before people started calling them “Hellevators” and while he admired innovation he hated cute nicknames. So he’d had escalators put in. At the time, they had looked like the future but now, over one hundred years later, getting to Hell took forever. By the time Satan reached Hell’s Vestibule he was exhausted, he was irritable, he had no sulfur and the bank account for daily expenses was approaching zero.
Hell’s Vestibule was hot and noisy and huge, an endless cavern that lay underneath the planet’s crust. Occasionally an explorer would break through the ceiling and then scurry back to the surface to spread rumors about a hollow Earth, or a lost civilization deep within the planet’s core. But really, this was just the staging area for Hell, and it needed to be big because Hell was gruesomely inefficient.
In the Vestibule, demons were rolled about on scaffolding towers that spired up for hundreds of feet to the rocky ceiling. Symbols were spray painted there, circles and crosses and arrows and squiggles, like something a road crew would slap on the pavement to locate power cables and gas lines before digging up the street. The demons clambered up their precarious scaffolding perches and argued over the symbols, occasionally slapping one another, sometimes shoving one of their brethren off, sending them plunging to the ground. The demons arguing on the tiny, swaying platforms would eventually reach some sort of consensus and then haul up powerful jackhammers and rip holes in the ceiling. Out of these holes they would pull the souls of the damned from their graves. The souls, rubbery and weak, would be tossed from claw to claw down the scaffolding towers, finally arriving, dizzy and confused on the ground where demons with clipboards and bullhorns would bully them into endless, slow-moving lines. The souls would shuffle forward, stop, shuffle forward, stop, taking months to get from one end of the Vestibule to the other. And at the end of their journey, when they finally reached the Gates of Hell, they would be processed. Most of them spent the entire time complaining.
“Those of ya with big ‘V’s,” Minos shouted into his bullhorn. “Unfortunately, you’re the violent and you’ll be spending eternity inna fast-flowing riverra blood.”
A grumble went up.
“I doan wanna hear it. Now come on, hold up ya ‘V’s, if we can’t see ‘em we can’t process ya. You wanna stand around in this cavern for another six weeks?”
“Yes,” some wag shouted.
“Who said that?” Minos barked. A few rough-looking demons dragged a young man out of line. “Nail his feet ta the floor. He’s gonna be in this room for eternity.”
“Excuse me,” a man in a very ugly sweater said. “Will we be given an opportunity to change clothes?”
“What you were wearing when you were buried is what you’ll be wearing for eternity!” Minos barked.
“But I hate this sweater,” the man said.
“Shaddap!” Minos roared.
The man turned to the woman standing behind him.
“My wife knew I hated this sweater. She did this to me out of spite. Who gets buried in a sweater?”
“I’m crying on the inside for you, really,” the woman said. She was naked and her skin was bruised and torn. “I went over to borrow an extension cord from my quiet neighbor who kept to himself and now I’m buried underneath his tool shed. No one ever found my body. And it’s freezing in here. I’d give anything for a sweater.”
“You can have mine,” the man said.
“No trades!” a passing demon growled, stabbing Sweater Man in the back of the head with a trident.
Satan tried to make it through the Vestibule without attracting any attention, but Minos suddenly sprang up out of nowhere.
“Hey, Boss,” he said. “Any sulfur? We’re running low.”
“It should be coming,” Satan said.“Later.”
“Not ta be cheeky, boss, but that means never, don’t it?”
“You’re just going to have to make do,” Satan said.
“That’s gonna be difficult. Because the only thing that smells like sulfur is sulfur. We’re known for our sulfury smell, and to get that smell we need sulfur.”
“We don’t have any,” Satan snapped. “If you want it that bad, then take up a collection and buy it yourselves.”
“Um, okay,” Minos said. “Also, um, we need ta get the gas lines cleaned. A lotta the fires been goin’ out.”
“Can’t you get a squad of demons to clean them?”
“Those lines’re pretty twisty. Ya need ta get in a professional.”
“We just had them done.”
“About two hundred years ago. They’ve got ta be cleaned out every hundred years, but fifty years