Lawyers in Hell Read online

  Perseid Publishing

  Paradise Productions LLC

  P.O. Box 312, West Hyannisport MA 02672

  Lawyers In Hell

  Copyright © 2011 by Janet Morris

  First Perseid Publishing / Kerlak Publishing hardback edition, May, 2011

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

  resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Please purchase only authorized editions.

  Uploading and distribution by any means without permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law.

  Book Design by Ellie Herring; Cover Design by Sonja Aghabekian

  Cover Art: Sebastiano Ricci, Sturz der rebellischen Engel, 1720

  Published in the United States of America

  Acknowledgements

  Interview with the Devil by Janet Morris and Chris Morris

  Tribe of Hell by Janet Morris

  The Rapture Elevator by Michael Armstrong

  Out of Court Settlement by C. J. Cherryh

  Revolutionary Justice by Leo Champion

  Tale of a Tail by Nancy Asire

  And Injustice For All by Jason Cordova

  Measure of a Man by Deborah Koren

  The Adjudication of Hetty Green by Allan F. Gilbreath

  Plains of Hell by Bruce Durham

  The Register by Michael H. Hanson

  Island Out of Time by Richard Groller

  Appellate Angel by Edward McKeown

  With Enemies Like These by David L. Burkhead

  The Dark Arts by Kimberly Richardson

  Heads You Lose by Michael Z. Williamson

  Check and Mate by Bradley H. Sinor

  Disclaimer by John Manning

  Orientation Day by Sarah Hulcy

  Remember, Remember, Hell in November by Larry Atchley, Jr.

  Theo Khthonios by Scott Oden

  Erra and the Seven by Chris Morris

  Related Works:

  Heroes in Hell

  The Gates of Hell

  Rebels in Hell

  Kings in Hell

  Crusaders in Hell

  Legions in Hell

  Angels in Hell

  Masters in Hell

  The Little Helliad

  War in Hell

  Prophets in Hell

  Explorers in Hell

  Table of Contents

  Interview with the Devil

  Tribe of Hell

  The Rapture Elevator

  Out of Court Settlement

  Revolutionary Justice

  Tale of a Tail

  And Injustice For All

  Measure of a Man

  The Adjudication of Hetty Green

  Plains of Hell

  The Register

  Island Out of Time

  Appellate Angel

  With Enemies Like These

  The Dark Arts

  Heads You Lose

  Check and Mate

  Disclaimer

  Orientation Day

  Remember, Remember, Hell in November

  Theo Khthonios

  Erra and the Seven

  Interview with the Devil

  by

  Janet Morris and Chris Morris

  Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

  – Mark Twain

  Satan was fuming, literally, when I was escorted into his office on the top floor of New Hell’s Hall of Injustice by Marilyn Monroe in a tight red knit dress. Aside from the devil and his desk, the huge place was empty from corbeled, cobwebby rafters to filthy marble floor. The whole office reeked of smoke. Wisps of gray smoke curled upward from his big black leathery wings, his wide maw, and leaked between his glittering fangs. His yellow eyes burned into whatever soul I have left, and hurt.

  “Sire, this is William Safire, from the New Hell Times Sinday Magazine,” Marilyn breathed throatily. “For your interview.” She teetered on red patent leather heels with six-inch spikes toward the son of the morning. “Here is the list of pre-approved questions, YSM.”

  “That will be all, Marilyn,” said Satan in a cultured voice, taking the list between his diamond claws. The list ignited as he held it, crumbling to char in his hand.

  Marilyn brushed past me and swished her way out of the office as if I didn’t exist. There was no chair for me. I had to stand. On my belt was my mini audio/video recorder; I tapped it. Now we were recording video, against all the rules. How few among the damned souls sent to hell had ever seen the notorious devil, up close and personal? What I did, I did as a public service.

  Mephistopheles sat on his desk, not behind it – looking at my crotch, it seemed. His tail lashed. He crossed powerful arms and said, “Safire. I do like the name. Just who were you, again? Before you came here to my domain?”

