Lawyers in Hell (49 page)

“M-m-me, sir?” quavered a voice from behind the silver-haired heavyweight.

“Yes, you.  You were a public defender in Brooklyn, specializing in doing the least amount of work for your court-appointed clients, and talking them into plea deals that weren’t in their best interest, just to clear your docket, weren’t you?” Melvin Belli said, as he glowered over the top of the list.

“Well, I, uh, wouldn’t say, uh….”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Belli snorted.  “None of you ever do,” he said, shaking his leonine head.  “I believe I have the perfect assignment here, just for you.  The Infernal Revenue Service needs some junior attorneys to go through all the older tax laws and identify any that are too favorable to taxpayers.  If I understand correctly, they’ve asked for five new hires.  It seems they have around sixty thousand volumes of tax laws that need to be updated.”

“But, but, I barely passed contract law in night school.  And I’ve never been detail-oriented enough to handle big issues like complicated taxes, and things like that….” wailed the profusely sweating thin man in the rumpled suit.

“Then I suggest you learn quickly.  But don’t worry, you won’t be alone.  There will be four more joining you to toil in the depths of the IRS archives, so you won’t get lonely.  Oh, and do try to stay out of the way of the Director.  She can be a real bitch if she’s not happy with your work…” chortled Belli, “…and you’ll be reporting to her immediately.”  As the appalled former public defender disappeared with the newly-familiar “pop,” Belli muttered,
sotto voce,
“you poor slob.”

*

Demetrius snickered as he watched the assignment process continue.  Sometimes this was the most fun he had all week – well, except for dallying with his new protégé.  He wondered how many in the blur of faces, three floors below, would pass through his fiefdom again, as any more than visitors.  A certain number of the fools always had to go through the process several times before they finally learned they had to play by the rules of hell to get anywhere.

When Demetrius turned to continue his discussion with Makalani, a tall, attractive man in casual black slacks, a black shirt and well-combed hair approached from one of the entrances.  “How may I or my scribe assist you?” asked Demetrius.

“Well, I’m Doctor Miguel Bartsch and someone told me this was the library.  Could you show me where the medical section is?”  The visitor looked perplexed as Demetrius and Makalani giggled at each other.

Demetrius recovered his decorum first and said “I’m afraid you are
really
in the wrong place, sir.  Most doctors of medicine end up on one of the Greek planes, ministering to the inhabitants there.  I’m afraid Reassignments has made another mistake.  You see, practicing medicine around here – if you actually help someone or cure them – is considered malpractice and punished immediately.  So, unless you were responsible for someone’s death by practicing quackery or were a money-grubbing pill pusher, you need to be sent back to Reassignments.  And judging by your expression, I’ll need to show you to the elevator.”

As the Chief Librarian and his assistant Makalani turned to escort the doctor through the stacks and to the exit, the floor shuddered, accompanied by a rumbling sound that rapidly grew louder.  Makalani quickly took Demetrius’ arm, staring around in trepidation.

Dust began falling from the ceiling eleven floors above, and librarians on every floor began shouting in fear as shelves teetered and began toppling onto them.  Computer screens blew out with a cascade of sparks and the lights began flickering, and failing entirely in some areas, as everyone tried to run for safety.

With a tremendous roar, the ceiling gave way under the weight of the entire Hall of Injustice above, which crashed down through the atrium, as the fourteen floors of shelves, walkways, and research and study rooms slid toward the open space in the center of the building, spilling law books onto the meeting-room occupants at the bottom, crushing them, as the Hall of Injustice collapsed into its own basement.

Demetrius barely had time to scream, “My scrolls!”

*

Absolute darkness … suffocating heat … pressure …
pain …
groaning … remembering – falling, tumbling, flailing – Makalani tried to take a deep breath, but couldn’t.  As his senses gradually came back,
more pain…
.  He felt something wet – was lying in something wet, felt something a little softer under his hand… more memory.

“Oh no,” he gasped.  The Library, Demetrius!  But he
was
breathing … dust and pumice… but breathing all the same – not clean air, to be sure, but not the odor of rotten teeth and decomposition he would smell if he had died and been resurrected on the Undertaker’s slab.  Makalani might be buried under a rockfall of unknowable proportions facing unbelievable difficulties, but at least there was a chance to get out without waking in the morgue to the unspeakable pain of being reassembled.  He sighed in some relief.

