Raising Hell

By Phillip T Stephens

A clueless optimist ruins a perfectly good hell.
Pity poor Lucifer. He rules hell with a vice grip. Demons and damned scatter at the sound of his foot steps. The Supreme Butt In hasn’t pestered him in eons. Lucifer’s future looks perfect, pitch black, until an administrative error sticks him with an innocent soul—an overweight optimist who calls himself Pilgrim and who believes he must be in hell to do good.
Lucifer never considers sending him back. He orders his subordinates to torture, degrade and humiliate Pilgrim until he promises to become evil if only it will ease the pain. Unfortunately, Pilgrim makes the best of the worst possible experiences. Always polite and well-mannered, he makes Pollyanna seem like a prophet of doom. Even worse, the damned start catching on, and set about making hell into the most enjoyable place of everlasting torment they can.
Lucifer can’t let Pilgrim continue to wreak happiness, but he can’t send him back untainted, either. When God arrives with a deadline for Pilgrim’s return, he enlists fellow fallen angels Screwtape, Azazel and the gender morphing Mephistopheles in a plot to corrupt Pilgrim’s soul before the deadline expires.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phillip T Stephens
• Release date: Jun 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9780985828523

Phillip T Stephens

During my freshman year in high school, the principal called me into his office and said, "I hear you're hanging out with left-leaning radicals looking to undermine my authority and the authority of the teachers and the school." Now anyone who knew me, also knew I was the Baptist preacher's kid and I may have been a smart-ass but this was San Marcos, Texas in 1968. Shit kicker country. A town where we woke up to the sound of roosters and aroma of the stockyards. I wouldn't know a leftist from a hash pipe. I said, "Not really, but if you'll point me to them, I'll be glad to join." Principals have no since of humor and so he took me at my word. He failed to point me toward any leftist companions, but he did assume I wished their association. Nor would I dissuade him of his delusion, for I discovered in that moment the safety of hiding behind false assumptions rather than emerging into the light. You see, my parents, staunch fundamentalists (my father a Baptist minister and my mother a Presbyterian who married a Baptist minister) believed aliens were the devil's deception, like fossils and evolution. What a wonderfully cruel joke the aliens played on them when they left me on their doorstep on Christmas Eve. Alien babies can't be distinguished from humans. My parents had difficulties adjusting to alien adolescence, but they preferred it to demon possession. Nonetheless, the many hours I spent writing human dialogue in an attempt to master human role playing evolved into fiction and made me the writer I am today. I'm still an embarrassment to my parents, but an adopted alien fiction writer is no less an embarrassment than any other fiction writer who can't get a real job. (Phillip and his wife Carol rescue and foster Alien-Siamese hybrids in Austin, Texas hoping to rehome them, implant free, before the invasion. You can find many warm loving hybrids, indistinguishable from earhling kitties at austinsiameserescue.org.)

Book preview

Raising Hell

by Phillip T. Stephens

Fiction

Literary Fiction

Satire

Humor

Smashwords Edition

©2012

Electronic ISBN: ISBN: 978-0-9858285-2-3

Too Bright Girls Publications

Austin, TX

[e-mail]

Cover art by Phillip T. Stephens

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Other titles by Phillip T. Stephens:

Cigerets, Guns & Beer

The Worst Noel

For more Raising Hell fun visit gdiMonday’s.

Table of Contents

Part One: Testing the Water

Chapter One

In which our hero, Lucifer, must deal with a clerical error that should have been handled by the mindless minions he had sentenced to dealing with mind-numbing minutiae guaranteed to make them suffer eternally through the very frustrations that caused them to utter the very comments that got them condemned to everlasting damnation in the first place.

Chapter Two

In which the reader is introduced to the concept of time in hell, then suffers through a segue into a panicked dream revealing that even Lucifer has insecurities, a dream which may turn out to have been prophetic when Lucifer discovers that he can’t delegate thorny problems away even though, as Supreme Lord of Hell, the powers of delegation come with the position. (Complete with schematics and illustrations.)