  “I was Richard Nixon’s speechwriter. He was an American president, you might recall. ‘Nattering nabobs of negativism’: that was my work. I wrote that line, sir – for Nixon’s vice president. Later, of course, I was a columnist for the New York Times. And now, for the New Hell Times….”

  “‘Sire’, not ‘sir,’” said the devil.

  “What does YSM stand for … Sire?” It was difficult to call anyone ‘sire,’ but I have interviewed my share of kings and queens and self-styled tyrants. And now, the most dastardly overlord of them all.

  “‘Your Satanic Majesty.’ Can we get to your questions? We have windows to replace in here today.”

  HSM was using either the editorial ‘we,’ or the royal ‘we,’ I didn’t quite dare ask which one: I might be the most famous etymologist of the twentieth century, but my interlocutor is the devil (from the Middle English devel, from Old English dēofol, an early Germanic borrowing from the Latin diabolus, in turn borrowed from Ancient Greek diábolos). “Sire, I’ve heard those windows always need replacing…. Howard Hughes built this building from Frank Lloyd Wright’s design, correct? My readers want to know details like that: what your … life … is like.”

  “Immaterial. No unapproved questions. Get on with it, Safire, or I’ll call in some demons to string you from my flagpole and eat your liver for a few hundred years.” The devil stretched out his arms and unfurled his black wings. His form suddenly shimmered and shifted and a handsome, steely-eyed man with brush-cut gray hair in a pinstriped suit sat before me. The smell of smoke abated.

  “Yes, all right. Well, this interview will be available on Gurgle and every other browser, so your subjects can read it on their phones and PDAs. But no video or audio, as your staff stipulated: just print. I’m required to tell you that. And that I’m recording this conversation – only for accuracy, of course.”

  “Read it on their what?”

  “On their hellphones and Pernicious Demonic Avatars, Sire.”

  The devil reached behind him and pulled something out of his nether regions: a black-furred winged thing, part cat, part bat, with shiny white fangs. It yowled, swiped at the Father of Lies, sprang to the floor and launched itself straight at me.

  Satan lifted a finger and pointed at the leaping bat/cat/leather-winged thing. It burst into a ball of flames in midair and disappeared, leaving only a few ashes drifting to the floor.

  “Michael doesn’t like you. One wonders why.” Steely eyes looked me up and down once more. “Your questions, Safire. I have a hell of a lot to do.”

  “Yes, well. Ah ... Prince of Darkness, will you please tell me what it means to the citizens of New Hell that you and all the other lords of hell are being audited by emissaries from on high, coming here to determine whether or not injustice is bein
g fairly dispensed…?”

  “‘Administered.’ Not ‘dispensed,’” Satan corrected me. “It means that some in the manifold hells of creation have existences far too cushy. That some of my Devil’s Children and my Insecurity Service have been lax. That Nero and Caligula and Sartre and Saddam Hussein and bin Laden and the rest of those perverts will get what’s coming to them. That all the hells are about to become more hellish.”

  “I see. And is there any truth to the rumors that there will be new appeals possible, hearings for those damned who feel they’re in hell unjustly?”

  “Unjustly? You jest.” The devil waved a hand toward me and my mini-recorder pinged insistently and began to overheat. I turned it off, foiled in my clever plan to podcast video of Satan in the flesh.

  “Sire, what about the story that there’s a ‘Get Out of Hell Free Card’ here somewhere, if one can just find it?”

  “It’s up my bum,” said the Devil. “Do you want to have a look? Come right over here….”

  “No, no; that’s fine, Sire,” I soothed. “Next question: What about the relics: the shrouds and chalices and spears and vials of holy water? Are they real? Can they save a soul? And if they’re not, what is your administration going to do about those perpetrating theses hoaxes on so many gullible souls? We’ve heard the money made on those supposed relics goes straight into your administration’s coffers.”

  “I am not a crook,” said the devil, standing abruptly and shimmering again.

