HEAVEN HAS JUST one set of Pearly Gates, but Hell has a variety of entrances to suit its various guests. Some of the gates of Hell are jumping with red devils against a background of yellow flames, some are lined by languorous catlike women who look very seductive in their nakedness until they grow green or orange-and-black fur and unsheathe their dagger-claws, some have warders as emaciated and grim as the inmates of a Nazi death-camp — which they may very well have been in real life.
But no one ever found a door to Hell quite so peculiar and deceptive as the one discovered by the late playboy and racing car driver Nicholas Teufler.
It began with a tiny silver bell ringing inside his head, it felt. Very fast, very shrill, worse than a fire siren. And why did that particular comparison come into his mind, he wondered?
Nevertheless he ordered the tinkling to fade away and for a wonder it did. Then he cautiously worked open his eyes, which felt glued by hangover.
He was in a strange bedroom and it certainly wasn’t a man’s. That was not altogether unusual on mornings when he woke with bells ringing in his head — though never wedding bells as yet, by a stipend due stroke of good fortune for which Nicholas had never been properly grateful.
But this time he wondered if his run of luck hadn’t come to an end.
He was looking at a vanity table cluttered with perfume bottles. He was sitting on the edge of a fully made-up bed topped with a fluffy-stuffed white satin coverlet dimpled with tiny gold buttons and he was wearing black pajamas with red piping. These details bothered him. They were ominous, in fact — the mingled aromas added up to lilies with the rotten-sweet under-scent of gardenias, while the white satin coverlet reminded him of the inside of a coffin. He shuddered. Nicholas had often said that marriage was a prison, but he hadn’t had quite that tight a cell in mind. Well, this room seemed spacious enough at the moment, at any rate, to his still-blurry eyes.
His left wrist felt hot and a little painful, as if he had tried to punch someone in the snoot last night and missed and scraped a door-post. He pulled back the sleeve of his pajamas and saw a gunmetal wristwatch with a red face and black numerals and with thin black hands pointing at eighteen minutes to four. He’d never seen it before in his life. It felt almost hot to the touch.
As he started to unbuckle the black band, which felt like reptile hide, he blinked his eyes to clear them and looked at the wall behind the vanity.
There was no wall. For a moment he thought that he had wandered into a department-store window display, but there were no peering faces of mothers and kiddies, or scornful teenagers, or anyone at all. Then he saw that there was no plate of glass and that the room simply went on and on, with clusters of furniture and soft lights here and there, as far as he could see.
Maybe he was in a department-store furniture section. Where had last night’s party ended. He remembered driving on a freeway… and a lot of noise… including sirens?
He looked up. There was a ceiling at least. Not more than eight feet above his head, for he could touch it. A gray slick ceiling like the screen of a dead television set.
Very slowly he turned around. In every direction the room stretched endlessly, furnished at about thirty-foot intervals with easy chairs, sofas, studio couches, beds — Hollywood beds, oval beds, round beds, contour beds, beds with canopies and curtains — and each lit by lamps that glowed in pastel shades of blue, violet, pink, topaz, green — every color imaginable except red. The lamps farthest away clustered and ran together like distant nebulas in a giant telescope.
Overhead and underfoot, the slick gray ceiling and thick gray carpeting stretched off toward infinity. He felt like a bug in a crack. What if the crack should snap shut? What if the room did go on forever? What mightn’t be hiding behind the furniture? For a moment he knew fear.
He asked himself what kind of engineering could hold up a ceiling that stretched without visible support for… miles? Even in Texas…
Suddenly he noticed that he was no longer alone. Beside a long gray velvet sofa about ten yards away stood a girl in a low-cut red velvet evening sheath. A golden zipper ran down the front of her dress, glinting here and there in the rich scarlet. She was blonde, looked about twenty-one, and was smiling at him. It was a warm inviting smile, hinting at secrets — not the sort of smile you’d expect on even a perfectly built shop-window mannequin, though that had been his first thought on seeing her.
But then she leaned forward to pick up something from a low table which held a rose-glowing lamp. Nicholas Teufler didn’t see what the something was, for he was looking down the front of her dress at two firm ivory breasts with nipples like coral lipstick ends. She seemed to be offering them for his inspection on a red satin tray, the material lining her dress.
He was moving toward her. His whole attitude toward his weird surroundings had brightened greatly. He and this wonder-girl would try out every piece of furniture in the place, he told himself enthusiastically. From sofa to couch to bed they would flit like butterflies — well, walk light-footedly at any rate. What did it matter if it took an eternity? And surely places that could materialize girls like this one could produce fresh-popped bottles of blonde champagne in golden ice-buckets with corded scarlet handles — it had to be, by the Law of Similars.
He was close to her now. She straightened up and reached out a slim arm toward him. He saw what she’d picked up — a tiny silver bell with an ebony handle she held between scarlet-nailed finger and thumb. With her other hand she began slowly to draw down the tag of her golden zipper. He reached out a hand toward hers.
The bell tinkled. At this frosty sound Nicholas felt a wave of dizziness. He exerted his will to banish the sound, as he had the first time, but it grew louder. Streaks of blackness swam in front of his eyes with narrowing streaks of crimson, girl, and gold. Then he was staggering and veering in darkness.
When his vision cleared, he was looking across ten yards of gray carpeting at a girl in a black lace negligee sprawled like a cat on a bed with green sheets and high old-fashioned head and foot made of silvery rods screwed together by silvery knobs large and small into rectangles of unequal size in which silver ornaments hung. Her shining black hair was tousled and one hand propped her chin as she gazed at him with a sultry dreaminess. A green-shaded lamp beside the bed intensified the green of the sheets and her eyes. It was clear that she was wearing nothing but girl under the black negligee.
