Hell

     
    Stuart found hell, as promised, underneath the city of Cleveland. There was an alley on West 6th street between a pizza place and a cocktail bar, and at the end of it was a scarred grey steel door set into a brick wall. Its paint was chipped around the edges but it was devoid of tags. Stuart felt drawn to it the moment he arrived in the city. With a hefty push he was able to move it. It opened with a simultaneous squeak and grinding sound, as if it wasn’t hung properly in its frame. It crashed back into itself after Stuart let it go, and he shuddered at the noise.
    The stairs were a dark charcoal color, worn down in the middle from countless footfalls, and chipped along the edges in places. He reached a landing. There were upturned buckets and ashtrays studded with cigarette butts and stubs of rollies. There was a battered budget love seat, ripped at the seams. A love seat that had given up its innocence years ago in the crossfire of drunken break-room trysts. A lust seat. The place smelled of mildew and stale tobacco smoke. He turned the corner and started down another set of stairs. Scrawled on the wall near the top of the stairs in white paint was a reminder. ‘VALEFOR’, it said on the first line in giant block letters, and below: ‘take out the garbage’. Penned in another hand was second note, a reminder to Valefor that he is a fuckwit.
    He continued down the stairway to hell. The walls were increasingly covered in some kind of corrosion-green drippings from above, and he could hear faint rumble and chatter, like a big diesel engine off in the distance.The noise built upon itself in layers, and atop the rumbling chatter he soon heard a manic ringing, like a blacksmith’s convention, and upon that a screaming hiss and an orchestra of metallic clashes and clangs. Still Stuart continued down the charcoal-grey stairs.
    The stairs stopped at a narrow hallway lit by smoky candles. A hissing voice from a dark corner called to Stuart.
    “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate!”
    He looked around. “What?”
    “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate!”
    “… I don’t speak Italian.”
    An old man with a pointed beard that came down to his waist stepped out from the shadows. He was bald, with liver spots and smelled curiously of motor oil. “Oh. Too bad.” He made a dismissive waving gesture  “I’m just fucking with you anyway.” He gave a good-natured smile, and his cloudy eyes smiled with him. He put out his hand to Stuart. “Prince Vassago, commander of twenty-six legions, declarer of things past and to come, finder of things lost and abandoned and prince of prophesy”
    “Stuart. Good to meet you”
    “So, Stuart, what brings you to these parts?
    “My mother said my dad was down here.” He paused. “And I was getting a little sick of the constant timeshare pitches.”
    Vassago smiled. “That’s why I left too a while back. You think it’s bad now, back before God had a kid and settled down it was fucking bedlam. Imagine the most volatile teenage asshole you can think of, and then make him omnipotent. What a dickhead.” He gave the kind of look you might give a fully-functioning adult who had soiled himself. “Well anyway, a bunch of us decided we’d had enough, and you’ve probably heard the rest of the story. Anyway, now we’re here after a couple of relocations. It wasn’t always Cleveland, but we’re treaty-bound to relocate to whatever shithole God dictates.  We were under Manchester for a long time. It’s really not as bad here as you’ve probably been led to believe. We just don’t have the PR that God and his people have. I mean, they’ve got churches, the whole Vatican, Mormons, and what do we have? A handful of heavy metal bands in Norway and the glue-huffing teenagers who listen to them. Believe me, they’ll be disappointed if they ever make it here.”
    They walked down the hall as they spoke, and soon came upon a rather plain but heavy set of bronze doors. Vassago pulled on one and motioned for Stuart to enter.
    The door was situated halfway down a sheer clifflike face. Before them was a cyclopean cavern that stretched for miles in every direction. Smoke settled at the top of the cavern, pierced by the black roots of mighty trees. Below them was a shantytown with countless tiny shacks built from the discarded detritus of Cleveland above. The cavern was dim, lit with an orange cast from garbage fires and torches.
    “So,” Vassago gestured to the settlement below “this is Dis. A lot of people actually find it preferable to Cleveland”, and he smiled sadly.
    The two began climbing down the carved stone steps to the floor of the cavern.
    “How do people end up here?”
    “Like you, mostly. It’s a pretty self-selecting group of souls. Those who can’t or won’t deal with all the nonsense up there.” Vassago climbed the stairs like a man with a bad back. “We also get the occasional confused dishwasher from that pizza place.” He flashed a mischievous smile.
    “A few get sent here straight off the bat, mostly the types that heaven would find embarrassing to have lounging around up there. Osama Bin Laden got here the other day. You can bet money Mel Gibson’s on the list.”
    “So, what about Satan? Is he real?”
    Vassago’s brow furrowed. “Satan means adversary, did you know that? Anyway, he’s dead. Has been for about 300 years.” Vassago’s cloudy eyes looked sad for the first time since Stuart had arrived. “He was brilliant; Sharpest organizer I’ve ever met. I think he took it pretty hard when God told him there was no going back, especially after He got on that big forgiveness kick.”
    Vassago stopped to catch his breath at the bottom of the steps. “I’m afraid I can’t help you finding your dad, but best of luck, Steve”
    “Stuart. What about all that ‘finder of lost things’ stuff you were talking about before? This place is huge, it’s going to take years to find him.”
    “Oh, that, that’s just a bunch of bullshit some German demonologist made up about me. Sorry, I didn’t think you were really going to ask me to look for anything. Anyway, good luck.”
Stuart nodded, thanked the demon for his time, and walked down the dirt road.