The next morning I was a little bit tired and a lot hungry (Ms. Hatchetface had insisted on bringing me breakfast in bed again) when I stumbled downstairs to find that my living room had been demolished.
Ms. Robbins had set up a blackboard against the far wall and was drawing bizarre Satanic symbols all over it with chalk, while Sarah sat at rapt attention in a desk that looked as if it’d been stolen from her kindergarten.
For just a moment I couldn’t help but think how adult Sarah looked, her bright blue eyes greedily scanning over the board as she drank in its knowledge. I felt a little pang of ‘my little girl’s growing up blues’ before I shook it off, telling myself it was far too early for all that.
Next to Sarah’s desk gaped a large black pit with burn marks around it; every once in a while Franken Teddy would throw a Cheeto fruit into it and a large purple tentacle would shoot up from the darkness and catch it mid-air before slithering back down into the darkness.
The couch had been pushed up against the staircase. The cushions had somehow been transformed to red, patent leather and two large, rounded horns sprouted from either side.
I sighed, giving the hole in the ground a wide berth as I went to the kitchen and grabbed a beer from the fridge before plopping down on my couch.
I heard a “Hey! Watch where you stick that thing!” from my couch and leapt back to my feet.
“The couch decided it doesn’t like being sat on all the time, Daddy,” Sarah said, turning and smiling sweetly up at me.
“Oh okay,” I replied dreamily. “I suppose next the carpet will decide it doesn’t want people to walk all over it.”
Sarah giggled.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Daddy.”
I took a big gulp of my beer.
“THE COURAGE OF THE COUCH IS TO BE COMMENDED,” Franken Teddy intoned in his monstrous baritone. “IT HAS RISEN ABOVE ITS STATION IN LIFE AND WILL SOON DOMINATE THE HUMANS THAT ONCE SAW FIT TO MAKE IT THEIR SEAT-SLAVE.”
“What-” I began, but Ms. Hatchetface cut me off.
“Have some more Cheeto-fruit, Teddy, you get cranky when your blood sugar is low.”
“NO DEMON IN HELL HAS THE AUTHORITY TO COMMAND ME BUT SATAN HIMSELF,” Franken Teddy boomed.
“Have some Cheeto fruit, silly,” Sarah said.
“OKAY.” With that he lifted up the wheelbarrow of the fruit that was next to him and tipped it down his throat. The sparrow on his head squawked in protest, and Ms. Robbins eyed the display with snobbish displeasure.
“Hmph,” she said. “I don’t know why Satan thought that thing was an appropriate companion for a little girl. When I was her age, I kept an evil unicorn. Stryder,” her voice drifted off dreamily, “now he was a pet.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t a dinosaur?” Ms. Hatchetface asked, voice dripping with faux-honey. Apparently she hadn’t taken it kindly when Ms. Robbins had called her a ‘strawberry tart’ the day before.
“And just what is that supposed to mean?” Ms. Robbins asked, swelling up indignantly like a great big bullfrog ready to burst.
“I BELIEVE THE LADY HATCHETFACE IS IMPLYING THAT YOU ARE OLD,” Franken Teddy said, wiping the Cheeto dust on the couch, who let out a disgusted grumble. “YET THE LADY HATCHETFACE IS APPROACHING 17,000 YEARS OF AGE HERSELF. PERHAPS SHE IS MERELY IMPLYING THAT YOU LOOK EXTREMELY OLD.”
“Yes, well we aren’t all half-succubus and-”
“BECAUSE OF THE WRINKLES”
“Yes, I understand my appearance-
“AND THE HUNCHBACK,” Franken Teddy finished.
Ms. Robbins’s finger began to wag dangerously in Franken Teddy’s direction and I decided that I had better cut in before there was anymore trouble.
“So!” I said a little too loudly. “What exactly are you guys learning today?”
“We are learning about the fundamentals of demonic possession,” came Ms. Robbins’s sharp retort. “And afterwards perhaps a lesson in etiquette for you, Darren. It is not polite to interrupt a teacher’s lesson.”
“Right... and what about the giant squid-hole in my living room?”
