around, as wide-eyed as I was. "This is unexpected."

"To put it mildly." I glanced down at a Redbook from April 1979. Those bell-bottoms! Those how-to-satisfy-your-man self-help articles! When the urge to vomit became too much, I knew exactly what I was going to aim for.

The room was furnished with dinged-up, knocked-around cheap furniture; no one was sitting at the check-in desk. The carpet was a perfect mixture of snot green and eye-booger gray. And there were doors, doors about two inches apart along every wall except where the desk was.

"Subtle," I observed, nervously eyeing one of the doors. "I guess you're supposed to get around hell with these things."

"Doors in a waiting room?"

"That's all this is." I glanced up at the ceiling as another ailing fluorescent started to flicker. "People wait. In one of the yuckiest spots ever. You can tell just by standing in this room that unpleasant things are right around the corner. Like an audit you think is done, until they pull out more paperwork." I shuddered. "It's brilliantly evil."

"Thank you," my dead stepmother said.

Of course. Of course the Ant was here. Of course she was the devil's right hand. With the possible exception of Eva Braun, no one could be more suited to the job.

"Well, great," I said, eyeing her. "The good news is, being dead hasn't made any sort of imprint on your eclectic personal style. Eclectic being another word for hideous."

"Says the vampire!" my dead stepmother cried, her overly be-ringed hands flying up to pat her shiny blonde hair. Her hair was as it had always been: the same shade, consistency, and shape of a ripe pineapple. "Only you could have been more a pain in your poor father's ass after you died."

"Uh, whoa," Laura said, glancing from the Ant to me and back again. "At least this isn't stressful. Or weird."

"So, the devil's handmaiden is really ... the devil's handmaiden! Ha! Color me the opposite of surprised. Ugh, what are you wearing? You can't tell me all the clothing designers went to heaven. Can't you dig up ... I dunno ... Yves Saint Laurent? No. Wait. He was just a coke hound who liked to drink. That's not really the sort of thing people burn in hell for. Too bad he didn't kill someone and cover it up. Cavalli? I'm pretty sure he was blasphemous when he wasn't cranking out panties ... aw, nuts. He's not dead."

"Maybe we're getting off track," Laura began.

"Oooh, Donna Karan! Right? The whole fur thing? Dammit, I think she's still alive, too. Uh ..."

The Ant puffed out a harassed breath, apparently never having noticed her hair never, ever moved. (It was interesting to me that people kept habits like breathing and sighing when they didn't need them anymore.) "It's nice to see you again, Laura."

"Thank you, Mrs. T-"

"No, no, no. Please, my name is-"

"Mud," I suggested. "Mud Barfbag Taylor. Call her Asshat for short."

"-Antonia."

Laura stretched an arm over the Ant's desk (hell didn't supply Post-Its, I noticed) and they shook. "I just wanted you to know, Mud Bar-um, Antonia, that though I understand Baal is my mother, you carried me for nine months and-"

"Then dragged my dad to the altar, had sex with him, then bit off his head and devoured his still-twitching body."

"Oh, Betsy, really!" Laura frowned at me. "Grow up."

"See? You're already turning evil. This place is gonna be a bad influence on you; I can already tell. I sense it, as I sense the Ant needs a makeover."

"When I heard you would be visiting us," the Ant was yakking, "of course I asked the Morningstar if I could help. I just didn't think I'd be able to so soon. I hope you understand you are foremost in her thoughts-"

"Vomit," I said to the ceiling. Interesting that there now was one. And it looked like every waiting room ceiling I'd ever seen: a yawn-inducing popcorn ceiling, pitted with little holes from where people tossed pencils at it. "And again, I say vomit."

"-even though she was called away. But I'll look after you." I felt a narrow-eyed glance. "Both of you. I guess. Hmpf Meanwhile, if I can answer any questions, please just come right out and ask."

