Hell Read online

  And having wondered about the unworthy sequoias, he suddenly finds himself face to muzzle with three dogs. Or, more precisely, the three heads of one dog, Cerberus. The faces of the Hound of Hell are not, as they are variously portrayed in the earthly life, like combinations of lion or bear or wolf or, in latter days, pit bulls. Cerberus is a rabid, grossly outsized Jack Russell terrier, slobbering and barking and leaping incessantly, his three heads each as big as a midsummer watermelon. For the moment, however, he has ceased his jumping and is concentrating on slobbering and barking at Hatcher’s window.

  “Roll the window down just a bit and feed him,” Hoover says.

  Hatcher grasps the window handle and starts slowly to turn it, bits of slobber instantly flying in and burning acutely on his forehead, the tip of his nose, his chest.

  “Watch your fingers,” Hoover says.

  Hatcher does, opening the window just enough to thrust the end of a cake out, averting his face from the slobber, and he starts feeding the heads. Each one falls silent in turn, and then Cerberus abruptly backs away and trots off, chewing laboriously at the sticky cakes.

  “Now,” Hoover says and he pushes Hatcher’s shoulder.

  Hatcher opens the door and steps into the driveway before Satan’s mountain lodge. He is acutely aware once more of his nakedness as two powder-blue jumpsuited minions rapidly descend the long front stairs and head toward him. He crosses his hands over his crotch and looks away. In the field to the side of the lodge he sees rows of pickup trucks, a hundred or more. And then gunfire flurries from behind the lodge. This brings Hatcher’s face back to the approaching minions, and the two mustaches are unmistakable. One a modified Walrus and one a classic Toothbrush. If asked which two people in history he would least wish to be naked before, Hatcher would probably have answered something like “my mother and Hillary Clinton.” But now that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin are at each side of him and grabbing him firmly by the elbows and, at once, lifting him off the ground and reexposing him, he has a new respect for Satan’s insight.

  Joe and Adolf tote Hatcher across the drive and up the steps and through the front door, and striding toward them, framed in the light from enormous veranda doors behind him, is Satan, wearing a red-and-blue-plaid flannel shirt, Armani jeans, and a RUTTIN BUCK camouflage hunting cap with tied-up fleece earflaps. Against his chest he carries a Ruger Deerfield 44 Magnum autoloading carbine with a smoking muzzle. Hatcher expected that through the anticipated long night he would have a chance to prepare himself for this moment. But the abruptness and the intensity of his gathering up and passage here, culminating in his hanging in dishabille six inches off the floor in the grip of two of the most prolific murderers in history, has prevented any preparation for what is, in fact, his first actual physical encounter with Satan. Till this moment he has had only the traditional earthly iconography and Satan’s e-mails and cell phone messages to conjure up the Prince of Darkness. And now: Hatcher thinks of some typical politician with whom he’s only vaguely familiar and who’s declared his candidacy for president and is scoring about four percent in the polls and Hatcher finally meets him in an American Legion hall in Dubuque or Cedar Rapids on a brutally cold December afternoon as the guy benightedly campaigns to win the Iowa caucus vote. That is say, a classic, middle-height, middle-age man with a squarish, slightly pasty, faintly jowly, smarm-ready, white-guy-in-power face. Except in the moment after this face registers on Hatcher, the face flares bright red—nothing else changing, not shape or jowls or even the smarm factor—but it all becomes instantly, luminously, arterial-blood red.

  “This one’s late!” Satan roars. “Set him loose out back!”

  And before Hatcher can quite get his mind around this, he’s being whisked past Satan and across the floor toward the veranda windows. This much is clear at once: Satan either is mistaking him for someone else or he’s pretending to.

  As Hatcher passes through the doors and sees the field before him, he starts to understand. A hundred—or a bit fewer now—naked men, mostly white, mostly paunchy, are running madly in circles in a dozen acres of low, stubbly canebrake. Originally there was one man per pickup truck parked in the front of the lodge, but now there are a dozen or more bodies twitching here and there on the ground, each with a major magnum-hole in head or chest. No doubt, all were hunters in life. Hatcher is being taken for one of these.

  “Wait!” he cries, twisting his head over his shoulder to try to address Satan. “I’m Hatcher McCord! Your anchorman! Your interview!”