Nevertheless it took Nicholas a moment to redirect his desires. He was angry with the girl in red for having thwarted him. Not “Ring Bell and Wait”, but “Ring Bell and Vanish!” Most annoying. He would like to spank her.
He was still standing near the rose-lit gray velvet sofa. A quick, stooping look around it, a quick scan around the everyway-endless-room — no sign of the blonde in red, no sign of anyone at all except the new dark-haired charmer.
She was still watching him, her lips now fixed in an enigmatic catlike smile. Very well, thought Nicholas, if you’re a cat, I’m a panther. No more of this vanish stuff. He strode toward her purposefully.
He wondered, though it didn’t slow him, why the green light made him think of corpses; the short silver bed-rods, of coffin handles; the musky perfume of dead meat.
Still smiling, she rolled over quickly, her negligee falling open to show a perfect narrow black-haired triangle and the larger long one made by that and the coppery nipples of her firm breasts. At the same time she reached out a sun-tanned arm and, just as he dived at her wrist to stop her, flicked with a black fingernail one of the ornaments hanging in the squares — a tiny silver bell.
He hit carpet rather than bed. The dizzying tingle died away as swiftly as the highest notes of a piano, yet in the interval Nicholas blacked out to find himself looking up from the floor at a barefoot platinum haired girl in a gunmetal mink coat beside a black davenport and a small black table on which stood a half empty bottle of scotch and a silver lamp casting a blue glow. She was staring at him haughtily, but a little unsteadily, and as she swayed, shifting gleams of a pale dress or pale flesh winked at him from the half-clutched front of her smokily gleaming fur coat.
Well, he thought, at least this one looks a little too drunk to play tricks with bells or anything like that. If only he could lay his hands on those other two tricksters, he’d…! But he’d better concentrate on this one. A girl in the hand… He warily got to his feet.
The blue light made Nicholas think of midnight and of impulsive sweet young lushes too eager to take a walk — and too adventurous — to bother to dress. It also made him think of drowned people — though this girl looked drowned in nothing but scotch. While the gunmetal shade of the mink reminded him of his strange new steam-heated wrist watch. He glanced at the latter. The hands still stood at eighteen minutes to four. And this time he also noticed a hair-thin sweep second hand standing still against the red face. The damned thing wasn’t even running.
He started to rip it off, but at that instant there was a giggle. The mink coast had fallen open. It had hid flesh, not dress, all right — flesh formed in a torso like that of a slimmer Venus de Medici — and either her hair was naturally platinum or she was a completist. Her haughty lips had softened into a welcoming smile.
He lunged toward her, noting with approval that the streamlined silver lamp had no trace of dangling ornaments. The girl leaned eagerly forward and nodded encouragingly — which shook the two silver bells which were her earrings and which her platinum hair had camouflaged.
A blacked-out second later Nicholas was standing on black-morticed flagstones of black shale. A dozen steps away there was the yellow dancing of a wood fire crackling gayly on ornate silver andirons. Its shimmering fumes and faint smoke were drawn up into a hood of silver jutting down from the slick gray ceiling like the mouth of a giant trumpet.
He was still in the enormous bedroom, however. Everywhere else the gray carpeting with its clusters of furniture and lamps still stretched off toward infinity — a gray desert with furniture oases.
On a polar-bear rug by the fire lay a cream-skinned freckled redhead in a white sharkskin bikini fastened with white bow knots on her left hip and under her right arm. She was eyeing him measuringly, challengingly.
Nicholas accepted the challenge. He couldn’t punish those three other teasers — not at the moment, at any rate — so he would wreak his wrath on this one. They all must be in cahoots, anyway.
What was that old sign? — In Case of Fire, Walk, Do Not Run, Toward… Well, he was afire right now, and the sign had it just backwards.
He ran, rather than walked, toward the redhead.
She snatched a silver poker from the set beside the fire, losing her bikini top in the act, drew the poker back in mock threat — and hit the andirons, from which silver bells hung.
As Nicholas slid to a stop, sight blacked-out and skull tormented by tinkling, the floor under his bare feet turned from warm flagstones to something cold, wet, and squishy. Instantly he was thinking of mold and ooze and snakes and other crawlers — all the death-thoughts that had been haunting him from the dark side of his mind, while these infuriating girls tormented and obsessed the bright side.
But then the tinkling in his ears was replaced by a curiously familiar roaring. His eyes cleared and he saw it was that of a shower cascading down fiercely from a nickel fixture in the ceiling toward a slotted nickel drain met below in a floor of hexagonal white tiles. The gray carpeting was wet for yards around from the splashing and he was standing on the edge of the wet area.
A pink ghost was in the shower. Emerging, it became a curvy strawberry blonde who instantly snatched from the standing rack and clutched around her a brown bath towel. Orange light from heat lamps set in the ceiling did charming things to her skin. She looked at Nicholas with an expression of intense but not unhappy and very special surprise — the sort of look a woman seldom wastes on husbands and wandering electricians, but reserves for handsome secret agents on the prowl and — at a pinch — racing car drivers. Then came the familiar inviting smile.
But Nicholas had become extremely suspicious of inviting smiles. He wondered why none of these frustrating girls ever spoke to him — or he to them for that matter. Because they’d all been expecting him?
He didn’t make a move. He felt very much four times bitten, five times shy. He also began to wonder if he’d just missed touching not four, but, say, four hundred girls — and consciously, but not subconsciously, forgotten the rest. He felt that frustrated and, looking back, there’d been a silver bell dinning in his ears when he first woke sitting on the white satin coverlet.