"Excellent. Because I've got lots of questions. When you decided to whore yourself in order to break up my mother's marriage, did you do it because you were an amoral slut, or because you didn't get enough of Daddy's attention when you were a little girl? Or some weird pervy combo of both? And when you'd do it with my mother's husband, did you talk to him about all the bad clothes and bad hair treatments you wanted him to buy, or just grunt like animals?"

"Betsy!" mother and daughter shrieked in unison.

"Yeah, that's what I thought." I yawned. "So are we getting a tour or what?"

Chapter 26

We followed my stepmother as she gave us a tour of hell. Laura was staring around, wide-eyed and fascinated, but I was mostly annoyed. I knew hell was going to be awful, but nobody warned me it'd be chockful of cliches.

There were pits of boiling oil, complete with screaming souls trying to do the breaststroke. There was the whole rolling-a-boulder-uphill-only-to-have-it-squash-you-when-it-rolls-all-the-way-back-down thing. (I guess this was also hell for dead ancient Greeks.)

There were people getting whipped, burned, and shaved. There were people who fell, again and again, into pits filled with snakes, lizards, mice, gummy bears.

There were people running, only to be run over by chariots, horses, tanks, RVs.

There were people drowning and people being buried. There were people being attacked by wild dogs, bears, eagles, ferrets, whippets. Oh, and-gross!

"Otters?" I asked, not expecting an answer. "Were those otters?"

I expected to feel a lot of things in hell, but I never expected boredom. (Although the otter thing was sort of unusual.)

It scared me, to be truthful about the whole thing. Seeing suffering and finding it anticlimactic. I hadn't been a vampire long, but I was beginning to see how the old ones, the ones even older than my husband ... they were bored by everything; screams and pain and despair and horror left them pretty unmoved. They ended up causing tons of trouble because at least that was something different.

I wasn't scared to be in hell. I was scared that I wasn't scared to be in hell.

But I was here, and I vowed to pay attention and learn what I could. Then I could go back home and spend the next fifty years repressing this entire week.

I pondered, then decided that was as good a plan as any. Pay attention, learn, get what needed to be done done, have the devil pay up what she promised, then get the hell, no pun intended, back home.

That was my plan, and I was sticking to it.

Yes, of course I didn't think it'd be that simple. I'd never been a Mensa member, but that didn't mean I needed to read the directions on a box of cereal to make my breakfast.

Chapter 27

Tell you what: hell was like a big evil torture-laden hive. If you stood back from it, you could see there were all sorts of chambers, going down and down and back and back, too many even to count, with something yuck-o or boring or stupid or terrifying or weird going on in each individual cell. As you got closer, you could make out faces and the like. If you pulled back, you couldn't see anything specific but had the sense that lots and lots of stuff was going on all around you.

Hell: nature's other beehive.

I could hear the Ant and Laura having a quiet conversation; I'd been so busy musing and looking around I'd dropped about twenty feet back. They must have thought if they kept their voices low enough, I couldn't hear them over the screams and moans and bitching and tantrums of the damned.

"Of course I jumped at the chance," the Ant was saying. Laura's head was bent attentively toward her birth mother; she had about five inches on the Ant. Laura looked almost protective as she walked beside her. "I had a chip, you know. The you-possessed-me-to-have-a-child chip, and in all this time I never played it. I never wanted to. But then I heard you were coming. That you were alive, I mean, and coming, and Lucifer said I could help show you around."

"Is she nice to you? Relatively speaking?"

"Sure. It's all hype, you know."

"I don't, Antonia. Could you explain?"

"Lucifer doesn't spend all her time thinking up ways to torture the souls who come to her. Hell is-it's almost a business. One she's been running for tens of thousands of years, with no sick time or vacation days. Or holidays. Or even maternity leave." And then she-did she? She did! She actually elbowed my sister, a sort of yuk-yuk elbow dig.

I rolled my eyes. Boo-hoo. Poor Satan. All work and no dental benefits; sounded terrible.

"Can you imagine?" the Ant exclaimed in what sounded like genuine sympathy. I couldn't be sure, though. Since I'd never actually heard that tone from her, you'll understand my confusion. "I thought the customs line at O'Hare was dreadful. That's part of the reason you're here, you know."