  Joe and Adolf are quickly descending the back steps, Hatcher flopping between them. At the bottom they rush on, across the yard toward the canebrake, and Hatcher is thinking this is what it’s always been about, doing this to him. He was getting to be too important in Hell. But why the hunting motif? He hunted with a couple of presidents over the years but only for show. He never even shot anything. Now he can see before him the whites of the eyes of the naked hunters running around making sounds of terror like the cries of wounded moose. Hatcher tries to reassure himself: it’s only more pain and humiliation. If it wasn’t this way, it would be some other.

  But now Satan bellows from behind, “Wait!”

  Joe and Adolf stop and turn around, Hatcher still hanging between them.

  “Put him down,” Satan says.

  They do.

  In his desperate relief, something registers on Hatcher about what is beneath his feet, but not quite consciously.

  Satan is standing at the top of the stairs to the veranda. His face is pasty white again. “Hatcher McCord!” he cries.

  “Yes. That’s me,” Hatcher says aloud, while his inner voice declares The grass isn’t real.

  “The anchorman.” Satan has stopped shouting. There is even a tone of dawning recognition in his voice.

  “The Evening News from Hell. Hatcher McCord. I’m here for the interview.”

  Perhaps the logs in the lodge aren’t real either.

  Satan says, “I didn’t recognize you. In person, you’re naked.”

  Hatcher is attuned to tones of voice. As an interviewer in his earthly life, he prided himself on being able to discern all the little audible clues that a subject is lying. Hatcher has the odd impression that Satan truly made a mistake about who Hatcher was. Certainly Satan would be adept at feigning his confusion. But why would he bother?

  Satan begins to drum the fingers of his right hand in the air. “Come here,” he says. Hatcher is free of the grip of the two tyrants now, and he moves to the veranda and up the steps, Satan continuing to elaborate on his invitation: “Come. Come. Hustle along, Hatcher Thatcher Snatcher. Come to Papa do. Come along comealongcomealong. Here, boy.”

  I’m spared for now, and at least trees are innocent.

  As Hatcher reaches the top of the steps, Satan backs up a few paces and motions him to stop. “Now,” Satan says, “Hatcher, old bean. Tell me why you come to visit your Papa Satan in the nude.”

  “Hoover . . .” Hatcher begins, and Satan waves his hand to silence him.

  “Oh dear oh dear, have you been doing naughty things with Eddie?”

  “No. No. Not at all. He burst in unexpectedly . . . Morning came . . .”

  “Morning came,” Satan says. “Ah, morning came indeed. I made the morning to come, my boy.”

  “I didn’t have a chance . . .”

  “Please. Papa understands. Morning. The clarion call of the feathered creatures.” Satan pauses, lifts his face, and makes a bird call of some sort that Hatcher cannot recognize.

  “Treedle eedle eedle oodle oodle!” Satan calls, and from behind Hatcher all the naked hunters in the canebrake are compelled to answer with the same call.

  “I am riven with guilt at mistaking you,” Satan says. There is a sly overripeness to his tone that clearly signals his insincerity. Hatcher understands he knows nothing, really, but hearing the meaning of this tone makes him have about a twenty percent confidence in his previous impression of Satan’s confusion. There are things
to think about in all this, but he does not have time.

  “I’ll make it up to you,” Satan says, striding up to him and shoving the rifle into Hatcher’s hands. “Step aside.”

  Hatcher does. He turns and watches as Satan lifts a hand and drums his fingers again, and Joe and Adolf approach at a trot. Satan stops them with a wave and then begins to point from one to the other and back again, moving his lips silently, doing an eeny-meeny-miny-moe. Stalin and Hitler begin to quake. Hatcher realizes that both of them have large, liquidy, creepily fetching, feminine eyes. Satan ends with his forefinger pointing at Hitler.

  “Strip,” he orders.

  Hitler tremblingly complies, peeling off his jumpsuit and then standing straight-spined and naked before Satan, his face rigid in terror. Hatcher, newsman though he be, consciously does not confirm the earthly reports that Hitler had only one testicle.

  “Shoot him,” Satan says to Hatcher.

  “Shoot him?”

  “With the rifle in your hands,” Satan said. “Shoot Adolf Hitler. Shoot him in the face.”

  Hatcher is trying to catch up with all this. He looks dumbly at the rifle.

