Pissing off Hell is not a good idea. Things went downhill rapidly for young Nero, and within a short period of time he found himself off the throne and on the run. He eventually wound up committing suicide. However, the real surprises were still waiting for him.
Ignoculi, like most of Hell’s executives, was extremely good at bearing a grudge. When Nero arrived in Hell it was to discover a special entrance had been built just for him. Yep, the Neronian Bridge. A thousand demons dressed in the finery of Roman imperial guardsmen were already there, waiting to accompany Nero across it in the splendor to which he had become accustomed in life. The great procession set off in single file across the abyss, drums pounding and trumpets tootling, but when Nero reached the other end his retinue abruptly vanished, leaving only the emperor and the one who was waiting to greet him—not Ignoculi himself, but Nero’s late mother, Agrippina.
She must have made a pretty awful sight, crooked and broken and soaking wet from Nero’s first attempt on her life, streaming blood from the sword-thrusts that killed her. Nero, suddenly realizing that he was going to receive something less than a hero’s welcome, tried to flee back across the bridge, but now Ignoculi himself made an appearance on the bridge, a huge, quivering glob of eyes and teeth that blocked the ex-emperor’s retreat like a ton of angry snot.
“Caveat imperator,” the demon reportedly said. In Hell, bad puns are considered a particularly ripe form of torture. Then Agrippina grabbed her son in her bloody, mangled fingers and, with strength she’d never had in life, dragged him shrieking through the gate to Hell and the less-than-imperial fate prepared for him. And of course, from what I’ve heard he’s still there, probably down at the bottom with the rest of the screamers.
After that, the Neronian Bridge was largely forgotten until I got there, just another monument to why you never, never, never get one of hell’s high rollers mad at you—something that I had already managed, big time. Do you think the universe might have been trying to tell me something?
I stepped onto the bridge and started walking.
I had been putting one foot in front of the other for what seemed hours when I noticed that the screams wafting up from below seemed to be growing louder. I hoped that meant I was finally nearing the center of the bridge, but it might just have been that lunch break was over downstairs. I looked down, steadying myself against a dizziness that wasn’t just physical but existential. Perspective turned the flames issuing from cracks in the pit walls into shrinking, tightening rings of concentric fire like a burning bull’s-eye.
Leathery wings flapped past my face, startling me badly, and I realized how close to the edge I was standing. I moved back into the middle of the bridge and began walking again, still in the wrong direction by any sane standard. The winged thing fluttered past me again, brushing against my skin, but the light was too faint to make out what it was. I don’t think it was a bat, because it was crying.
Hours and hours later, the smoldering bull’s-eye was still more or less right beneath me. When you’re crossing a Hell-moat that could be as wide as South Dakota I guess the idea of “near the middle” is fairly relative, but it sure was depressing.
But this was all for Caz, I kept reminding myself, for the Countess of Cold Hands, the beautiful, ruined young girl trapped in an immortal body and sentenced to Hell. No, it wasn’t even for Caz, it was for what we had together, for the moments of happiness and peace I had felt lying in bed with her while the infernal hordes harrowed the streets of San Judas looking for me. Yes, she was one of those infernal minions herself, and yes she had all but told me that I was turning an incident of straightforward battlefield sex between two enemies into some absurd, juvenile love story . . . but oh my sweet God, she was lovely. Nothing in my angelic life had made me feel like she did. Even more, my time with her had showed me that my existence up to this point had been hollow. If it hadn’t been for that, maybe I could have believed it was all demonic glamour—that I had simply been seduced, that I’d fallen for the oldest trick in the Adversary’s book. (There was another reason I didn’t think I was simply being played for a chump. It had to do with a silver locket, but I’ll tell you more about that later.) Anyway, if what I felt for Caz was just a trick, an illusion, then nothing else mattered, either.
Love. Tired old jokes aside, a real, powerful love does have one thing in common with Hell itself: it burns everything else out of you.
Hours in, hypnotized by endless, flickering shadows, it took me far longer than it should have to realize that the spot of darkness on the bridge ahead of me was not simply another shadow or a floating spot in my vision but something real. I slowed, squinting, my dreamy half-life suddenly cracked into pieces. Was it waiting for me? Had Eligor found out I was coming and prepared a welcome for me, something like that horned Babylonian nightmare that I had barely managed to survive back in San Jude? The only thing that had stopped the last one was a precious piece of silver, Caz’s locket, but I didn’t have anything like that now. My new demon body was naked and I didn’t have a gun. I didn’t even have a stick.
As I got closer I saw that the shape wasn’t standing erect like a man but was on all fours like an animal. Closer still and I could see that it was crawling away from me, which gave me my first moment of relief since I’d stepped onto this bloody bridge. Mama Dollar’s baby boy is no fool, though, or at least not in the obvious ways; as I began to catch up to the solitary crawler I slowed down so I could examine it.
It was manlike but unpleasant to watch, like a blind, clumsy insect. Its hands were clubbed and fingerless, the body distorted, and even by the standards of that miserable place it reflected very little light: it seemed less like a solid thing and more like a smudge on the surface of reality. I was right behind it now, but it seemed unaware of my presence, still crawling like a crippled penitent, drawing itself along as though each movement was miserably difficult. The very slowness of its progress made me wonder how long it had been on the bridge.
I didn’t want to walk around it, not on that narrow span. Just because it looked slow and stupid didn’t mean it wouldn’t turn on me. I considered simply jumping over it, but I didn’t trust the footing either.
“What are you doing?” I said. “Are you hurt?”
The sudden noise of my new, raspy demon-voice startled even me, but the crawling thing gave no indication it had heard. I tried again.
“I need to get past you.”
Nothing. If the crawling thing wasn’t deaf, it was sure acting like it.
Frustrated, I finally reached down and yanked on its leg to get its attention, but although the man-shape looked solid, it was as brittle as a dessert meringue. The entire limb broke loose underneath my fingers in flaky shards, leaving nothing below the knee. In horror, I dropped the substantial piece of leg. It broke into pieces, many of which bounced slowly over the edge of the bridge and vanished into darkness. The thing finally stopped crawling long enough to turn toward me, and I caught a glimpse of a gray face with empty hollows for eyes and an equally empty hole of a mouth stretched wide in surprise or horror. Then it tilted to one side as if the loss of the leg had overbalanced it and toppled off the bridge without a sound.