Chapter Three

In which Lucifer chooses to personally oversee the flogging and torture of Pilgrim, only to discover that punishment, no matter how painful, is all a matter of perspective. At least to morons and optimists, who (in Lucifer's opinion) just happen to be morons as well.

Chapter Four

In which Lucifer decides to deal with the Pilgrim problem personally, a decision which leads to a tour of the urban segments of hell, a lengthy conversation with his most insidious opponent since the All Misty-Eyed and his discovery that the scalpel of psychoanalysis cuts both ways.

Chapter Five

In which Lucifer decides to show Pilgrim how difficult he can make his afterlife by assigning him to hell’s most notorious micromanager, only to discover how efficient the right employee can make the wrong things.

Chapter Six

In which Lucifer resorts to political indoctrination using techniques he taught to Mao Zedong, Hitler, motivational speakers and public educators across the world—propagandists who trained generations of students to wipe all traces of independent thought from their unformed and uncritical little minds—only to discover how badly indoctrination can backfire when the wrong soul is forced to participate.

Part Two: Making Waves

Chapter Seven

In which Lucifer decides the best way to deal with recalcitrant souls is to go old school and make a one-sided bargain that seems impossible to refuse but at the same time hopelessly entangles the victim in ambiguity and compromise that will, sooner or later, seal his fate, only to discover that any devil’s bargain can be twisted, insidiously, to the greater good.

Chapter Eight

In which the joy Lucifer feels during Pilgrim’s brief absence is undermined by the sudden appearance of The Lord It Alloveryou himself, an appearance which results in a demand for Pilgrim’s immediate return, a demand which, in turn, prompts a series of reveries about the first moments of creation, the obnoxiousness of God and the unintended conversation that made Lucifer the patsy for the fall of the angels.

Chapter Nine

In which Lucifer discovers that a deal with the Devil may backfire even when the devil makes the deal. Or, in the immortal words of Sky Masterson, Daddy, I’ve got cider in my ear.

Part Three: Opening the Flood Gates

Chapter Ten

In which Lucifer decides that if the best way to fight fire is with fire, then the best way to fight good is with the opportunity to do even more good, hoping that good would be a very bad thing indeed for Pilgrim indeed.

Chapter Eleven

In which Lucifer discovers, much to his horror and dismay, how easily an eternity of compounding the interest of bad deeds onto the interest of more bad deeds can cause an investment that was poorly-conceived (but seemingly wise at the time it was made) to crumble under its own weight.

Chapter Twelve

In which Lucifer realizes that hell hath no fury like his own, only to discover the full flower of his wrath still can’t appease the rage he feels towards Pilgrim, who constantly interferes with his grand design (or, at least, his hazy spiteful vision) for the afterlife, and, in which, desperate for a way to turn the tables on Pilgrim, he seizes on a plan so diabolical it proves to be proverbial as well.

Chapter Thirteen

In which His Satanic Majesty Lucifer, finding himself defeated and totally despondent for the first time in eternity (which includes his many dealings with His Lord It Over You), reluctantly entertains advice from his foremost adversary and realizes he can, indeed, fall even further than he already has.

Chapter Fourteen

In which it could be argued that all's well that ends well, but that’s really a matter of perspective, isn’t it? One could even ask oneself if Lucifer would have gotten into his mess if he understood how perspective works. Unfortunately, perspective wasn’t really invented until the Greek Classical Period, by which time it was far too late for Lucifer to learn his lesson.

Epilogue

In which we finally have a chapter that needs no introduction (except for this bit).

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Phillip T. Stephens

Reference Notes

In which some readers realize that all of those little numbers in the text you’ve been ignoring were trying to tell you something, but you weren’t paying attention and now, if the information below catches you’re interest, you’ll have to work even harder to figure out where they belong.

Part One: Testing the Water

Chapter One

In which our hero, Lucifer, must deal with a clerical error that should have been handled by the mindless minions he had sentenced to dealing with mind-numbing minutiae guaranteed to make them suffer eternally through the very frustrations that caused them to utter the very comments that got them condemned to everlasting damnation in the first place.