  “Are you more anti-Communist than anti-Fascist?” Satan asks. “You can do Joe instead.”

  It’s not a preference for someone else that makes Hatcher hesitate. Hitler would do just fine, if he has to shoot someone in the face for Satan. But Hatcher feels some vast thing opening up in him.

  Satan thumps his own forehead with the heel of his hand. “Of course. Ofcourseofcourseofcourse. Pillars of fire and smoke. Big TV news. Round the clock.” He throws his head back and does an inept fire engine siren impression—“Weeeooo weeeooo”—and then resumes, “You’re on. Smoking skyscrapers behind you. Undo your tie. The nation turns to Hatcher McCord.” And now in a high girlish voice, “Oh please do your face just that way again. So grave, so compassionate. We all ache together.” Abruptly he leans near to Hatcher—smelling, yes, generally of something burnt, of brimstone even, but also, from his breath, of Frosted Cherry Pop-Tarts and, from his face, of Old Spice After Shave—and his voice swoops down into a conspiratorial baritone: “You want Osama bin Laden? I’ll get him for you. It’ll only take a moment.”

  “It’s not that,” Hatcher says.

  “He’s small beans, though. Comparatively speaking, yes? Comparatively. Numbers, boy. Numbers.”

  Hatcher does not understand his own hesitation. Adolf Hitler, after all. Big numbers.

  “You’re a sportsman, is that it? Adolf. Run around.”

  Hatcher looks at his rifle once more, the stock and the forearm a smoothly unbroken run of apparent walnut.

  “You can do it,” Satan says. “You’re a great shot here. Just point and shoot. Squeeze, don’t pull. Point and shoot, anchorman.”

  Hatcher lifts his eyes and Adolf Hitler is running around in circles twenty yards in front of him, with each circuit lifting that famous face to Hatcher with wide, frightened eyes. Adolf fucking Hitler. Hatcher puts the rifle to his shoulder and squeezes the trigger. Hitler’s head explodes in bloody fragments and the body falls.

  Hatcher pants heavily. He trembles. All the muscles of his hands and arms and chest trill with jumpy happiness. “Go ahead,” Satan says.

  Stalin turns his face from the fallen Hitler. He looks Hatcher in the eyes with that familiar avuncular smugness. Big numbers. And Hatcher pulls the trigger again. Stalin’s head vanishes in a pulpy red plume and the body falls.

  Hatcher’s chest pumps up instantly full, as if he was drowning and has unexpectedly leapt into the air. The headless bodies of Hitler and Stalin lie shuddering beside each other. And now, before Hatcher can even lower his rifle, one of the hunters—a corpulent jowly man with a Brylcreem-rigid pompadour—dashes this way from the canebrake, as if to run up the veranda steps and past them and escape out the front door.

  Satan rattles a rapid ID: “He shot his best friend to death in a planned hunting accident so he could fuck the wife in their double-wide with her twin eight-year-old girls locked outside in the snow.”

  Hatcher hesitates. The man’s dash has suddenly turned into glutinous slow motion. Every one of us had the trying-to-run-but-can’t nightmare on earth, Hatcher thinks.

  “One man or a million,” Satan whispers. “It’s the same. Fuck big numbers. The nova of a star or the splitting of an atom. In the great scheme of things, the difference is inconsequential.”

  Hatcher hears this and it seems true and the pompadour’s best friend deserved better, but when it comes down to it, Hatcher is simply still holding that big, beautiful chestful of air from Stalin, and it needs a proper release. He pulls the trigger. The man flies backward, his belly blown open. Hatcher’s full chest huffs happily empty, and he breathes deep again as a lanky, hatchety-faced man leaps through the steam of the gut shot of the fallen hunter and heads for the veranda.

  Satan says, “This one never ate a thing he killed. He just got off on seeing those cute little birdies explode.”

  Hatcher pulls the trigger and catches the lanky man in a shoulder, spinning him around screaming.

  “Again,” Satan says. “We shall not forget even one sparrow.” Hatcher shoots once more, cutting the man in half at the middle of his spine.

  This time he sighs a calm, sweet, quiet sigh. Poor little birds.

  Hatcher feels the rifle being gently tugged from his hands. He resists for a moment. But it’s Satan.

  “Look how talented you are,” Satan says.