“Help…
help!…
anybody…?” Makalani doubted anyone could hear his faint call, but just then he felt a weak tug on his pants leg … heard a muffled voice:

“Sesh…?  Is that you…?” Demetrius wheezed.

“Oh, sir, thank the fates!” Makalani breathed.

Remember, Remember, Hell in November

by

Larry Atchley, Jr

Guy Fawkes will always remember the day he died and went to hell.  First he and his co-conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot were sentenced to be “put to death halfway between heaven and earth as unworthy of both” by the royal executioner.

He’d died on a purpose-built scaffold in the Old Palace Yard at Westminster, England, last of the four condemned plotters to meet his end there, in front of king and countrymen and church officials.  Fawkes had watched from the wicker litter to which he was strapped as his cohorts’ genitals were cut off and burnt before their eyes.  Their bowels and hearts were removed before they were decapitated, and the dismembered parts of their bodies displayed so that they might become “prey for the fowls of the air.”

Then it was his turn.  Before jeering crowds, the guards cut him loose from the wickerwork frame to which Fawkes was strapped at the base of the gallows.  The executioners had to hold him upright, so badly broken and battered was his body.  Before being tortured, he had been tall and strong.  His coarse reddish-brown hair and beard with long, drooping moustache were matted with grime.

King James I looked down at the execution yard from his balcony in Westminster Abbey and shouted:  “Fawkes, how could you conspire so hideous a treason against my children, and so many innocent souls who have never offended you?”

By then, the world around him was growing dim, yet Fawkes somehow managed to reply:  “A dangerous disease required a desperate remedy.”

The king declared, “You have plotted to blow up The Palace of Westminster, Westminster Hall, and Westminster Abbey, myself, my family, and all the members of the House of Lords and the House of Commons.  Yet you portray yourself as an instrument of God’s Will?  God has seen through your treasonous gunpowder plot, Guy Fawkes.”

Death would be welcome, a refuge from the consuming pain of his torture.  Fawkes looked up at the monarch and said, “The Devil, not God was the discoverer of our plot.  I repent of and regret only that I did not succeed in blowing you all back to Scotland or to hell!”

Somehow they got him up the gallows ladder.  King James I, purple with rage, decreed:  “Let this traitor be hanged by the neck from the gallows, suspended between heaven and earth, for he is unworthy of both.  Then, he shall be taken down alive, and his private parts cut off and burned before his eyes as he is unworthy of begetting any generation after him.  His belly shall be sliced open, and his bowels and all inner parts removed and burned.  He shall be quartered and beheaded, and all the pieces are to be displayed as a testament to the fate of treasonous fools.  Let his remains be food for the carrion birds.”

The hangman looped the noose around Guy Fawkes’s head as he ascended the gallows ladder.  His legs wobbled and his shoulders throbbed with aching pain from the torture of the rack two months earlier by the Royal Interrogators, and from his being dragged through the streets.  Before the executioner could pull the rope taut, Fawkes found one more shard of rebellious strength:  he leaped from the gallows scaffold.  The rope went taut.

A sharp pain lanced through him.  His neck snapped but he didn’t hear it.

Fawkes was falling.  Forever.  Plummeting through space.  Neither rope nor earth existed.

“Aaaaaiiiiiiiiiaaaaaahhhhhh!”  Fawkes thought he screamed as he hurtled even faster downward, endlessly falling through nothingness and darkness for what seemed an eternity.

Then he landed with a loud ‘thump’ on a hard stone floor in a dark chamber, lit only by fiery torches flickering from wall sconces.  A sulfurous stench rode air as hot and dry as central Spain in summertime.  Before him sat a huge stone dais and, behind it, a torchlit figure gleamed, bat-like wings spread wide and black from the middle of his back.  He was both beautiful and terrible to behold:  proud face, massive form, manlike but distorted.  A creature like a large house cat with bat-wings that mimicked his own and a bat’s head perched upon his shoulder, gnawing absent-mindedly on his collarbone.

“Welcome to hell, Guy Fawkes,” the winged being said with a voice like the thunder of stones in a landslide.  “I am Satan.  You may have heard of me:  Prince of Darkness, as your countrymen say.  Enjoy your stay in my domain.  You’ve earned it.”

“Hell? 
Satan?
  Mary Mother of Jesus!” exclaimed Fawkes as his bowels let loose in terror. 

The Devil frowned.  The bat-winged thing on his shoulder hissed and its spittle steamed when it hit the ground.  “Too late to call upon those Above.  Choose your words carefully, Fawkes.”

