Chapter 26
We followed my stepmother as she gave us a tour of
hell. Laura was staring around, wide-eyed and fascinated, but I was
mostly annoyed. I knew hell was going to be awful, but nobody
warned me it’d be chockful of clichés.
There were pits of
boiling oil, complete with screaming souls trying to do the
breaststroke. There was the whole
rolling-a-boulder-uphill-only-to-have-it-squash-you-when-it-rolls-all-the-way-back-down
thing. (I guess this was also hell for dead ancient
Greeks.)
There were people
getting whipped, burned, and shaved. There were people who fell,
again and again, into pits filled with snakes, lizards, mice, gummy
bears.
There were people
running, only to be run over by chariots, horses, tanks,
RVs.
There were people
drowning and people being buried. There were people being attacked
by wild dogs, bears, eagles, ferrets, whippets. Oh,
and—gross!
“Otters?” I asked,
not expecting an answer. “Were those otters?”
I expected to feel a
lot of things in hell, but I never expected boredom. (Although the
otter thing was sort of unusual.)
It scared me, to be
truthful about the whole thing. Seeing suffering and finding it
anticlimactic. I hadn’t been a vampire long, but I was beginning to
see how the old ones, the ones even older than my husband ... they
were bored by everything; screams and pain and despair and horror
left them pretty unmoved. They ended up causing tons of trouble
because at least that was something different.
I wasn’t scared to be
in hell. I was scared that I wasn’t scared to be in
hell.
But I was here, and I
vowed to pay attention and learn what I could. Then I could go back
home and spend the next fifty years repressing this entire
week.
I pondered, then
decided that was as good a plan as any. Pay attention, learn, get
what needed to be done done, have the devil pay up what she
promised, then get the hell, no pun intended, back
home.
That was my plan, and
I was sticking to it.
Yes, of course I
didn’t think it’d be that simple. I’d never been a Mensa member,
but that didn’t mean I needed to read the directions on a box of
cereal to make my breakfast.