  Hatcher lets go of the rifle.

  “And righteous,” Satan says. He looks away from Hatcher, toward the lodge, and flicks his head to someone.

  Hatcher is in a state of calm quietude, like after a sauna and a massage and about four glasses of wine with a Xanax dissolved in the first one. Hands are upon him, squaring him around at the shoulders, poking at the back of a knee. “Lift your leg,” a woman says. He does. “Now the other.” He does. His arms are lifted one at a time and there is a zipping.

  His head begins to clear. He looks down. He is wearing a powder-blue jumpsuit.

  They sit in the lodge great room with a walk-in fireplace roaring intensely behind Satan. Hatcher sinks deep into an overstuffed chair before the Old Man. He crosses his leg. He realizes he is also wearing powder-blue-coordinated Nike Dunks. Behind him is a top-of-the-line Sony HD Camcorder set up on a tripod. The camera was unattended when they sat down a few minutes ago and Satan has been rattling on and on ever since about how this is the first-ever interview he’s granted, that even William Randolph Hearst tried unsuccessfully to get an interview for the Hell Times Herald Examiner Journal Standard, which Hearst published for a long while until the Internet came along and he was forced to shut down and now Hearst’s off in a blogger cubicle writing about his own dick and its previous billionaire adventures, weeping at his loss all the while, and he can’t turn off his keyboard Caps Lock and is thus the object of severe and constant ridicule by his fellow bloggers for always shouting.

  But Satan stops talking abruptly, looking at something over Hatcher’s shoulder. Hatcher turns. Adolf Hitler is standing beside the camera. His head has been reconstituted, but imperfectly, his face a maze of raw scars. An old, bleached-blond woman, her arms and face and neck a dense patchwork of liver spots, is hovering beside Adolf with a bottle of iodine and a dingy wad of cotton. She heavily doses the cotton, the burnt-orange liquid splashing everywhere, and she swipes at the join-lines of Adolf’s face. He cries out in pain and she cries out in the same pain, and she does the cotton again and they cry out together again. He seems unable to stop her from these painful ministrations, his hands hanging unmoving beside him, his head held rigid. Both Hitler and the woman are wearing blue jumpsuits—hers short-sleeved to feature her age-and-sun-ravaged arms.

  “Stop stop stop!” Satan cries to the woman.

  Hatcher expects that the woman will back away and Hitler will operate the camera. But it’s Hitler who bows. He takes the bottle and cotton from the woman, and he withdra
ws. The woman looks to Satan and Hatcher, for a moment blinking hard, trying to focus on them. The face seems familiar, but in a mid-seventies, heavily made-up, heavily nipped-and-tucked New York-to-Miami retiree way—his second wife Deborah’s people. The woman looks away to where Hitler is marching out of the room.

  “Leni,” Satan says sharply. “Focus. Glory times have come for you again. This will be your masterpiece. Marching millions in the dark. Torchlight. And naked racing bodies. Leaping and soaring and running. All captured solely in my words. The grandiloquence of the Prince of Darkness. Now turn that thing on and back away and hold very still, you bitch. No fucking with the camera.”

  And Leni Riefenstahl focuses. She bows from the waist and steps behind the camera. Hatcher turns to face Satan, whose eyes are lasered on Hatcher’s. He’s reading even this thought that I think he’s reading this thought, Hatcher thinks.

  “Any time,” Satan says. “Shoot.” He laughs loud. “Shoot. Shoot. Quick.” Satan jumps up and pantomimes shooting and he roars on. “Point and squeeze. I’m out running in the canebrake. Shoot quick. Shoot me with your questions, Hatcher McCord. Shoot me with your 44-magnum brilliance.”

  As Satan is going on, Hatcher tries to focus on the questions, the notes for which he left behind with his clothes. But it’s difficult. He has an image caught in his head: Adolf and Leni beside the camera. And what Hatcher is seeing are collegial powder-blue figures, minions of Satan, joined with the Old Man, and here Hatcher himself sits dressed in the jumpsuit of a minion and he’s about to willingly—eagerly—give Satan a wide, public voice. But. But. I’m a journalist. I do not judge. I report. Let the public judge. And it takes an informed public to make good judgments. This all suddenly sounds to Hatcher like bullshit of a very strange sort, and he shakes his head sharply back and forth.