What the Devil was behind these peculiar frustrations? — he asked himself, deliberately keeping his attention off the strawberry blonde with the towel. He’d offended some girls in his life, hurt the feelings of others, perhaps even slightly cracked a heart or two — but surely these things didn’t amount to enough to get a whole team of girls plotting to drive him mad. Besides, practical jokers didn’t build rooms the area of cities — not even if they had the bankrolls of international financiers or last-century kings. A dream? — but he’d never had a dream with one-hundredth the Technicolor, definition, and sound-fidelity. Had his psychiatrist been feeding him LSD or mescalin? That seemed a better bet, but he hadn’t seen Dr. Obermann for more than a year, if he could trust his memory. Besides, Dr. Obermann was…
He didn’t complete that thought. Once again, sudden rage had filled him. Some day, he told himself, he would catch these devilish girls, preferably all five together, and then…
With an effort he made himself think rationally again. How the Hell long would these peculiar and painful frustrations go on? Gazing around the enormous bedroom with its Milky Way of distant lamps, he seemed to glimpse the faint spectral forms of innumerable girls — blondes, brunettes, redheads, oddballs with blue and greenish locks, girls in sables and girls in shirts, girls stepping out of skirts or unbuttoning blouses or pulling sweaters over their heads, girls cross-legged on rumpled beds, sprawled on overstuffed furniture, straddling wire-backed with their forearms resting on the topmost loop of wire — there was no numbering the variety of their poses and stages of undress. Was he doomed to be frustrated by all of them? Until girls meant no more to him than grasshoppers? A voyeur’s paradise — but Nicholas was discovering that unrelieved voyeurism can become more tiring than making love.
The ghost girls dimmed and faded entirely — if they had ever been anything more than imagination — leaving the infinite gray surround bare except for the strawberry blonde in front of the shower.
Nicholas tried furiously to resist — these frustrations were enragingly humiliating — but her smile became super-inviting, she kept almost losing her brown towel, and finally he yielded to the irresistible — though this time he moved forward without a grain of hope, despite the great seeming hope in the water-dewed girl’s eyes.
He rationalized it by telling himself that it was interesting and even educational to see, even if very briefly, some of the intimate construction — details of such a variety of young females.
Besides, he was curious as to where the devilish bell was hidden this time.
It was hanging, of course, from the shower head, previously hidden (and its tinkling muted) by the sizzling water. The blackout and skull-scream that seized him when she flicked it with her towel were quite as black and tormenting as any that had gone before.
Then he was moving slowly but compulsively toward a slim coffee-and-cream girl whose large brown eyes stared at him with a mysterious impassiveness. To one side of her was a cluster of bright violet globes, to the other a four-foot bronze arch supporting a yard-wide dark bronze gong with black leather-padded striker hanging beside it. The gong had enameled on it a curious design of red flames.
The girl stood absolutely motionless, her legs straddled and her arms zigzagged in a pose from a Siamese dance. She wore a silver girdle and breast cups of silver filigree, a silver turban was wound round her head, silver slave bracelets weighted her wrists, while from her ankles dangled clusters of tiny silver bells.
Why, this time the plotters weren’t even taking the trouble to hide them! The girl had only to shake a foot and he’d be off again into blackout and pain and the next frustration.
Nicholas suddenly sat down on the gray carpeting and locked his hands around his knees. He’d be damned if he’d let himself be tricked again.
Damned?
He looked at his queer wrist watch. It was still stuck at eighteen to four, with the sweep second hand motionless and the two other downward-beating black hands looking like the wings of a bat coming out of Hell.
Hell?
What was his mind trying to tell him?
The brown eyes of the girl in the silver-filigree bikini brightened. She began to dance languorously with the upper half of her body. Momently Nicholas expected her legs to move, just a little, and the ankle-bell to tinkle, but her control was perfect. Grimly Nicholas held still himself, refusing to budge from his spot. To keep himself from going batty, he imagined in great detail what he could do to these six girls when he caught them without their bells. There was one fantasy in which, dressed as little girls, they sat obediently at desks too small for them, while he, with a supply of willow switches and other academic instruments of correction at hand, lectured them interminably on all topics from human anatomy to the Spanish Inquisition.
Nicholas’ control was not perfect. The physical effects of such imaginings, added to the posturings of the coffee-and-cream girl, were slow in coming, but they came. His desire slowly rekindled, became overpowering. In an effort to surprise the silent danger, he tried to spring up swiftly, but his legs had become stiff and kinky and he stumbled.
The dancer’s brown eyes grew very bright. Still without stirring her ankles, she reached out and lifted the leather-padded striker and struck the fire-emblazoned gong on its very center.
The gong’s note was deep as the grave and its vibrations bone-shaking. Nicholas felt them battering him into insensibility. His fury fought back at this clubbing with sound waves, but that only made the pain worse. And this time his blackout was twice as black.
When he came to, limp as his black pajamas and aching everywhere, he was sitting in front of a large, gleamingly surfaced black desk in a very large black windowless room lined with black filing cabinets with numbering in red and labeled with a large red script that looked halfway between Arabic and Runic. Behind the desk was a most comfortable looking black swivel chair, empty. To the right of the chair, within easy reaching distance, was a great silver console covered with pushbuttons of an infinitude of pastel shades. He noted a line of them colored rose, green, blue, yellow, orange, and violet in that order and it made him remember the soft-lit six girls and his fury was re-fired so far as his debilitated state would permit.