  I’d heard those words before. I’d written those words before. “Yes, Sire, but I’m certain our readers are anxious to learn how your government proposes to deal with these supposed relics and with the auditors coming from on high. Can you tell us about the auditors? And what, if any, charges have been lodged against you or your various departments? Who will be the counsels defending your administration from accusations of incompetence?”

  “‘Defending?’ ‘Incompetence?’” Now the devil changed his shape: gone was the handsome bureaucrat. In its place came no winged demonic form: Satan was now a spinning whirlwind of inky blackness that tugged at me as if it would suck me within itself. If you die in hell, you revive in the Mortuary, on the Undertaker’s table, usually worse off than you’d been before. “I need no defense,” came HSM’s voice, ringing like hell’s bells. “I am lord of the greatest hell in human history.”

  “Yes, of course you don’t, YSM,” I said hurriedly. “But we have heard that punishments will be meted out to the guilty and innocent alike by these auditors from the higher heavens.”

  From the lightless void came Satan’s voice again: “In hell, Safire, all punishments fit the sins.”

  “You mean punishments such as George Washington having endless dental implants that don’t heal and infect his whole system?”

  “Never mind Washington. He got off easy. Cow’s teeth and hippopotamus-ivory dentures should have been good enough for him.” The spinning black vortex was expanding, the voice ringing excruciatingly in my ears. “I know who you are now, what you’re trying to do. You have your interview. And you shall have a new punishment, more appropriate to your crimes. Your life here has been far too easy: you and your subscribers need to learn a thing or two about penance.”

  The black maw whirled around me and sucked me up and put me down far from the devil’s office, far from New Hell itself, among the cactus and the tumbleweeds, in this tattoo parlor from which I’m logging my report. I’ll be here quite some time, the Hell’s Angels tell me, strapped to this table until the entire Constitution of the United States, including all amendments, is inked into my skin.

  Tribe of Hell

  by

  Janet Morris

  Be not too hard for my wits and all the tribe of hell

  – William Shakespeare, Othello

  Kur had been in hell long before the first cast-down gods and their damned worshippers took the fall; he would be here long after the last of them were gone. Kur was born here in Ki-gal, home of the indigenous tribe of hell. Golden-green sulphur tickles his nostrils, billowing down sweet and warm from the mountaintop. He breathes deeper, expanding his mighty chest, rippling the surface of the dark pool where he floats, content. Beneath his backside, tar bubbles pop, massaging his wide-spread wings, his long spiky tail. His red skin is gleaming, dusted with quills, warning all comers of his poisonous bite and his rank, highest among the tribe.

  A sudden flurry of motion sets the tar sloshing: little black Eshi has arrived.

  “Almighty Kur, I need to know something!” Young Eshi splashed toward him, tail flailing (black tail, black wings, black skin; crimson tongue and sharp white teeth); then clambered atop him, nearly sinking them both.

  “You will need to know more than one thing, Eshi, to grow up red and strong. Which particular thing do you most need to know now?” Eshi was his eromenos: his protégé, his beloved, his passion and his joy. “Look what you’ve done, boy: I don’t need a tarry front today. Lick me clean – every quill, every hair.” Kur stretched his wings wider and the pool’s surface calmed.

  The black Kigali boy bent his head and began licking Kur’s red skin. If Eshi lived to mature, his black skin would turn red as he sprouted quills. Yesterday, that fate had seemed certain. Today, little was certain. Trouble was coming, falling from the heavens.

  Young wings, dripping tar, rustled and folded tight. “I need to know who Erra is and why he’s coming, and about the Seven, and who they are and why they’re coming, and why the tribe is afraid of mere men and gods from the heavens.”

  “And this is what you most need to know now?”

  “I need to know, great Kur, if the others are right. Should I be afraid? You’re not afraid….” Eshi shifted, slid, and nuzzled Kur’s groin. “See? You’re not.”

