Chapter 25
Hell was a waiting room with fading fluorescent
lighting and out-of-date Good Housekeeping and Redbook magazines. Also: hell
smelled like a doctor’s office, that sharp, sting-y smell that
promised you were gonna get hurt, one way or another, before the
visit was over.
“Uh.” Laura was
looking around, as wide-eyed as I was. “This is
unexpected.”
“To put it mildly.” I
glanced down at a Redbook from April 1979. Those bell-bottoms!
Those how-to-satisfy-your-man self-help articles! When the urge to
vomit became too much, I knew exactly what I was going to aim
for.
The room was
furnished with dinged-up, knocked-around cheap furniture; no one
was sitting at the check-in desk. The carpet was a perfect mixture
of snot green and eye-booger gray. And there were doors, doors
about two inches apart along every wall except where the desk
was.
“Subtle,” I observed,
nervously eyeing one of the doors. “I guess you’re supposed to get
around hell with these things.”
“Doors in a waiting
room?”
“That’s all this is.”
I glanced up at the ceiling as another ailing fluorescent started
to flicker. “People wait. In one of the yuckiest spots ever. You
can tell just by standing in this room that unpleasant things are
right around the corner. Like an audit you think is done, until
they pull out more paperwork.” I shuddered. “It’s brilliantly
evil.”
“Thank you,” my dead
stepmother said.
Of course. Of course
the Ant was here. Of course she was the devil’s right hand. With
the possible exception of Eva Braun, no one could be more suited to
the job.
“Well, great,” I said, eyeing her. “The good news is,
being dead hasn’t made any sort of imprint on your eclectic
personal style. Eclectic being another word for hideous.”
“Says the vampire!”
my dead stepmother cried, her overly be-ringed hands flying up to
pat her shiny blonde hair. Her hair was as it had always been: the
same shade, consistency, and shape of a ripe pineapple. “Only
you could have been more a pain in your
poor father’s ass after you died.”
“Uh, whoa,” Laura
said, glancing from the Ant to me and back again. “At least this
isn’t stressful. Or weird.”
“So, the devil’s
handmaiden is really ... the devil’s handmaiden! Ha! Color me the
opposite of surprised. Ugh, what are you wearing? You can’t tell me
all the clothing designers went to heaven. Can’t you dig up ... I
dunno ... Yves Saint Laurent? No. Wait. He was just a coke hound
who liked to drink. That’s not really the sort of thing people burn
in hell for. Too bad he didn’t kill someone and cover it up.
Cavalli? I’m pretty sure he was blasphemous when he wasn’t cranking
out panties ... aw, nuts. He’s not dead.”
“Maybe we’re getting
off track,” Laura began.
“Oooh, Donna Karan!
Right? The whole fur thing? Dammit, I think she’s still alive, too.
Uh ...”
The Ant puffed out a
harassed breath, apparently never having noticed her hair never,
ever moved. (It was interesting to me that people kept habits like
breathing and sighing when they didn’t need them anymore.) “It’s
nice to see you again, Laura.”
“Thank you, Mrs.
T—”
“No, no, no. Please,
my name is—”
“Mud,” I suggested.
“Mud Barfbag Taylor. Call her Asshat for short.”
“—Antonia.”
Laura stretched an
arm over the Ant’s desk (hell didn’t supply Post-Its, I noticed)
and they shook. “I just wanted you to know, Mud Bar—um, Antonia,
that though I understand Baal is my mother, you carried me for nine
months and—”
“Then dragged my dad
to the altar, had sex with him, then bit off his head and devoured
his still-twitching body.”
“Oh, Betsy, really!”
Laura frowned at me. “Grow up.”
“See? You’re already
turning evil. This place is gonna be a bad influence on you; I can
already tell. I sense it, as I sense the Ant needs a
makeover.”
“When I heard you
would be visiting us,” the Ant was yakking, “of course I asked the
Morningstar if I could help. I just didn’t think I’d be able to so
soon. I hope you understand you are foremost in her
thoughts—”
“Vomit,” I said to
the ceiling. Interesting that there now was one. And it looked like
every waiting room ceiling I’d ever seen: a yawn-inducing popcorn
ceiling, pitted with little holes from where people tossed pencils
at it. “And again, I say vomit.”
“—even though she was
called away. But I’ll look after you.” I felt a narrow-eyed glance.
“Both of you. I guess. Hmpf Meanwhile, if I can answer any
questions, please just come right out and ask.”
“Excellent. Because
I’ve got lots of questions. When you decided to whore yourself in
order to break up my mother’s marriage, did you do it because you
were an amoral slut, or because you didn’t get enough of Daddy’s
attention when you were a little girl? Or some weird pervy combo of
both? And when you’d do it with my mother’s husband, did you talk
to him about all the bad clothes and bad hair treatments you wanted
him to buy, or just grunt like animals?”
“Betsy!” mother and
daughter shrieked in unison.
“Yeah, that’s what I
thought.” I yawned. “So are we getting a tour or
what?”