To the left of the swivel chair and almost equally accessible, sat a girl in a high-necked black suit with red piping along the seams and pockets. Around her slim waist was a wide shining black leather belt with two red buttons. Her gleaming black pumps were edged with the same fiery vermilion and he could glimpse red clocks on her black stockings. She held a black notebook poised on her knee with a black pencil lightly held between her slim fingers and she sat very straight, like the properest of proper secretaries.
Her black hair was fixed in bangs, like Cleopatra’s. Her black eyebrows were arched, her eyes were greenish-yellow, her face was slim, her mouth wide and painted with lipstick red as fire.
And she was grinning at him — quite nastily, Nicholas had to admit. Her eyes weren’t at all like those of the other girls. They were alive — as a tiger’s.
In addition to all this, she looked vaguely yet unpleasantly familiar to him. She was associated with some painful period in his life that he didn’t want to bring to mind — and at the moment couldn’t.
And he didn’t for an instant associate her with the other six girls. They had all had, despite their abominable teasing, something of the mindless quality of houris or odalisques. This one looked like a very beautiful murderess about to defend herself from the witness stand, her every sense alert, her wits crackling, her dagger-claws barely sheathed.
To tell the truth, she frightened Nicholas a little. Her silent grinning seemed to hold a peculiar sort of menace. He blamed this uneasiness on his debilitated state and looked back from her to the desk.
There were only two objects on it: a tiny silver bell with a tiny red handle — he looked away from that quickly — and a large hour-glass with about as much white sand in its top as in its bottom.
Then he noticed a strange thing. He could see the white sand very sharply against the black background and there wasn’t any dropping down from the top half of the hour-glass into the bottom. The hour-glass was stuck. He stared at it fascinatedly.
The silence of the room was profound, yet not complete. After a bit Nicholas identified a tiny sound breaking it — a soft ticking. He glanced down at his wrist watch. The hour-thin sweep second hand was moving around purposefully and the others already stood at sixteen to four — the longer wing of the bat was slowly rising.
The hour-glass was stuck, but the wrist watch was running — a highly suggestive but baffling circumstance.
Then he distinguished a second sound — a soft wispy snoring — and started with surprise. In the big black swivel chair behind the desk slumped a fat man. How the Devil had he missed him before? Impossible! Yet it seemed almost equally impossible that anyone could have crept into the chair without him noticing.
The fat man was wearing a strangely familiar gray suit. A dark pearl pin, also familiar, was affixed to his deep red silk necktie. His bald head was slumped forward on a cushion of chins and around it a dozen or so flies circled. Their lazy buzzing made a third small sound.
Nicholas Teufler recognized the man. He had sat on the opposite side of a desk from him often enough.
He was about to call, “Dr. Obermann,” when he caught the girl in black with a vermilion fingernail quickly raised to her lips. Her grin had changed from nasty to something more like mischievous.
And now he realized why she looked familiar: although there were several differences, she made him think of Dr. Obermann’s last secretary, a Miss Ferenzi.
He thought furiously. Had Dr. Obermann been giving him electroshock treatments? That would account for the blackouts and his muddled memory — including his memory of how long since he had seen the doctor.
Or dosing him with LSD or mescalin? More likely still. Those drugs also gave colorful and exciting hallucinations — visions which could turn nasty.
But this wasn’t remotely like Dr. Obermann’s office. Ten times as big, for one thing. Also, while the new girl resembled Miss Ferenzi a bit, the latter had been a slim graying woman of forty with silver-rimmed glasses and a Viennese accent.
Besides, Dr. Obermann couldn’t be treating him in any case, because Dr. Obermann was…
Again he almost shouted awake the snoring man. Again the girl’s quick authoritative gesture stopped him. Now he could feel the aliveness in her eyes, as if they sent out invisible stinging rays. Besides “Be quiet!” what was she trying to tell him? Something she couldn’t, daren’t say out loud?
He stood up, noting that on the dark round seat of his chair was a red design exactly like that of the flames enameled on the gong which the girl in the silver bikini had struck.
He glanced behind him and involuntarily retreated toward the desk.
Only a few inches behind the back legs of his chair was the edge of a rectangular depression in the floor —— a depression big as a tennis court which occupied all but a narrow border of the three-quarters of the room behind his chair.
Down inside it was a picture or expanse dotted with thousands of tiny points of light of all colors except bright red.
He couldn’t tell if it was a dark picture or screen a few inches down or a great field of lights hundreds of feet below. Or even the star-fields of another, more colorful universe more than light-years away — except that some of the light moved. Still, there was the feeling that if he stepped off the edge, he might fall out of the world.
He sprawled down on the thickly carpeted, red-figured black floor and reached down his arm full length without feeling anything.
From this position it seemed to him that the strange pastel star-fields extended under the floor, beyond the bounds of the rectangle.
Was it a reality or was it a map?
Then his eyes fixed on a particular zig-zag of stars colored in this order: rose, green, blue, yellow, orange and violet. They matched the lamps of the girls who had teased him. His anger flamed again. But — had he been down there?
He glanced at his watch. Still ticking. The black hands stood at ten to four — one straight line against the red face.
He got to his feet and turned around. The scene hadn’t changed. Dr. Obermann still snored, but the smile of the girl in black seemed to have become conspiratorial. She wet the smile with the tip of her tongue. And now he saw that she was beckoning to him by curling the vermilion-tipped forefinger of the hand that held the black notebook.
He was passing the corner of the desk when he heard another sound — a very faint pattering.
The hour-glass had come unstuck. White sand was falling in a tiny stream.
And Dr. Obermann’s snore had stopped, his bald head was upright, the flies still circling it, and his big hypnotic eyes, which Nicholas remembered without pleasure, were open.