  Kur reached for Eshi and brought the boy up into the curve of his strong right arm and the hammock of his wing. “Never listen to rumors, Eshi. Erra … deserves my attention. I always host his kind when they come. No one has come to Ki-gal who wields such power in a very long time. Erra is an ancient god of plague and mayhem, who lays low the mighty and makes politicians weep. And he brings with him the Seven – the Sibitti – peerless champions, personified weapons, pitiless and terrifying: sons of heaven and earth. Hell is under audit from on high, and Erra and the Seven shall deliver punishment summarily, as they see fit, where injustice has been unfairly distributed. The Seven destroy guilty and innocent alike when they roam the earth, but in hell there are few innocents – only those of us in the tribe. So the tribe is worried.”

  Eshi squirmed and kicked his feet, making tarry spume, scrambling for purchase. “So they’re right, the tribe, to worry? There is destruction coming? Havoc? Requital? But I’m innocent…. Aren’t I?” Glowing eyes implored him.

  “Perhaps the tribe is right; perhaps wrong. The future is unknowable. You are with me. You are without quills, having yet to stir your blood with a kill: in that way, you are innocent. It is my honor to succor Erra and the Seven and guide them through hell. I always do so, whenever great powers need lodging and meals and local wisdom. You will meet Erra, and you will help me in my tasks. Now, a little more licking, please, just a bit to the left…. We must look our best when we greet Erra and his Seven on the Downward Road.”

  *

  In the dung pit, two men met with Lysicles to decide the fate of his soul: Draco, lawgiver of Athens, tall and lean with a wooden triangle in his lap and a linen robe belted round him that was gray and long and dirty like his hair and beard; Hammurabi, his inky Babylonian coif oiled and jeweled and his beard resting on his ample paunch, with a pile of stone tablets beside him on which his two hundred and eighty two laws were inscribed. Facing them sat Lysicles, the supplicant: still the same muscular, war-braided Athenian commander who’d been executed for rashness after his infantry was routed by Philip and Alexander’s Macedonians.

  Begging tastes bitter. Lysicles was desperate but dared not show it. These two ‘old dead’ might be his only hope: Draco h
ad set the precedent for Lysicles’ downfall long before the soldier was born; Hammurabi had set humanity on the path to endless slaughter with a code of laws that made one man right, another man wrong, and allowed punishments to be inflicted by third parties and levied by a state. These two were the most influential lawmakers in hell: they had made laws that later, lesser men reinterpreted and misapplied. Lysicles had done terrible things to secure this meeting: worse things than had sent him to hell in the first place. While alive, during battle, he had been as innocent as a general could be: those he had killed with his own hand, or with his armies, deserved death with honor and got it. Now he was no longer so innocent. But no one was asking him what he’d done since he’d gotten to hell: only why he thought he deserved to get out of here.

  “Eye for eye; tooth for tooth,” Hammurabi reminded the other two. “No presumption of innocence is possible when a thousand died following your orders, Lysicles.”

  “Let Lysicles finish making his case,” suggested Draco, who had created the law-code by which the Athenian assembly had duly ruled to execute the general.

  “But my commanding officer, Chares, walked away, a free man – exonerated.” Exasperated, Lysicles stared at Draco until the other soul lowered his gaze.

  “And was he innocent, by the law, this Chares?” Hammurabi asked, twirling an oiled curl of beard in stubby fingers.

  “Innocence has little to do with this. Chares had better orators in his pay, making his case,” Lysicles said. “I followed my orders to the letter: if I hadn’t, I would have deserved to be put to death. And if I was guilty, Chares should have died by my side. If I’m in hell, he should be too. One commander cannot have been wrong and the other right, when the result to our forces was the same.”

  “How do you know this Chares is not in Hades? In Tartaros? Alexandros has raised a new army: they war as they always have, against other Greeks and Asiatics, until the ground runs red with blood and shades of fighters long dead decide the winner of the day…. Go fight it out again: find your fellows, and go you back to the battlefield.” Draco was haughty, cold, and always harshly logical.