His Satanic Majesty Lucifer of the Morning Star; Ruler of the Lower Dimensions of Darkness; Proprietor of His Satanic Majesty’s Hall of Everlasting Damnation, Torture and Never Ending Decay; and Sovereign Lord of the Devoted Knights of His Satanic Majesty Lucifer of the Morning Star (or so he referred to himself informally) stared at the two quivering masses of jelly who called themselves his palace guards.

What do you mean he’s happy?

The guards kowtowed so deeply in his fiberglass carpet that the fibers crawled through their nostrils and out their ears. Their prisoner sat between them, locked in a porta-kennel for the damned.¹ One of them mumbled through the fibers, He’s happy, your most unforgiving. We flog him, burn him, pull out his toe nails one-by-one…

The other guard pitched in, …curse him, spit on him, slap him silly, and stick iron hot pokers in his ears.

The first guard finished, face still buried to the back of his neck in fiberglass, All he says is, ‘You guys are really good at this.’

Lucifer grabbed them by the napes of their necks and pulled their faces level with his own. No one can be happy in hell. Don’t you have any brains at all?

He turned their skulls inside out and thumped the cavities. He scraped the inside of their skulls with twelve-inch nails until they sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard. No brains. I didn’t think so.

He dropped the guards back onto the carpet, changing the fibers to bull nettles and sticky thorns. Now listen carefully. hell runs on a few simple rules, and if you simply follow the rules, you’ll become the horrible examples no one would dare follow.

Lucifer leaned in so that his nostril was only inches from their faces. Instead of the miserable, kowtowing, ass-kissing toadies you are now.

It was already a bad day, as days go in hell, days that could be very long and aggravating when they didn’t go as planned, which, for some reason he could never understand, they usually didn’t.

Just today Osama Bin Laden stopped him to demonstrate the massive airliner he crashed into hell’s central office district scattering millions of souls into tiny charred pieces that wriggled around the debris trying to find the rest of themselves. How can you top that for pain and misery? he begged.

Lucifer had to reach down Bin Laden’s throat and tie his intestines into a Gordian pretzel. You ignorant Shiite for brains, he screamed in Bin Laden’s ear so loud it popped his cochlea into thirty-seven pieces. In hell that’s just a long weekend.

This was just before George Bush showed up, the dumber one, with his entire entourage in tow—Rumsfeld with his nose tucked between the legs of Rove with his nose tucked between the legs of Cheney whose nose was being swatted away by Condoleezza Rice—all of them begging for the opportunity to do the Lord’s will and take Bin Laden back for execution.

Lucifer sent them away for another hundred-year session of waterboarding with boiling oil while listening to Barack Obama’s inaugural address played to the rhythm of Jimi Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner. He hoped they would one day figure out that Bin Laden was dead, they were dead and that there was literally no way in hell they would be doing the work of the supreme butt-in anytime soon.

The only good thing about eternal damnation was that he always had time to get through his to-do list in spite of the ceaseless petty annoyances and interruptions.

Like this one.

He slipped a forty-foot thick parchment scroll from his sleeve and sliced the seal with a razor sharp nail. The scroll rolled across the carpet, across the guards and across the room. He ran a finger nail down the 1 point gothic black face text. Here’s a simple rule. Number 2759.85.D paragraph 12.a sub 6: ‘Abuse the soul at every opportunity. Pile on the abuse with layer after layer of confidence-reducing adjectives designed to make them feel even more worthless. Then make them grovel in their lack of self-worth by heaping larger and larger piles of malediction and invective onto the piles you already heaped there.’

He paused dramatically and waited until they began to squirm so violently with dread and nervous anticipation that they couldn’t possibly process anything he said without vacating every orifice and pore.

Can a rule be any more simple than that?