“Hello, Teufler,” he grunted, as if this were just another of their old sessions. “Take a pew.”
Nicholas hesitated. The girl in black gave him one quick anxious nod. Dr. Obermann glanced toward her, but by then she was only smiling again — nastily. Nicholas sat down on the fire-stamped chair on which he had awakened and wondered why the doctor didn’t bat at the flies, why he accepted this dark noisy coronet.
Dr. Obermann studied him with a little bored smirk. “Well, my boy,” he asked, “how are your symptoms? Any interesting dreams to report?”
Nicholas snapped his fingers and said, “I know why this can’t be happening — why I must be imagining it. You’re dead! You died of fatty blockage of the blood vessels almost a year ago.”
Dr. Obermann leaned forward, put his fat elbows on the desk, supported his chin-pillows with his pudgy fists. His smirk became a grin.
“On the contrary, my boy,” he said, “that’s exactly why this can be happening.”
Nicholas swallowed. “You mean,” he said, “I’m dead too?”
Dr. Obermann nodded beatifically. Nicholas thought: pain, glaring lights, a car hurtling out of the freeway exit he was headed toward… No! Or rather, most regrettably, yes.
He said, “So that’s why I kept smelling mold and decay and thinking of coffins.”
Dr. Obermann nodded. “Yes, the shock of death is great and creates some vibrations that are a long time damping out.”
“But you haven’t changed a bit,” Nicholas observed. “You’re your ugly old self. While Miss Ferenzi has become an exceedingly beautiful young woman.”
The psychiatrist scowled. “Miss Ferenzi didn’t die with me. What gave you such a stupid idea? She’s disorganizing some other doctor’s files up above. This is my new secretary, Miss Diable.”
Nicholas bowed to her. She nodded, murmuring in a husky contralto, “You’re looking quite handsome yourself.”
Dr. Obermann shot her a suspicious glance, than reached out a fat hand and laid it on her black-stockinged knee in a manner Nicholas found most offensive.
“But then where the Hell am I?” he demanded loudly. “Or,” he added, “have I answered my own question?”
”You have, my boy,” the other told him in the sugary pat-on-the-shoulder tones which he’d used in the old days to inform Nicholas that he’d had a valid insight into his problems.
“But what the Devil then is a newcomer like you doing running Hell?” Nicholas demanded.
Dr. Obermann finally swiped negligently at the flies circling his shining cranium. Nicholas remembered that Beelzebub was called the Lord of the Flies. Then the psychiatrist said, “Not quite the Devil, my boy, though given a couple of years more…” His voice trailed off meaningly, then he went on briskly, “You forget that I arrived ten months ahead of you. And it turns out that Hell had become a typical big modern organization, my boy, in fact the biggest in the known universe. And you know how fast a man can get ahead in a big organization if he can discover the ropes and find where the bodies — so many of them here! — are buried — or burning! And who would be better than an… ahem!… unscrupulous psychiatrist…?” He gave the black-stockinged knee a peculiarly intimate squeeze.
“-to discover the ropes of Hell!” Nicholas finished for him. “That I’ll agree to.” He shook his head. “But that Hell should actually exist when even ministers have given up pretending to believe in it — that’s fantastic!”
Dr. Obermann shrugged. “But true. Like atom bombs in China, euphorics in glue, brassieres on Bali, light-rays that kill, and craters on Mars.”
Nicholas hesitated. “But I always thought that Hell would be…” He grimaced distastefully.
“Full of pitchforks and flaming pitch and tortures and torments and all those other medieval curiosa?” Dr. Obermann finished for him. “My dear boy, you haven’t visited all our departments, at least as yet. In some of them…” He shrugged and made a little grimace. “But although it has its secret concentration camps, Hell on the whole has become as progressive as the world — managerial, self-governing, democratic, with advancement open to anyone who keeps his wits about him.” He smiled complacently. “Also, Hell has become highly competitive, just as our own culture — competition inside one big happy organization. You study the man above you for weaknesses, find the means to topple him, seize your opportunity and — presto! — you’ve advanced to the next power-level, whether it be assistant department manager or senior executive.
“Moreover,” he went on, “Hell has become a welfare state, with rehabilitation rather than punishment its aim, especially when it comes to Vice rather than Violence.”
“What’s the exact difference?” Nicholas wanted to know.
“Violence is what harms another person, whether it injures them only a little or hurts them to the point of death,” Dr. Obermann dogmatized. “While Vice is what harms the doer alone. In fact, anything done compulsively or to the point of boredom — to the point where it unbalances your life and makes it less rich — is vice! In your own case, my dear boy, the pursuit of girls. Especially the pursuit of girls unnecessarily prolonged. Your dossier shows that you have a bit of the voyeur in you. It’s even been suggested that you’d rather chase girls than get them — Don’t fume, Teufler! It never helps — that you’d rather watch girls do things than do things to them yourself.
“Of course, this again is characteristic of our culture with its increasing use of sex stimulation for purposes properly called perverse, such as money-making, and with so many more exciting desirable girls in advertisements, on billboards, in movies, TV and books than there are in the flesh.”
Nicholas squeezed in, “It seems unfair that I should be punished…”
“Oh, you consider what’s been happening to you punishment?” Dr. Obermann interrupted. “Some philosophers affirm that anticipation is far more delightful than fulfillment. In which case you’ve been in paradise, my boy.”
“I didn’t find it that way,” Nicholas said gruffly, again battling down his rage at the six girls. “The old Chinese used uninterrupted sex as a torture. I think that in your intolerable anticipation indefinitely prolonged you’ve gone them one better. But what I was trying to say was that it’s unfair that I should be punished for a fault of my own culture.”
