Lucifer's Lottery

“Tell you what,” Gerold posed. “Go on home for your much-needed beauty sleep, and I’ll check myself in.”

“Right. You’d just go somewhere and pretend you’re trying to kill yourself again, to get more attention.”

Gerold would’ve paid any price just to be able to stand up for one second and clean this guy’s clock.

“Aw, shit!” the guy spat, and looked at his watch.

“What? That time of the month again?”

“Fuck off. I forgot your out-pross papers.” He pointed right in Gerold’s face. “Listen, dick, I have to go back inside and get your papers. I’ll only be five minutes, and when I’m back you better still be here. Don’t even think about eloping.”

“Eloping?” Gerold stretched the word. “That’s what they call it?”

“Yeah, you’re an elopement risk. Says so right in your records. Elopement is when a pseudo–mental patient tries to escape from the people trying to help his sorry ass.”

“Where am I gonna go in five minutes, man!” Gerold yelled.

The finger kept pointing. “Just know this. If you do try to flee, I’ll find you, and you’ll be real sorry.”

“What, you’re threatening me?”

The stubbled face grinned. “Yeah. So what’re you gonna do about it, Hot Wheels?”

Gerold laughed hard now. “That’s what I like about interns. It puts the good ones into the system.”

The intern gave him the finger, then turned and headed back toward the building.

Gerold could only shake his head, chuckling morosely. This has been the worst twenty-four hours of my life. Wouldn’t it be nice if just once the Fates would let something GOOD happen to me?

A second after the automatic doors closed behind the intern, a city bus pulled up at the shelter not ten yards from where Gerold sat. “Yo, yo! Hold up!” Gerold launched himself forward with such force his wheels nearly left the pavement. Immediately the wheelchair lift began to beep, the ramp lowering.

“Come on in,” the uncharacteristically friendly driver invited. In no time, Gerold was on the ramp, going up. Come on! Come on! he fretted. “Is this a time point?” he asked. “I got a connection.”

“It is but I’m running late,” the driver said and belted Gerold’s chair into the cubby. “We gotta leave right now.”

All right! Gerold sat hunched, peeking with half an eye out the window. He just knew that before the bus pulled away, that intern would be running after them.

The bus pulled away.

No sign of the intern.

Go! Go! his thoughts pleaded, and he rocked back and forth with his fingers crossed.

The bus made the turn, roared onto the main road, and was on its way.

Gerold stared desperately behind until the hospital disappeared. He went slack in his chair. Thank you, Fates.

The bus was empty and deliciously cool.

“So what’s your connection?” the driver said.

“Uh, the 52.” Gerold picked the first bus route that came to mind.

“Oh, hell, we’ll be at the terminal at least ten minutes before that one leaves.”

“Great. Thanks.”

Gerold smiled, rocking over the gentle bumps in the road. But a glance down showed him a crumpled newspaper. He snatched it up.

It was the Tampa Bay Times, the local popified daily. His eyes idled over the “hip” articles and blaring ads for lingerie and singles clubs. It was a girl in a bikini holding a long fish that snagged more of his attention.

Gerold read the half-page ad—its headline: FUN & SUN AT BEAUTIFUL LAKE MISQUAMICUS!—to learn of a quaint, out-of-the-way camping and fishing resort several counties north of here. Jet Skis, parasailing, freshwater fishing, and, of special note, “Catch your own crawdads! Lake Misquamicus crawdads are the biggest in the state! We have delicious freshwater clams too!” Gerold really liked crawdads . . .

“Excuse me, driver? Now that I think of it, I won’t need to go to the terminal. Just drop me off on Ninth Avenue.”

“Sure. You taking a Greyhound somewhere?”

“Yeah,” Gerold said, still eyeing the ad and its accompanying bikini-clad model. “I’m heading up to . . . Lake Misquamicus.”

The driver nodded. “Good choice. They’ve got great fishing there and crawdadding. They stock the lake every year, and the place isn’t all full of tourists.”

“Cool,” Gerold said. Suddenly he felt wonderful, and he was genuinely looking forward to some fresh-cooked crawdads. They seemed a perfect last meal.

(III)

. . . and you’re not sure what you’re looking at, but when your supernatural vision sharpens—

“It’s like a mansion, except it’s got to be over five hundred feet on each side . . .”

“Sixty hundred and sixty-six,” Howard redresses, “if you’re interested in exactitude, and six floors each precisely sixty-six feet in height. Six belfries and six towers per side, six spires and crockets per tower. Six windows per dormer section, sixty-six chimneys, sixty-six occuli, and six hundred and sixty-six crest spikes along each of sixty-six cornices, not to belabor the evidence of sixty-six—”

“Enough of the fucking sixes! Please!” you wail. “I’m SICK of the fucking sixes!”

Howard waits for you to settle down, a bemused smile subtly set into his sallow face. “It’s curious to observe the extent of your acclimation, Mr. Hudson.”

“What’s that?”

“Your slowly increasing tendency to use profanity—”

I did it again, you realize. This place is a bad influence on me, and it’s no surprise.

After all, it’s Hell.

You look back up at the bizarre edifice you’ve been escorted to, just as Howard announces:

“Mr. Hudson, it is my doubtless pleasure and unreserved honor to introduce to you the new personal abode of the Prince of Darkness . . . Manse Lucifer.”

By now, you’ve already noticed the most distinguishing characteristic of the colossal manse. Its walls are not constructed of brick, block, cement slab, nor wood, nor stucco.

They’re built with female Human heads.

The heads face outward and—to no surprise—they’re all still very much alive. They’ve been laid like mason work, with mortar meticulously packed around each. Millions of heads, no doubt, have been used to construct the mansion’s outer walls and immense mansard-style roof.

“The walls are double layered,” Howard points out, “so that living female faces form the walls inside, as well—God knows what they’re forced to witness. All the interior floors, too, are made from the heads, including buttresses and load-bearing walls.”

A house of heads inside and out, you can only think. A MANSION of living female heads . . .

You sense yourself lowering, then perceive that Howard has set your “stick” into a slab of sidewalk filled with bone and tooth fragments. He’s slipping something from his pocket. “As you can imagine, an equally spectacular interior exists.” Howard, next, holds a small stack of dim photographs before your face.

“Good old-fashioned photographs,” you remark. “I’m surprised you have stuff like that in Hell.”

“Not photographs, hectographs. Hell’s version of the tintypes of my early days. A process of gold nitrate