He pulled his hardcover copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People from the other sleeve and pounded them about their heads. Or could it be that you’re too ignorant to know what malediction and invective mean, you quarter-witted, empty-headed, totally clueless, numbskulls who make single-celled organisms look like the pinnacle of evolution by comparison?

We did all that sir, the first guard said as he tried to twist his head back into position. We used every abusive word we knew, in every combination…

All twelve of them, his partner added.

When we ran out of those we used a thesaurus and spelled out the words we didn’t know. But it didn’t do any good.

The other guard said. Instead he taught us new ones that worked even better.

’Wind eggs,’ the first guard said.

That means ‘farts,’ the second guard added. And don’t forget ‘phlegmatic.’ I still don’t know what it means but it sounds real bad.

Lucifer inserted three fingers, nails extended, all the way up each of their nostrils and yanked their faces toward him. I know what a wind egg is you phlegmatic, spasmatic, grammatically clueless cretins.

His nails curled out their ears and around their throats. Perhaps you should have tried a more simple rule. He dropped the two spastically shaking jelly rolls and unrolled a scroll twice as long as the first one. Let’s try rule 298759.4397090.z subsection 3477A paragraph 2010: ‘Never forget to apply intense unbearable physical pain at every opportunity. This includes flaying, flogging, skinning, beating, pounding, biting, burning, searing, scorching, scratching and liberal doses of itching powder.’

But, your most treacherous, the first guard protested. We boiled him in oil until he melted away. He said he’d taste even better in a beef broth with potatoes and carrots.

The second guard added, We ripped his internal organs out and soaked them in a solution of Tabasco sauce, salt and jalepeño peppers. Then we sewed them back into his body. He recommended we try chipotle peppers if we really wanted to turn up the heat.

Or chili piquins, the first one said. He said those would be even hotter. Both shook their heads in anxious agreement.

We pulled his teeth out one by one and stuffed them root first into his…

Enough! Lucifer let a slim sliver of flame roll from his tongue across their faces. He rolled the scroll closed and tucked it into his pants, moving it inward to bulge against his thigh. How do you expect to earn promotions if you can’t punish a single difficult soul?

We can get promotions? they asked in unison.

Stick to the point, Lucifer lashed at them. Are you saying that this soul is happy not because of your total, absolute, unquestionable incompetence, but because my well-crafted and easy-to-follow rules don’t work?

He turned up the flame from his breath, scorching their eyelashes and eyebrows. The two guards peed all over themselves, Lucifer’s clean white carpet, and the port-a-kennel for the damned.

Struggles, Lucifer yelled. His Victorian era English valet, sporting a starched collar and morning coat, dashed over to wipe up the mess with one of the many meaningless Middle Age popes.

Struggles kneeled to clean the prisoner’s kennel. Lucifer snarled, Just clean the carpet. Let the prisoner soak in his situation.

Even though porta-kennels are a tight squeeze for tiny white lab rats, the soul inside weighed more than two hundred pounds. The prisoner’s skin, fingers and the occasional toe popped through the seams between the bulging kennel walls.

The prisoner inside said, Thank you, sir. I was getting a little parched in here.

Lucifer felt his skull pop through the skin on his head. He caught it with his left hand and tucked it back in. He pulled the hapless imps across his desk. Why is that prisoner grateful, you five watt, burned out, long ago discarded for useless dim wits?

Two lions’ heads reared up from his jacket buttons and gnawed on the imp’s cheeks and eyebrows.

We told you, your most miserable, the first guard said, his face buried so deep in the carpet threads that his voice sounded like a wet vacuum whose nozzle was caught by suction against dry wall. He likes it here.

Lucifer leaned closer to hear better. Just because I’m the devil it doesn’t mean I have super hearing. Even though, in fact, it actually did. What did you say?

They said I like it here, came the voice from the kennel.

Lucifer banged the guard’s head against the ceiling, the bookcase, the mantle, picture frames, the desk, the wall and any other surface he could reasonably expect to inflict pain.