Dr. Obermann yawned. “War does exactly the same thing to the individual. It’s the rule in this neck of the cosmos. A man has to be able to outthink his culture or else suffer the consequences. Vice is vice and must be given the treatment it deserves. Hence your frustrations, which I trust will now at least be more intelligible to you when I return you to them.”
By chance or design, his hand moved toward the silver bell. Nicholas measured the distances — he had no chance of reaching it first. And if by some miracle he won the grab, he’d be sure to ring the thing. He looked around desperately. For an instant Miss Diable narrowed her eyes at him and tapped her left wrist with her right forefinger. The gesture meant nothing to him.
“I’d like to know one thing,” he burst out hurriedly. “Is that map behind me…” He indicated the rectangle in the floor, “-an actual map of the place where I was, or a televised projection of it, or the thing itself, far below, and seen through its transparent gray roof?”
“Suppose you figure that out for yourself,” the doctor retorted coldly. “But do consider the possibility that I can bring any part of it close by television, so that Miss Diable and I — if I wish — can amuse ourselves by watching your antics.” His pudgy hand now moved definitely toward the bell.
“But why’s the place down there so huge?” Nicholas demanded hurriedly.
The doctor halted his hand. “My dear boy,” he grinned savoringly, “do you imagine you’re the only man damned to that department of Hell, that it was constructed solely for you? No, there are thousands, millions of men going through it all the time, invisible to each other. Your vice is an extremely common one, as I explained. These days it takes a trained — and unscrupulous — psychiatrist to think of anything really new or interesting in the way of sexual deviations. Which reminds me, Miss Diable…”
He picked up the bell, but so delicately it didn’t tinkle once.
Nicholas froze. Throat dry, he asked, “Does that mean you have millions of beautiful… well… she-devils working down there all the time?”
The doctor set down the bell with equal care. Apparently he thought such a rare bit of naivete as Nicholas’ could not be allowed to go unsquelched, for he said with a pitying smile, “My boy, Hell is above everything else efficient. If I may refresh a stale euphemism, we use even the squeal of the damned. The only she-devil you have viewed thus far is my charming Miss Diable. No, all the girls you encounter down there are bona fide female human beings damned for the vices of self-adoration and teasing, though some of our moralists consider the latter sin a mild violence. Their dossiers are there…” He indicated the nearest tier of filing cabinets, “-and they make quite interesting reading. A few of the naughty little lambs were murdered. Others grew into embittered old maids — though in Hell they’re all young again so that they can practice their vice to the point of extreme frustration. You see, in almost every case they think it is you who jingles the silver bell to dismiss them. The one with the gong — a sadly superstitious little Hindu — had been led to believe that its sound would enchant you and keep you from escaping.”
He continued, “They get pretty depressed with this constant rejection, as you can imagine, though they keep on smiling. When the suffering of one of them becomes simply too great, I summon her here and give her consolation. They’re very grateful, the poor dears.”
“How do you summon them?” Nicholas asked, still playing for time.
“Simply by pressing the appropriate one of these buttons,” the other replied, turning toward the silver panel with great satisfaction. “You’ll notice their interestingly large number, like the stars or the sands of the desert — if a psychiatrist may be permitted to wax poetic.”
Nicholas looked toward Miss Diable. Now that her employer was turned away she quickly made a face of disgust, then for an instant pursed her vermilion lips at Nicholas. It was exactly the morale-restorer he needed.
Turning back, Dr. Obermann sighed, “I truly wish you too were a button-pusher, Nicholas, instead of the one for whom the bell is rung,” and once again he reached toward the tiny red-handled instrument.
Nicholas fixed his features in a sneer. “Oh, I’d take it for granted that you could have your will of any of those poor little damned girls. After all, you’re the great psychiatrist, you’re the boss. But such easy conquests must be small satisfaction to you, I’m sure. Just as I’m sure you have no power over any of the girls with status in Hell, any of the really interesting ones, such as Miss Diable.”
“Is that so?” Dr. Obermann asked harshly, drawing back his hands. “You really have the nerve to think that and tell me that to my face? Miss Diable! Come here and take some dictation!”
Rather ostentatiously he sat forward in his chair and thrust out a pillowy knee. He tossed his head, saying, “Off with you now,” and the circling flies vanished.
Miss Diable stood up. While she was still turned away from the doctor, she stared intently again at Nicholas and again tapped her left wrist. Then, her eyes obediently downcast, with only the faintest professional smirk on her lips, she went over and sat down. Dr. Obermann at once clasped her with a gesture so intimate that Nicholas felt that any fiendess of good breeding should show strong signs of distaste and begin to struggle violently, perhaps employing a discrete judo chop. But Miss Diable merely poised her notebook and pencil, taking no notice of the hand crawling like a fat pink spider near her waist, except that her fiery nails thinned a little and her nostrils flared.
“You don’t like this, Miss Diable, do you?” Dr. Obermann asked benevolently.
“I detest it,” she replied cooly.
“And this even less?”
“You fill me with disgust and loathing.”
“Yet you endure my attentions because you are my secretary and because this is Hell?”
“Yes, Dr. Obermann,” she replied meekly.
Dr. Obermann turned his head to sneer at Nicholas. “Perhaps Teufler, you’ll soon be begging me to ring the silver bell, eh?”