"What? What do you mean?"

The Ant shut up, in the way she alone shut up: she kept talking. "I, um, probably shouldn't have-it's not appropriate for me to be talking to you about this."

"But-"

"Oh, look, there's Ted Bundy being raped and strangled again today."

"Aaaiiggh!" Laura clapped her hands over her eyes. "Antonia, I don't want to look at that! Please don't call my attention to things like that. And now please finish your thought"

What thought? I snickered but managed not to say it aloud.

"I really need to finish this tour," the Ant said, sounding rattled and nervous.

"I don't want you to get into trouble, so I'll leave off it for now. But ... is that part of the reason you're helping her? Is Baal ... this will sound so silly, but is Baal overworked?"

"Not so much overworked as I think she's lonely," the Ant said after a long pause. Mother and daughter had lowered their voices more, and I ruthlessly decided not to mention I could still hear them. "She's the only one of her kind, you know. And she's been doing this for a long, long time. Ever since the terrible fight with you-know-who."

The building super? Her mechanic?

"Yes," the Ant concluded. "I'd say she was lonesome."

Laura stopped short and glanced back at me. "Oh, look," I said, pretending I hadn't been eavesdropping. "Kenneth Lay is being buried alive in Krugerrands. Gah, that must hurt-look at the welts! They're doing that to him naked? Oh, ew, did you see where some of those Krugerrands went? Hey!" I yelled. "How 'bout in your next life, you come back as someone who doesn't screw people out of billions?"

"Don't taunt the damned, Betsy," the Antichrist chided. "Isn't it bad enough they're stuck here?"

"It's bad enough we're stuck here."

"Stuck isn't really the right word," the Ant said. "No one is here against their will."

"What?" I gave up all pretense of pretending I couldn't hear. "Not even him?" I gestured to Henry VIII, who was on his knees begging Anne Boleyn not to let a French swords-man cut off his head for witchcraft. Old Anne wasn't looking very forgiving. "Because I don't see an egotistical pig of that size-and that's not a fat joke, although there must be Stair-masters in hell-signing up for hell of his own free will."

"But he did. We all did."

"But why?" Laura asked, and I admit, I was interested in the answer myself.

"This isn't a place," the Ant began. She was speaking slowly, but I didn't have the sense she was lying. Just trying to explain so we'd get it. Proof I was in hell: the Ant knew lots of things I didn't, and had to break them down for my understanding. "Not a place like Africa or the Mall of America. You can't get in your car and find it.

"Hell is a zone, a plane, where spirits can visit. Any spirits. At any time. You two are special because you still have your bodies. We"-she gestured vaguely-"don't anymore. In hell you're only limited by your imagination ... just like heaven."

"I don't get it," I admitted, and boy, did that one hurt.

To my astonishment, the Ant didn't seize the opportunity to try and squash my ego or cripple my will to live. "No, I don't think either of you can-not right now. It's really, really hard to explain."

"Nevertheless," Satan said, popping in from wherever, "I shall try. Thank you, Antonia, that's all for now."

"Ma'am," the Ant said, and blinked out of sight.

"Wait! Shit."

"Have no fear nor fret, Betsy, you'll see her again."

"Don't you threaten me, Satan. I just had stuff I wanted to ask." Why did she haunt me right after she and my dad died? Why did she quit? Why did she play tour guide? Where was my father? Why did she choose to have awful hair in hell? These were the questions beating against my brain for answers.

"Is it true, Mother?"

"Which, darling?"

"Is my birth mother right? Are you lonely?"

"Of course." No denials. No sarcasm. Just a simple statement. I won't try to deny it; I was impressed. Why couldn't Satan be like this all the time? "I've lived long and long. It's why I had you."

"What?" I asked, because Laura suddenly seemed afraid to say anything.

"I want you to take over the family business," Satan said to her, as if Laura had asked the question. "I'd like to retire."