Lucifer's Lottery

All at once, the horned soldiers on the ramparts began to cheer. Several more were lowering a boat into the water.

Gerold could do little more than stare out.

A drone invaded his ears; then he saw a line of liquid green light hovering toward him—

Sssssssssssssssss-ONK!

Now Gerold did scream.

The line of green light dilated to a wavering circle—a hole in the sky—and from that hole two hands that were clearly not human reached out, grabbed his arms, and pulled him in.

He was dropped into something like a black cave; then he sensed that the cave was moving off very quickly, soaring up into the alien air. In moments, all he could see was the bloodred sky.

“Don’t panic,” said a figure with its back to him. Gerold crawled forward, dragging his dead legs behind. He wasn’t sure what his impulse was. To see? To confront the figure that had pulled him out of the boat and into this . . . this place?

Or to jump back out?

“I can’t believe it,” the figure said. “The coordinates were right—we made it!” And then the figure turned to face Gerold.

Gerold screamed again, loud and hard. “You’re a monster!”

The figure let out a snide chuckle. “Actually, I’m a Troll, thank you very much.” His voice sounded like any normal man’s, but everything else?

Gerold screamed a third time.

This . . . Troll stood hunched over, shirtless, with greenish brown skin stretched over hillocks of muscles. He wore pants that looked like burlap and boots that were stitched up the middle. Each wide hand possessed only three fingers and a thumb and had nails like a bear’s. And his head . . .

“Man, your head’s all fucked up!” Gerold bellowed in ceaseless horror. “It looks squashed.”

“That’s ’cos when I was in jail, they put me in a Head-Bender. Don’t worry about it.” Now the figure took a candle off the side of the interior wall and touched it to each fingertip of a severed hand. “Hand of Glory,” the Troll informed. “Got no time to explain, just that it keeps the outer Observation Egress of the Nectoport invisible.”

Gerold shuddered where he sat.

“Yeah”—the Troll glanced out the large circle before him in which the red sky soared—“we’re safe now, er, at least for the time being.”

“WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING!” Gerold shouted.

The Troll sat down on an outcropping in the wall. “Look, man, I know you’re confused and scared and a million other things. My name’s Krilid, and yours is Gerold, right?”

Gerold nodded, teeth chattering. Suddenly he was aware of stifling heat.

“You’re in Hell,” Krilid said.

Gerold gaped.

“I don’t have time to answer all your questions—we gotta be somewhere else, like, real soon. But I’ll give you the short version—”

“I’m in HHHHHHH—Hell?” Gerold managed.

“Only Hell’s probably not what you imagined.” Krilid picked Gerold up by his armpits, and held him up to the circular opening so he could look down.

Gerold screamed yet again.

“Hell’s a big city, the biggest in history. It’s bigger than all the cities in the Living World all put together.”

Gerold felt frozen as he looked down out of the opening. There was a city down there, all right—a leaning, shrieking, smoke-gusting city without end—

“It’s called the Mephistopolis, and this thing you’re in is called a Nectoport, the most sophisticated mode of transportation in the Abyss. We bootlegged the technology. It can travel great distances in seconds by using occult mathematics to collapse values of space.”

“I-I-I-I . . . WHAT?” Gerold blabbered.

“I understand. Just listen, though, and make of it what you will, okay? Clairvoyants in Heaven foresaw your coming here; that’s how I was able to pick you up. I’m a Troll in Hell but I work for God, and a Fallen Angel named—well, forget all that, no time. I pulled you out of your boat for a reason . . .”

“A reason,” Gerold droned.

“I’m on a mission, and I’m hoping you’ll go along with it.”

Gerold’s head spun and spun. This couldn’t be happening. It had to be a nightmare but then he somehow knew it wasn’t. Whatever this thing, this Troll, this . . . guy named Krilid meant, Gerold found incontemplatable.

The opening continued to soar through the scarlet sky.

“You were gonna kill yourself, right?” Krilid asked, keeping one eye out the opening. “ ’Cos you can’t walk?”

“How do you know that?” Gerold snapped.

“Same way I knew you’d be in the Reservoir. It was foreseen. And let me tell you, it’s a good thing you didn’t kill yourself ’cos if you had, you’d be here.”

Gerold stared agog. “I already AM here!”

“Yeah, but not as a member of the Human Damned. You’re still alive, man. You’re a member of the Living World, but you’re in Hell. Why? Because of a fluke.”

Gerold pushed his hair out of his face. “Yeah, I’ll say.”

“If you had really killed yourself, you’d be damned here for all eternity. Period. No exceptions.”

“Then how did I get here?” Gerold finally regained enough of his senses to ask.

“I told you, a fluke, an accident, but we foresaw that accident and used it to our advantage,” the Troll said. Now he picked up a long musket-style rifle and began swabbing the barrel out. He chuckled. “You happened to be on that lake at the same exact moment that Lucifer’s smartest occultists pulled a Spatial Merge—”

Gerold winced. “A what?”

“It’s pretty cool,” Krilid said. “There’s no fresh water in Hell, so Satan figured he’d steal some—six billion gallons’ worth—from the Living World.”

Six billion gallons, came the grim thought. “That’s how much water was in Lake Misquamicus . . .”

“Um-hmm. And now all that water is here, in the Vandermast Reservoir. It was built especially for this operation. Satan wants to build an oasis or some shit, so he activated a massive Spatial Merge to bring all that water here—”

“All that water,” Gerold croaked, “and me with it.”

“Yep, and, depending on your frame of mind”—Krilid raised a scarlike brow—“you can look at your situation as a bad thing . . . or a good thing.”

Even in the midst of all this impossibility and all this horror, Gerold laughed. “How can being in Hell be a good thing?”

Krilid raised a Monocular with a bloodshot eyeball where the lens should be. “Just . . . be patient, and you’ll see.”

Gerold was about to crawl forward again, to look back out, but suddenly, the Nectoport’s oval opening flashed blinding white, and inertia shoved him back. Immediately there came the sense of bending, of his body somehow elongating; the strange walls of the compartment he sat in elongated as well.

Krilid tremored slightly, like one sitting on a trolley over bad tracks. He said, “We’re going to the Pol Pot District now, collapsing space.” And, next, the white flash ceased, to be replaced again by more bloodred sky. “Take a look now.”

Gerold dragged himself forward and looked out.

They hovered maybe a half a mile up, through wisps of soot-colored clouds. The clouds