Hell, Day Four
Naked and tumbling through the sky, Santos refused to let go of his food.
Thinking he had conquered the circle of gluttony, he was unable to think straight, focused on taking in every last drop, Beelzebub's golden blood smeared all his hands and face.
Falling upwards, hands now slippery, he lost his grip, and his older brother's corpse went flying off into the reverse sky. The threat of death was much more concerning now that his food was gone, and Santos flapped his wings, trying not to break his neck on another fall.
He didn't know where to land, a sea of yellow surrounding him.
" Fuck it."
He curled his body into a ball, covered his head, and braced for impact. Santos landed on the right side of his body, his bones shattering, the pain rippling down his spine. A few teeth went flying, and his limp body rolled down the metallic hills and stopped once pushed up against a marble statue.
Santos couldn't move his head, but he could still hear, the crunching of metal underneath someone's feet making him relax. He thought it was Savannah, there to help him up until he healed, but it wasn't.
It was the friendly neighborhood demon, Deceit.
She dragged Santos by his long black hair and rolled her eyes, upset that she didn't even get to fight him. Deceit took her time, whipping his body back and forth to hit the piles of coins as they trudged through the vault, smiling every time Santos grunted in pain.
The golden blood made him heal faster, and his body started to twitch. Methodically, every time Santos's body healed, Deceit would snap his neck, and continue on, through the valleys of vanity and precious gems.
The valleys became hills, the hills became slopes, and the gold coins were no more, as they left the Valley of Decadence. The red desert left powder on her feet, and she took her time, in no rush as usual.
Why rush when you can't die?
A city of bright lights was in the distance, and Santos came to, trying to stay as still as possible so she wouldn't knock him out again. Deceit had become a master of breaking necks in the just right way, after snapping his dozens of times.
He let his body go limp, and he tried to take quick glances around him, trying to learn where he was. The fourth circle, unlike the others, was not filthy, smelly, or downtrodden.
It was paradise.
Monsters strolled around in the bright city lights, some dressed in clothes, others naked, others half-dressed. Even when fully dressed their outfits are overtly sexual or outlandish, with lights, or moving patterns on their shirts.
Santos tried to focus on staying limp as demons gave friendly waves and shouts to Deceit, and she waved back, a shining star wherever she went. Wearing her standard heels, shorts that were always too short, and no shirt, she had returned home with a prize.
Santos was disgusted that they had their own city, friends, and strangely, police officers. He tried not to turn his head too far as he saw two police officers give an incubus a ticket for not showing enough skin. Her pants were ankle-length, and should have been at least at the knee!
Full of shame, she covered her bare chest as the officers claimed they were federal breast inspectors , and that it was time to make sure everything was up to regulation standards .
Santos was filled with some shame himself as the bright black and blue lights excited him, the smells of bloody stumps wafted in the air from food stalls, and no one around him seemed to have any worries about decency.
He knew he should have hated it. He hated Him, and all of his children, but surrounded again by other beings like him, Santos started to feel less alone. He missed his kids, and this was the closest feeling he had gotten to seeing them in three days. Deceit looked back and saw his eyes wide open, and she smirked.
"'Sup, bitch."
Santos said nothing and glared at her, but then grimaced as the top of her forehead twitched. The skin convulsed, and a thin seam appeared. It slowly opened, black blood spilling out, and her red, All-Seeing Eye opened, looking deep into his sinful soul.
"I know that you're trying to leave," she said, her mouth not moving. "I can get you out. You just have to make a deal with me."
Santos said nothing, not trusting a single word she said. He could see the obvious traps every time he walked through Hell, its very existence itself a trap for the damned souls that they could never escape. He was silent, waiting for her to speak more so he could wait for her to accidentally spill important information, but instead, she kicked him in the face with her green Timmy Foo heels.
Santos made his body heavy on purpose, but it didn't work, and Deceit purposefully gripped harder onto his long black hair and dragged him into a love hotel. His face went warm and he panicked, worried that she was trying something obscene. Santos didn't want to finish part of his bucket list with a woman who killed people he cared about and didn't want to stay to find out what she would try to do.
It was too late.
She snapped his neck again, and he went limp as she easily dragged him into the old, rusty elevator, and descended underground. The sounds of the rusty elevator scraped against its own machinery, and the red dancing lights inside the elevator swirled, lighting up the black and grey carpet with little hearts.
The screeching death trap came to a halt after descending a few floors, and Deceit dragged Santos's limp body down the dark hallway, and into a hotel door that said room sixty-nine . She thought she was funny, the previous renter of the room thought it was funny to rent it out as well until she came in the middle of the night and tore his head off.
Santos awoke, lying on a blood-stained bed next to the corpse of the previous renter, his headless body slumped, leaning towards him, his decaying hand on Santos's chest. Santos didn't make a sound, and nervously picked up the rotting hand by its pinkie, and moved its hand off his chest.
He slowly turned away and saw Deceit, sitting on the floor, watching a reboot of the Golden Girls, Betty White still alive, her power growing day by day. The glow of the cathode TV illuminating the dark room and bouncing off of her face.
Without turning away from the television, she addressed him.
"I can get you out of here, but you can't come back."
Santos sat up slowly and quickly glanced around the room, looking for an escape. There was only an open door. He decided that he could just pop her head or crack it against the ancient electric device, but Deceit knew better.