“Just two more questions, sir,” Nicholas replied brightly, doing his best to hide his chivalrous anger. The hint of a master stratagem had come to his mind, but he could not quite bring it into focus. “Why did my wrist watch stop while I was having those… well… experiences down there and then start up when I arrived here? And why was your hour-glass stuck when I arrived? — and then start to trickle when you woke and noticed me? Perhaps these are mysteries beyond my limited understanding, but…”
“Indeed they are, except in their simplest manifestations,” Dr. Obermann said with happy contempt, meanwhile running his hand over Miss Diable’s in a series of caresses which Nicholas found highly offensive. “Suffice it for you, Teufler, that time is not the tyrant here it is in the mortal world. By use of various clever gadgets we can start, stop, advance and reverse it. The mighty hour-glass is my gadget, the humble wrist watch yours. Your experiences, as you refer to them take place in the timelessness of eternity. As for myself, I sometimes travel from this workaday desk to seek refreshment in worlds of mystic enjoyment beyond your ken — secret realms of wonder known only to the upper executive echelons of Hades.
“But now I have various pressing matters to attend to, and I do not desire to bore you and perhaps pain you to excess by forcing you to witness them. So it is time I returned you to your… ah… experiences. I believe your next… er… receptionist is a professional stripper with lifelong mysophobia. Or is it a debutante accident prone as to scams and shoulder straps but unshakably credulous of the horrid picture of sex her mother painted her? No matter. Now, Miss Diable, prepare yourself to endure…”
With his free hand he snatched at the silver bell.
At that instant Nicholas seized the tiny milled knob of his wristwatch and set the time back from ten minutes past four to fifteen to.
The effect was all that could have been desired. Dr. Obermann’s hand stopped an inch from the bell, his other paw dropped away from Miss Diable’s person, and his hypnotic eyes closed. His pillow of chins received his bald head, while a dozen flies appeared from nowhere and began to circle it, and he began gently to snore.
Miss Diable sprang from his knee. With equal alacrity Nicholas came around the desk, carrying the flame-emblemmed chair, and set it down beside Dr. Obermann. With Miss Diable eagerly assisting, he transferred the gross bulk of the psychiatrist from one chair to the other. The dozing man did not wake, though the flies buzzed for a moment angrily. Nicholas took off his watch and strapped it on the doctor’s wrist. Then he confidently seated himself in the swivel chair and tinkled the silver bell sharply.
Air whispered as it rushed in to occupy the space where Dr. Obermann had been. A clot of colliding flies buzzed frantically, then flew off like bullets.
Miss Diable set her fists on her black sheathed hips and said with great satisfaction, “Well, that takes care of him!”
Nicholas reached out a gentle but authoritative hand and gathered her onto his knee. She shivered delightfully — it gave his knee gooseflesh — and sighed, “Oh, Nick!” He repeated the claspings and caresses he had watched Dr. Obermann apply and discovered that there was not anything offensive about them at all — in fact, that they were the height of friendly courtesy. Miss Diable snuggled closer to him. He remarked on the similar colors of their costumes and she explained to him that she had planned it that way, after falling in love with his picture in the files. Thereafter she had guided Dr. Obermann’s every step leading to his downfall.
Nicholas proceeded to demonstrate his gratitude. In putting his arm around her waist, he touched one of the red buttons on her belt. To his considerable interest, her skirt began slowly to shorten, though it was impossible to see where the material was disappearing to. Not that that problem concerned his mind greatly, he was more interested in discovering where her stockings ended. She looked down too, her cheek against his, as if she were as mystified as he — but after a bit she pressed the other button. Her skirt crawled down an inch, to mid-thigh, and stopped.
“For now,” she said softly, adding, “Hell has some extremely clever couturiers, don’t you think? And they’re not one-idea men either.”
He explored her jacket. A glint of silver at the end of the red piping of one of her pockets intrigued him. He delicately pinched the zipper-tag between finger and thumb and pulled it four inches sideways. There popped out a breast that would have fitted a champagne glass, but now rested in a half-cup red silk brassiere. Feeling that symmetry must always be maintained, he repeated the action with the other pocket, with the same result. Miss Diable luxuriated against him like a cat, looked up at him innocenteyed and asked, “Didn’t you ever know why they were called breast pockets? There are at least six other stimulating gadgets on this wardrobe. I think it would be nice, Nick, if in the spirit of a treasure hunt…”
But by then the word “six” had registered on Nicholas’ mind. He suddenly sat up straight, almost dumping Miss Diable on the floor.
“This is all very well,” he said in tones of fury, “but…”
“I should think it’s all very well,” Miss Diable countered indignantly, glaring at him. “I’ve often been told it’s the greatest.”
“Oh, all very, very well,” he placated her. “You have opened up to me lines of exploration which I have no doubt I will spend intoxicated hours investigating. But”-(Again his voice became furious)-“there are a certain six girls who have frustrated me abominably. I assure you I cannot concentrate on anything else until I have admonished each of them severely. So please explain to me the system of the buttons on this silver panel, so we can have them up in sequence, beginning with one particular slim blonde wearing a red velvet evening sheath with a red zipper.”
Miss Diable stood up, quivering with suppressed anger, yet looking most engaging in her short-short skirt and with her pocketless breast pockets filled.
“Mr. Teufler,” she said evenly, “I cannot accede to this humiliating request. That you should prefer any or all of six damned little minxes to me, one of the upper crust of Hell, one of the status figures, as you yourself said…”
“I infinitely prefer you to any one or all six of them together, Miss Diable,” he assured her. “In fact, I detest them to the point of obsession — but that’s just the point! Until I have rebuked each of them very severely, I cannot possibly think of anything, or even anyone else.”
“Do you think you have the strength to rebuke all six?” she sneered.