“Why am I in hell?  I’m a martyr.  I should be in heaven for serving the Holy Catholic Church and the Jesuit order.  Did we not help bring down the false Church of England and its evil Protestantism?”

Satan shook his head.  “‘Why?’  For attempted murder, for the Gunpowder Plot.  For choosing one group as good and another as evil and trying to kill those who disagreed with your religion.  Religion brings me many damned souls who sinned in one of its manifold names.  Protestantism, Catholicism:  all
‘isms’
are meaningless in hell.  Here are only the damned.  And you, Guy, are surely damned.”

“But is there no appeal?  No hope of reversing this damnation?” Fawkes demanded, only then realizing that his body was no longer broken, that his neck turned on his shoulders, that no wound afflicted his flesh.

“None.  Or not yet.  You may someday appeal your case, but first you’ll pay for your sins in life.  Thou art damned, Guy Fawkes, to hell!”

*

Anton Szandor LaVey awoke, lying on a black tile floor in an elevator rapidly descending.  He sat up, running his hands over his body, across his shaven head, and down his Mephistophelean goatee, not quite believing he was feeling anything at all.  His last memory was being in a hospital bed while a nurse told him he would pass very soon.

“But pass to where?” he had wondered.

LaVey was the founder of the Church of Satan.  He’d died, he was sure, to awake in an … elevator?  He held no belief in heaven, or any afterlife, really – heaven or hell – especially not in any Christian or biblical or Dantean or Miltonesque sense.  Why should human animals be punished for behaving as nature dictated?  LaVey found man to be nature’s most imperfect, incomplete creation.  Sin, like god, was just another invention of man, designed to keep the teeming hordes compliant and guilt-ridden.

The elevator came to a sudden lurching stop; its doors opened.  LaVey looked out into some kind of basement dimly lit by flickering fluorescents.  The air in his nostrils was hot and dry.  He stepped out of the elevator; its door sighed shut behind him and it disappeared.  Where it had been, only basement remained.

“Well, hello there, tall, bald, and handsome,” said a sultry woman’s voice from behind him.

He jumped, startled.

A pair of arms in black full-length formal gloves wrapped themselves about his chest and locked tightly around him.  Long silky hair brushed his neck.  Moist lips kissed the edge of his mouth.  Sweet game of seduction.

He knew this game well.  Hell, he’d even written a book about it.  Who was this mystery woman?  He shifted to get a better look at this wanton minx.

Arms still wrapped around him, she wriggled around to face him.  She was about his height.  Buxom, full-figured curves filled out a slinky black evening gown, slit up both sides.  Black nylons and a garter belt were visible on her thighs; six-inch stiletto-heeled boots sheathed her legs to just above her knees.  Flame-red hair flowed in waves down past her shoulders.  She had a beautiful, pale face, with high cheekbones and a strong chin.  Bright blue eyes stared at him.

When LaVey opened his mouth to ask who she was, she planted her lips on his and kissed him ravenously.  He reciprocated.  Their tongues intertwined.

Her tongue flicked the roof of his mouth and probed deeper, to the back of his tonsils, and then kept going, down his throat.  He gagged and fought to disengage, pushing against her arms to free himself.  The long wet tongue worked its way further and further down his esophagus, choking him.  Desperately, arching his head back, he broke from her deadly embrace.

He heard a slurping sound.  As the woman stumbled back, she was retracting her black tongue, forked like a snake’s and two feet long.

“What the fuck was that?” LaVey demanded.

She replied in soft demurring tones, “‘Fuck.’  To you it’s profanity, but to me it’s exercise.”  She giggled lasciviously, grabbing her ample breasts and, pushing them up toward him, offered herself once more.

“I’m all for that kind of exercise my dear, but your tongue damn near killed me.  Where did you get that tongue?  Surgery?  Some serpentine fetish?  Who are you, and
where
are we?”

The woman slid the gown off her body and onto the floor, revealing a red patch of kinky hair covering her mound, wherein something sinuous was writhing.

“I’m the Welcome Woman, Harlot Supreme, and this is hell!” she proclaimed with a haughty cackle.  Her features began to shimmer and alter, warping into those of an old hag with rows of needle sharp teeth and black eyes.  Long pointed horns erupted from the top of her skull.  Her body swelled and bulged, gross with fat.  The black nylons and garters stretched over her legs and the knee-high boots split, falling to the floor.  Her breasts became flaccid; her wizened nipples split open and blood spewed from them; her feet curled into cloven hooves, and coarse black hair sprouted from her skin to cover her legs and buttocks.