Do you really want me to believe this prisoner enjoys hell? He grabbed a laser saber from his collection of exotic weapons, swords, lances, spears and Swiss Army knives. Hell? Where souls suffer worse than this when I’m in a good mood?

He set the beam to dull, and hacked at both imps with a faint beam of light until nothing remained but wriggling green pieces of demon flesh on the floor, the walls, and occasionally the ceiling. Lucifer particularly relished decapitating and dismembering his denizens because, when he finished, they still had to pick up their own pieces and report to their next shift.

Excuse me, the prisoner said, but don’t you think you’re being a little hard on them? I mean, I’m the problem. They did all they could to make me miserable. Can they help it if I always look for the bright side of things?

Lucifer dropped his third jaw.

Excuse me? He blasted the kennel and the prisoner’s skin with a withering whirlwind of heat coughed up from the bottom of his lungs. Excuse me? Who are you to tell His Satanic Majesty how to treat one of his imps? You pretentious, ignorant, ill mannered, speak out of turn, festering son of an unwanted, uninvited, should have been aborted busybody.

He hurled the kennel against the fireplace. It smashed into a thousand metal and plastic pieces and spilled its prisoner onto the floor. Lucifer lifted the prisoner and dangled him by his ankles from a pair of gryphons on the mantle.

You might want to watch that temper, the prisoner said. All that anger can be really negative. We’re talking major league bad karma here.

The prisoner weighed more than two hundred pounds, and stretched down to five feet six, with long curls of kinky black hair, olive skin and an enormous hooked nose. Lucifer figured him for a Palestinian goatherd who spent his life dodging Israeli missiles, or a New York cab driver dodging cars and traffic cops.

Lucifer snapped his fingers and banished both guards to the Hell of Insubordinate Sub-creatures and Bureaucrats Condemned to Grovel Eternally Before Supervisors with the Vision, Charisma and Intelligence of Oatmeal. They disappeared in a puff of neon gas. Struggles appeared with a vacuum to sweep up any remains.

He turned his attention to the prisoner. Who exactly are you?

Just a pilgrim, sir, he said as he massaged each muscle one-by-one.

The lion head buttons popped off Lucifer’s jacket and began to gnaw on the pilgrim’s cheeks and neck. To Lucifer’s amazement, he picked the tiny creatures up, and began to tickle their bellies. The lions purred, and rubbed their faces against his fingers.

These are cute little guys, Pilgrim said. I bet you have a lot of fun playing with them in your free time.

Lucifer’s brain boiled over with a rage he only felt when dealing with the Lord It Over You himself. He stormed to his stereo and turned up The Ride of the Valkyries until the screaming soprano voices bounced off the walls and shook the ground beneath them.

Pilgrim looked around, Cool office, he said. Like the Penthouse Suite. I bet you throw some kick ass parties.

We do not party in hell, Lucifer reprimanded him, gathering his robe about him and sitting with one cheek on the corner of his desk. We beg for mercy, we plead for forgiveness that never comes, we scream in pain, but we don’t party.

At least you get to scream in first-rate surroundings, Pilgrim said.

Lucifer nailed him to the fireplace with needles from his eyes. While Pilgrim pulled them out, Lucifer opened his armoire.

Eons of experience with treacherous souls taught Lucifer that a carefully chosen wardrobe helped him control any interview. With the proper dress and attitude, he could entertain a fire breathing, battle-ready demon and send him away whimpering and promising to be a bad little boy.

He skipped over his battle armor, pushed aside his imperial robes, and shook his head when he reached his business suits. This Pilgrim looked too clueless to be intimidated by an open display of power. Lucifer would have to tweak his subliminal fears, stir up some monsters from the id.

He dropped his skin-tight, vinyl, Gene Simmons outfit, complete with bass guitar and prosthetic twelve-inch tongue, to the floor. He pushed aside the Fifteenth Century velvet jacket with twelve inch round epaulets, leotards, jester hat and curly-toed shoes with silver bell. He tossed his Zen Mistress robes, his false perfect master tunic complete with blind third eye, his Krishna costume with six sleeves and thousands of false teeth, and his televangelist outfit with hand painted pompadour and rhinestone studded black velvet jacket.

