Lucifer's Lottery

his thoughts pleaded. Take me anywhere because no matter how bad the next place is, it can’t be as bad as this . . .

“Here’s the shortcut out, and don’t worry about the gate.” She lifted something from beneath her tongue. “I have the key.”

Thank God . . . Slydes followed the lithe woman down another reeking alley whose end terminated in a chain-link gate closed by an antiquated lock. When Andeen finnicked with the key, rust sifted from the keyhole.

That thing better open, Slydes fretted.

“I guess the hardest thing to get used to for a Human in Hell is, well, the insignificance. Know what I mean?”

“Huh?” Slydes said.

“No matter what we were in the Living World, no matter how strong, how beautiful, how rich, how important . . . in Hell we’re nothing. In fact, we’re less than nothing.” She giggled, still jiggling the key. “Do you follow me, Slydes?”

Slydes was getting pissed. “I don’t know what’cher talkin’ about! Just open that fuckin’ lock so we can get out of here!”

She giggled but then frowned. “Damn. This bugger’s tough. Check the alley entrance, will you—”

“All riiiiiiiii—” But when Slydes looked behind him he shrieked. Proceeding slowly down the alley was a congregation of the short, dog-faced, implike things he’d seen previously on the street. They grinned as they moved forward, fangs glinting.

Slydes tugged Andeen’s arm like a child tugging its mother’s. “Luh-luh-look!”

Andeen’s tattooed brow rose when she glanced down the alley. “Shit. Broodren. They’re demonic kids and they’re all homicidal. The little fuckers have gangs everywhere—”

“Open the lock!”

She played with the key most vigorously, nervous herself now. “They’ll haul our guts out to sell to a Diviner; then they’ll screw and eat what’s left . . .”

“Hurry!” Slydes wailed.

Suddenly the pack of Broodren broke all at once into a sprint, cackling.

When they were just yards away—

CLACK!

—the lock opened. Slydes peed his jeans as Andeen dragged him to the other side. She managed to relock the gate just as several Broodren pounced on it, their dirty, taloned fingers and toes hooked over the chain links.

“Jesus! We barely made it!”

Andeen sighed, wiped her brow with her forearm. “Tell me about it, man.”

“What now?” Slydes looked down a stained brick corridor that seemed to dogleg to the left. “How do we get out?”

“Around the corner,” Andeen said.

They trotted on, turned the corner, and—

“Holy motherfuckin’ SHIT!” Slydes yelled when two stout gray-brown forearms wrapped about his barrel chest and hoisted him in the air.

Tall shadows circled round in total silence.

Slydes screamed till his throat turned raw.

“One thing you need to know about Hell,” Andeen chuckled, “is that trust does not exist.”

Five blank-faced Golems stood round Slydes now, and it was in the arms of a sixth that he was now captive.

One of them handed Andeen a stack of bills. “Thanks, buddy. This guy’s a real piece of work. He deserves what he’s getting.” Then she winked at Slydes and pointed up to another transom. It read: DIGESTIVE TRACT REVERSAL SUITE.

“For the rest of eternity, Slydes,” she intoned through a sultry grin. “You’ll be eating through your ass and shitting out your mouth.”

“Nooooooooooooo!” Slydes shrieked.

The Golems trooped toward the door, Slydes kicking and screaming, all to no avail.

“Welcome to Hell,” were Andeen’s parting words.

Slydes’s screams silenced when the suite door slammed shut, and Andeen traipsed off, greedily counting the stack of crisp bills. Each bill had the number one hundred in each corner, but it was not the portrait of Benjamin Franklin that graced each one, it was the face of Adolf Hitler.

PART ONE

THE SENARY

CHAPTER ONE

(I)

Six words drifted across his mind when he entered the bar:

A whore is a deep ditch . . .

It was a line from Proverbs, one of many that warned men of the power of lust. Hudson had studied the Bible with great zeal—and he still did—but what would seem strange about that? He’d graduated from Catholic U. with a master’s in theology, and within a month would be entering the seminary. No, what might seem strange, instead, was his presence in this bar, a place known to be a whore bar, or at least that’s what he’d heard.

His first name was the same as his last—Hudson—something he’d never understood of his parents, who’d both seemed distant or distracted since the time his memories commenced. He didn’t get it. They were dead now. They’ll never get to see me ordained, and I’ll never get to ask them why they named me Hudson.

Six tiny cracks could be seen in the long bar mirror, but why would Hudson count them? Obsessive-compulsive? he wondered. How could he really ever know? His contemplations itched at him. He knew why he was here, and was slightly discomfited by the patrons. The bar was simply called LOUNGE; that’s what the tacky neon said outside, and aside from its notoriety as an establishment that condoned prostitution, his friend Randal had warned that the place catered essentially to “white trash.”

So . . . what does that make me?

His reflection in the mirror looked like that of a bus bum. Unkempt, hair in need of cutting, eyes open wider than they should be as if used to looking for something that wasn’t there.

When he glanced down the long, dark room, he counted only six customers—three men, three women—then he noticed they were all smoking. Tendrils of smoke hung motionless in the establishment’s open space, like slivers of ghosts. Hudson didn’t smoke. He’d never even tried because he recalled a childhood sermon: “Your body is a gift