Her head turned, her body still facing the same direction, and it turned at an impossible angle to look back at him. "I don't want you here. Kill me and you can't leave. Kill me and the others won't forgive you."
Her voice shook the walls, and the yellowing wallpaper of little hearts with bows and arrows peeled, sloughing off the walls, revealing the cracked foundation. She stood up, her head still turned all the way around, and approached him.
"Make your choice now. Kill me, or leave."
"I can't do both?"
" No. What the- No!"
Santos sighed and shook his head, smelling her jealousy. It was a strange smell. Unlike anger, which was the smell of burning tires, jealousy smelled like freshly cut apples. Deceit wanted him gone, wanting to be the only objects of her father's affections, and her wish was now near impossible after she had failed him, thousands of times, without even realizing.
"What's your game," Santos asked.
"I want my father back. He's the only man I really want, and I was a fool for chasing that nasty meatsuit."
Her voice cracked near the end of her sentence, and Deceit tried not to cry. She had thrown everything away for someone who would never love her as much as she loved him, her obsession eternal.
"I failed, and now I stay in this horrible place, away from my father… I'm a loser…"
She cried, never lower than she had been in her life, her black tears cascading down her face, dripping onto her back. The ghastly sight didn't scare Santos, but it made him empathetic. Her words were true. He could smell her sadness, the smell of rain.
"I know what it's like to lose favor with your father," Santos admitted. "I too gave up my life with my dad for love, and every day I pay the price."
"So you understand? That you need to leave?!"
"No, I'm not going to leave! Wouldn't it make more sense just to give me to Him? "
Deceit turned her body around, paying full attention to him, and wiped the tears off her frayed green halter top, no longer wanting to be vulnerable if it didn't give her what she needed.
"I want Him to never get what He wants, just as I never did," she shouted. "Why does He get to be happy after I gave up everything? "
She sobbed even harder, and Santos became uncomfortable seeing her pain, her tears no longer fake like her eyelashes. Santos was used to the smell of decay and death and paid the corpse no mind. What made him uncomfortable was his own feelings, empathizing with a monster.
"Don't cry for Him. They think they're helping us when they punish us, but the punishment never fits the crime," he told her. "They love us, but in the only way they know how."
"He doesn't love me," Deceit cried.
She picked up the bedside end table, and threw it against the wall, shattering into hundreds of pieces, the brown splinters flying across the room. She screamed, the roar of a lion emitting from her mouth, and she wasn't going to listen to reason.
"If this is love then I don't want it!"
She picked up the old television and raised it over her head. It crashed through the hotel room door, and into the dark hallway, her strength pushing it through the wall across the hall and into the other room.
Shouts could be heard from across the hall, and Deceit had enough. She wasn't going to risk her life for someone who wouldn't listen and tried to lecture her on love. Her All-Seeing eye glared at him, and she walked across the room, the large pieces of wood piercing her feet, and she didn't feel a thing.
"He tried to get rid of me. He told me how to leave. What kind of father just does that? How could he just get rid of me? "
She collapsed to the ground, a heaping mess, and her short stature appeared even smaller as she wailed for a father that claimed that his love was unconditional. Santos wanted to console her, but he didn't want her to think that he cared.
Helping her was more about helping himself, his old emotional scars all over her, freshly cut and bleeding. Santos was thrown away, never allowed back, all for believing the lies of the same person that had tricked her.
He swore he would never hurt his children the way his father had hurt him, and his quest to return home was imperative. He wanted to go back, more than ever, but the more he wandered the ten circles, the more his thoughts wandered about who else was trapped down there.
Suddenly, he remembered his youngest.
"Where's Savannah," Santos shouted.
Deceit gave him a look of complete and utter confusion. She was still on the floor and shrugged, not knowing who he was talking about. The shouts from across the hallway became louder, and two demons entered the trash room through the gaping hole in the door.
One was an incubus, naked and covered in chocolate and blue paint, her fingernails long and curled, her horns short and stubby, barely visible on her green, pixie cut hair.
"You're not Carl. Who the fuck are you?"
She glanced at Carl's body.
"Did you kill him," she screamed.
"What kind of demon's name is Carl," Santos laughed.
Deceit snickered along with him, and then they both started roaring with laughter at the demise of Carl, the lesser demon, a trapped soul that sold earrings made of ears, at the open market, to make ends meet.
"He was a horrible man, the worst of us all," the other monster wailed. "He was terrible! His victims knew no pleasures!"
He covered his face in shame as he cried, and his green skin pulsed as the incubus comforted him, rubbing his shoulders and promising that he could eat the chocolate off her chest if it made him feel any better about the death of their neighbor.
"I'm sorry about your friend, but-"
"-no you're not! You-"
"-but I didn't kill him! I'm leaving!"
"You're leaving for Adamah," Deceit asked. "You mean it?"
The two monsters perked up at her words and wanted to learn more.
"How do you know to get to Adamah," the green, short cyclops asked. He shivered, naked, his fun interrupted by the broken television set that came through his wall. Deceit glared at him with her pulsing, singular eye in the center of her forehead, and the words shut up , repeated, continuously in the room, shaking the walls.
The bed clattered, and poor Carl fell off the bed, his blood smearing on the sides of the bed comforter.