“Welcome to hell, Anton!” the grotesque creature screamed.

LaVey uttered a strangled cry as a long black tongue shot from her vagina and pulled his face into the cleft of flesh between her hairy thighs.  The stench of sulfur and brine was stifling.

“Kiss me, my darling,” she moaned.

Anton LaVey had no choice.  No woman in life had ever been able to dominate him.  But this was the Harlot of Hell, infernal dominatrix.  She was physically repulsive and her stench made him gag and cough, but he reveled in his subjugation.  If this was hell, it suited him just fine.

“His Satanic Majesty has told me so many sinister things about you, Anton,” she whispered, gyrating her pelvis against his face.  “Now, Anton, you will bestow upon me the Devil’s Kiss to prove your eternal loyalty to me and to His Satanic Majesty, the devil.”

The harlot let him go and lay back on the floor, then turned over and thrust her corpulent buttocks up to him.  She farted noxious fumes into his face.  Despite his nausea from the reek, LaVey put his lips to her anus and quite literally kissed her ass.

“The Devil’s Kiss is a binding pact in hell.  Anton Szandor LaVey, you are truly one of the privileged damned, now and forever.  Perhaps someday soon you will be numbered among the Devil’s Children, Satan’s own intelligence officers,” she told him, her teasing smile revealing deadly teeth.

A diabolical grin spread across LaVey’s face as he imagined what he could achieve in hell as a true servant of the devil.

“Hail Satan!” he proclaimed.

*

“All rise!” the bailiff announced.  “The First Appellate Court of Hell is now in session, the Dishonorable Judge Roy Bean presiding in the case of Guy Fawkes versus Hell.”

Everyone in the courtroom in the Hall of Injustice stood up as the judge entered.  Tall, thick-middled, with a haggard, white-bearded face, he was a man once handsome but not aging well.

“Where in hell is my gavel?  Bailiff!  Get me another one, pronto!” Bean ordered in a voice that had swallowed too much tobacco smoke and whiskey in life and afterlife.

“Yes, Your Dishonor, right away!”  The bailiff scurried to replace the judge’s small wooden gavel.  Bean eyed the replacement judiciously.  “Hrumph!  It’ll not give me as much bang for my buck as my old one, but it’ll have to do, I reckon.”  Judge Bean banged it on the wooden sounding block of the bench.  “You insufferable bastards may be seated!” he declared.

“Counsel for the Appellant may approach the bench.”

Icelandic lawspeaker Eyjolf Bolverksson, wearing a fine linen tunic and a rich scarlet cloak upon his shoulders, strode to the bench, case notes in hand.

“State your case before the court,” Judge Roy Bean told Bolverksson.

“Your Dishonor, my client, Guy Fawkes, brings forth an appeal of his sentence of damnation in hell.”

The Judge responded, “Why does Mister Fawkes think he doesn’t belong in hell?  What evidence substantiates this claim?”

“Your Dishonor, my client maintains that the actions resulting in his untimely death by hanging were undertaken by him in the interest of the Holy Catholic Church against an unjust and false Protestant Anglican Church of England.  He believes he should have been martyred and granted sainthood by the Catholic Church, and thus should have been sent directly to heaven.”

“Did the Catholic Church exonerate this man and grant him such martyrdom after his death?”

“No, Your Dishonor, it did not.  However, we shall prove his lack of canonization to be an oversight on the part of the Catholic Church.  We maintain that my client’s martyrdom is irrefutable.”

“Do you have any witnesses to support your client’s claim to innocence and martyrdom?” Judge Bean asked.

“Yes, Your Dishonor.  Appellant would call Robert Catesby, a peer of Mister Fawkes, to the witness stand.”

“Approach the stand, Mister Catesby – and be quick about it.  I ain’t got all day,” said Judge Roy Bean.

A middle-aged man, six feet tall with the refined features of a nobleman, approached the stand.

“Mister Robert Catesby, be warned:  perjury in this court will not be tolerated.  If I suspect you of lying, we will obtain the truth from you through torture.  Is that clear, Mister Catesby?” asked the judge.

“Yes, Your Dishonor.”

“And that goes for the rest of you damned souls!” Judge Bean added.

“Mister Catesby, sit down, damn you.”

Catesby took his seat in the witness box.

“Council for the Appellant, you may examine the witness.”