While Lucifer pondered his wardrobe, Struggles pried open the gryphon’s claws. Pilgrim tumbled into the carpet, then stood and massaged his calf muscles. He began to tap his feet to the music playing over and over again on Lucifer’s Hi Fi.

The worn LP skipped, popped and cracked. The better to torture music lovers with, Lucifer smiled to himself.

The tone arm lifted and dropped back to the beginning of the record. The Valkyries soared from the speakers again. For an instant, Lucifer thought he heard the prisoner mumbling. He popped an ear loose and stretched it around the armoire’s door.

Pilgrim sang, Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit.

Lucifer stepped into the open. Did I give you permission to sing?

Sorry, Pilgrim said. There’s this cartoon? Elmer Fudd thinks he can kill Bugs Bunny and sings ‘Kill the Wabbit’ to the Ride of the Valkyries. It’s a pretty good bit. Bugs disguises himself as Elmer’s love Brunnhilda, Elmer thinks he accidentally kills her. They even toss in some music from Tannhauser: ‘Goodbye my wuv. La da da La da, la da da….’ I forget the rest of it, but it’s even funnier because Elmer can’t pronounce ‘r’ or ‘l’.

Did I give you permission to speak? Lucifer turned to his Victorian era desk and commanded, The buzzer, Byron.

Lord Byron, his secretary and desk caddy, reached from the middle desk drawer and pushed a button on Lucifer’s desk. Each push sent a gigawatt of electricity surging through Pilgrim’s body.n2

Sparks popped from Pilgrim’s earlobes, fingertips, toes and hair follicles. He opened his mouth to speak, but the sparks arced from one tooth to another, lighting him up like an amusement park.

That’s better, Lucifer said. Down here the damned imagine dead rabbits. Picture their little paws being cut off, and their fur being skinned away before they’re dropped into a boiling pot screaming, ‘Help me, help me.’ We want each soul to realize the exact same thing will happen to him.

Lucifer pulled his royal black Nazi SS uniform jacket with fractal lightning bolts branching down both arms from its hanger and held it next to a pair of red spandex toreador pants. He took the pants as well.

I don’t mean to sound presumptuous, Pilgrim said, but maybe you’d take more pleasure from the afterlife if you didn’t listen to Wagner all the time. He’s incredibly pompous and self-absorbed, don’t you think? All trumpets, tympani, piss and vinegar. No wonder people seem so tense around here. It’s like every soul in hell is a big shoulder blade sorely in need of a massage.

Lucifer caught a nail in the Spandex. I don’t need to explain myself to some cab driving Pillsbury doughboy just off the docks and clueless about the real world.

Pilgrim drifted across the room to study Bosch’s Last Temptation of Christ in the Wilderness.³ Wouldn’t Mozart make more sense than Wagner? Pilgrim prattled on as though Lucifer hadn’t said a word. He relaxes and prepares you for the daily minutiae. Did you know that studies link listening to Mozart to the production of neural pathways? Boosts your I.Q. as it were.

Lucifer felt his blood begin to boil. You don’t get it, do you? You opinionated, ill-mannered, speak-without-being-spoken-to lout with no more couth than an oaf hogging the hors d’oeuvres at the governor’s ball.

Pilgrim stood on his tiptoes, and ran a finger across the top of the painting’s frame, touching off an avalanche of dust and vermin. Couth isn’t a word, is it? Wouldn’t it be more correct to say ‘an uncouth oaf hogging the hors d’oeuvres at the governor’s party?’

Lucifer stepped around the wardrobe door wearing his thong, teddy and stiletto heels. His crepe blouse dangled from his fingernail.

"Listen here, you participle parsing, dictionary reciting, self-appointed Commissioner of the Grammar Police. You’re in hell, and I run hell, and I’ll use any devildamned words I devildamned well want to use whenever I devildamned feel like it. Am I