“Do not increase my anger, dear divine — I mean devilish Miss Diable,” he told her, “but obey my orders. Oh, and while you’re at it, please fetch me from the files the dossiers of each of the girls, so that I will be able to interrogate them searchingly before I rebuke them. I intend to reduce each one of them to a quivering-”
“Can’t you at least get it through your thick head,” she shouted, “that they weren’t trying to frustrate but hold onto you? That they were suffering in their schoolgirl way as much as you?”
Nicholas frowned. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted, smiling. “Perhaps I’ll give them medals after admonishing them. Kindly scout up for me a half dozen silver pitchfork brooches or whatever else seems appropriate.”
“Mr. Teufler!” Miss Diable asserted ringingly, the contents of her breast pockets quivering. “You are on the way to making me as angry with you as I was with Dr. Obermann. Do you see that tiny red light moving about down there?” She pointed beyond the desk to where a tiny bright point of red light was indeed moving among the pastel ones. “That is Dr. Obermann, who is even now suffering the tantalizations and torments you were going through with the same six damned little demi-virgins. Do you want to put yourself on his level? Do you expect me to sit quietly by, taking notes, while…”
The vision enchanted Nicholas. “Miss Diable, I will tolerate no further delay!” he said incisively. “You are my secretary now and must obey all my orders, just as you did those of Dr. Obermann. And I want you to understand — in fact, I order you to understand — that what I am doing is only to rid my emotions of an intolerable burden. So explain to me at once the system of the buttons and also teach me the appropriate dossiers and medals!”
“I won’t,” she said, folding her arms at waist height, which made a frame for her breast pockets.
“Very well!” he blustered, well aware that he knew nothing whatever of the system whereby Dr. Obermann had enforced the obedience of Miss Diable, or if there had been such a system. “Very well, then I’ll do it for myself. Don’t think I can’t; the colors are seared on my memory: rose, green, blue, yellow, orange, violet. And I earlier noted a line of buttons of those hues.” He studied the panel briefly. “Ah, here they are! Now, Miss Diable,” he said, turning to her triumphantly, “are you going to fetch me the dossiers — and medals! — and explain to me customary procedures, or am I simply going to press this rose button?”
She stood straight no longer, but crouched like a cat, her green eyes glaring. “So you insist,” she hissed, “that I demonstrate to you that you are not all-powerful. Very well, be it on your own head — or tail, if that’s the way you happen to land!”
In one blur of movement, she seized the hour-glass on the desk and tipped it almost on its side, so that the trickle of sand nearly stopped, became the barest sliding of one or two grains at a time.
Nicholas was instantly paralyzed. His right forefinger, already touching the rose button, could not exert an atom of force against it.
At the same time the room around him grew dim, so that he saw it only as a shadow, while at the same time he found himself in another room, lit with burningly hot white lights. Here he was one of a considerable group of men and a few women crouched around a very large circular table. Each of them had the look of a high executive, a master of men, yet each was obviously in a state of pitiable shock, apprehension, and terror. In the center of the table squatted an obscene monster, half man, half dragon, with a barbed black tail and burningly red eyes. It was the size of a medium tank. It was clearly giving all the upper-crust underlings, all the presumable department heads, a dreadful tongue-lashing — both figuratively (in a voice like an orchestra of drums, sirens, machine-guns, and cannon) and literally (with a very long barbed black tongue that snaked out from between slabby lips and yellowed fangs to flog the backs of super-folk screeching out pain and promises.)
Through this tumult Nicholas could still hear the voice of Miss Diable saying meaningfully, “Now you understand that Dr. Obermann was in somewhat the same position as you were down below. A considerably worse position, in fact. You are witnessing one of the ‘worlds of mystic enjoyment in which he refreshed himself,” as Dr. Obermann somewhat falsely described it. Now, will you return and behave like a sensible executive, running your department under my guidance in such a way as to avoid such rebukes and admonitions as you are now witnessing? — and will you stop nattering about those six girls? — or would you rather I turned the hour-glass fully on its side for a period of, say…”
The very long, very barbed black tongue was already lashing the man beside Nicholas — an executive giant with the build of a football guard, who cowered weeping and bleating.
“I promise!” Nicholas called loudly. “I promise, dear Miss Diable! I’ll never mention those six girls again. All my animosities have vanished, I assure you. It’s quite impossible to maintain them in this atmosphere. Just be quick! I promise… on my hour-glass!”
The hateful bright room vanished. The black room returned. Nicholas collapsed into the black swivel chair. Miss Diable smiled at him in gentle triumph until his shaking had abated, then seated herself again upon his knee.
Interweaving her fingers behind his neck, she said softly, “My dear Nick, I knew you’d be sensible when you understood the realities of the situation.”
Yielding gracefully to the inevitable, Nicholas embraced her in turn. “I am sure you are quite the loveliest fiend in all Hell,” he murmured. “Quite the most charming she-devil in all Gehenna. I cannot imagine how I could ever, while looking at you, have had a single thought of any of those miserable little damned girls down there.”
“They are miserable, aren’t they?” she agreed, yawning. “So miserable, in fact, that I feel no jealousy of them at all. In fact, if you’re especially nice to me, over an extended period, I might let you look at one or two of their dossiers and even experiment with the buttons a bit, on long boresome afternoons.”
“Darling,” he said, embracing her with renewed enthusiasm and adding with almost complete sincerity, “The only buttons I am remotely interested in are yours. If I should press the one on your belt again and at the same time the one I can feel through your skirt at the base of your spine…”
Her lips burned, her tongue was a flame, her slim body through the unthreading seams of her black suit was like fire — almost.