sitting on a pile of groaning souls watching the exchange.
“It’s another Rosemary,” he sighed, and the two of them shook their many heads, sadly.
“Do you want to know what their first plan was for Hell?” Satan asked as they walked through the Vestibule. “It was just going to be an enormous lake of fire and they’d pitch sinners in. Heaven didn’t care that eleven-year-old shoplifters and Bosnian war criminals would all be getting the same eternal torment. Michael just shrugged his shoulders when I brought it up and said, ‘Oh, well. They shouldn’t have sinned in the first place.’ I made something out of this place. I didn’t have to do that.”
They passed beneath the mighty Gates of Hell and then ducked through a service door that let them out onto the muddy banks of a polluted, slow-moving river. The ceiling was so high that this massive cavern had its own weather system and right now its weather was foul. A stinking wind sent black, tattered clouds rolling across the subterranean sky. The tarry water gurgled and swirled dangerously and the river’s opposite shore was too far away to be seen. Everything smelled like wet tennis shoes. Sister Mary’s feet squelched in the muck as she plodded along beside Satan.
“I stratified the torments,” Satan went on. “Made them fair. Liars got nailed to trees by their tongues, heretics get bolted inside burning tombs, suicides were transformed into trees with their own discarded corpses hanging from their branches. It’s irony, see? It makes sense. It’s fair.”
A crowd of dazed souls stood on a short, crumbling dock that jutted out into the brackish, syrupy water. Satan led Sister Mary through them to the end of the dock.
“Watch the edges, watch the edges,” King Paimon said. The demon had eaten his legendary dromedary one day after the two of them had gotten into a long and complicated argument over what keeps the land from falling into the sea. No one had blamed King Paimon, he was known to have a bad temper. That dromedary had been asking for it by talking back, to be honest. Ever since then, however, he’d been a different demon, more subdued and depressed. Now he worked the docks, making sure no one fell in the river and got sucked away before they could reach their eternal torment. Like most demons, he just wanted to be useful.
“This is my life’s work,” Satan continued. “It was nothing, and I made it into something and now they want to take it away from me and turn it into nothing again. I fought Heaven once and it was...it was hard for me. But I’ll do it again to keep them from ruining all this.”
Mary wasn’t really listening.
“The suicides are trees?” she asked.
“Down on the Seventh Circle,” Satan said. “I know this looks like a giant underground garbage dump, but it would have been a lot worse if they’d had their way.”
“Ferry’s coming through,” King Paimon said. “Watch the edges, watch the edges.”
A shrill boat horn playing “La Cucaracha” cut through the air, jolting Sister Mary out of her reverie. A large, pink, inboard motorboat was cutting across the river towards them, moving way too fast. Its gold fittings sparkled in the dim, underground light.
“This is the river Styx?” Mary asked. “With Charon, the skeletal boatman of the dead?”
“Actually it’s the Acheron river. The Styx is more like a stagnant marsh down on the Fifth circle.”
“But that’s not – ” Mary said.
“No,” Satan said. “That’s not Charon. That’s Charo.”
A woman in a form-fitting pink jumpsuit with an enormous bouffant of red hair piloted the motorboat. As Sister Mary stared, a tiny Chihuahua wearing prescription sunglasses and a little straw hat leapt onto the bow, yipping furiously.
“Ola!” the woman called to the cluster of souls as the boat got nearer. “My name is Charo and I am your driving, boating cutie pie. Coochie coochie!”
The pink monstrosity bumped up against the dock, rocking it crazily on its rotten pilings. Souls crowded onto the throbbing inboard. Sister Mary stared at it in horror.
“Charon quit a few years ago,” Satan tried to explain. “And, well...Charo...their names were pretty similar and she seemed enthusiastic.”
“Charo is not dead,” Sister Mary said. “She has a restaurant in Hawaii and was on the Jerry Lewis Telethon last year.” It was the one piece of television programming Sister Mary had watched all the way through with Sister Barbara.
“That’s a Charo impersonator,” Satan said, climbing on board. He helped Sister Mary into the