“We opened a portal to the Netherworld, Daddy,” Sarah said with the casual ease of someone explaining what they’d had for breakfast that morning. “It’s like Hell’s basement, where all the incomprehensible beings that existed in the black void of nothingness before the universe was birthed live.”
“Huh,” I replied, taking another gulp of beer.
Just then a low, rumbling growl emitted from the hole, shaking the picture frames off the walls and sending cracks through the ceiling.
“Could we maybe shut that?”
“We haven’t learned how to shut portals yet,” Sarah replied.
“...okay.”
I took another sip of beer,realized that it was just air because the beer was already gone, and wandered off into the kitchen to see if I could scrounge up something resembling human food.
I opened the refrigerator and my hair blew black as a deep, infernal roar erupted from within. I slammed the door shut.
“Sarah?” I called out to the living room.
“Yes, Daddy?”
“Did you open a portal to the Netherworld inside the refrigerator?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
I sighed, closed my eyes tightly and rubbed my temples.
As I stared into the blackness of the back of my own eyelids, an idea occurred to me. The night before, I had puzzled over the problem of Ms. Hatchetface’s mysterious conversation with no-one until the early hours of the morning. I could not come to any sort of conclusion, my head fogged by lack of sleep and the gentle warmth that perpetually radiated from Ms. Hatchetface’s skin.
Yet now I realized that whatever was going on, Satan was surely behind it. After all, he was the one who had sent Ms. Robbins up, and he was the one in charge. And, perhaps most importantly, he was the one who had buzzed me down to Hell every time I called his customer service department with a complaint.
At first, that had irritated me--it was almost as bad as dealing with Comcast customer service here on Earth--but now it could be an opportunity, an opportunity for me to get down to Hell and snoop around a bit.
I slid my phone out of my pocket and hit the number for Hell’s customer service hotline, which I had saved in my phone.
It was picked up after one ring, and the familiar, pushy voice of the customer service representative answered.
“Welcome to Hell’s customer service, how may I Hell you today?”
“You know that joke’s getting pretty tired.”
“You don’t say? Why don’t you come up with something better, then?”
“Seems like a lot of effort.”
The voice on the other end sighed and mumbled something about lazy writing.
“Is this Mr. Rogers again?” she asked, her tone telling me that she already knew the answer.
“Yes, I wanted to talk about a portal to the Netherworld in my-”
“Please hold.”
The line clicked, and I noted with some confusion that the hold-music was Creed’s “Can you Take me Higher.”
The line clicked again and Satan’s enthusiastic voice answered.
“David, buddy!” he almost yelled into the earpiece. “What’s shakin?”
“It’s Darren,” I said. “What’s shaking is the gaping pit to the Netherworld that Sarah opened up in the middle of my living room.”
“Oh, well that’s no good, is Gary down there?”
“Who is Gary?”
“Gary is the giant octopus whose ink is the source of the universe’s dark matter.”
“Well, there is a giant octopus.”
“Alright, well I’ll send someone to close that portal up right away, how does Tuesday work for you?”
“Satan, it’s Wednesday right now.”
“I meant the Tuesday after next.”
“Satan, there’s a giant octopus living beneath my living room who could squirt dark matter all over my furniture at any moment. Could we maybe talk about this face to face?”
“I uh...” Satan’s voice trailed off. “I’m a little busy right now, Darren. Don’t worry I’ll send somebody within a few months.”
“What happened to Tues-no, you know what? Buzz me down.”
“Okay,” Satan said. “But I’m not at the office.”
“Where are-” but my voice was drowned out by the roar of the black and purple fire that swallowed me whole, sucking me down to Hell like human-flavored soda through a straw.
I stumbled across the rusted red dirt and cracked volcanic stone as I landed in Hell, although just where in Hell I was I had no idea. It seemed to be some sort of construction site, where giant, purple-skinned behemoths hauled around girders made from the ancient, yellowed bones of some even larger beast.
I stood on a hill overlooking it all, and from my perspective it seemed as if the demons were laying down a monumental pentagram, flat across an enormous expanse of blood red sand.
Torches stood at each of the five points, made from trees so tall and wide that they could have held up the Earth itself. Inside each gap between the star and the circle were archaic looking symbols. I could not explain why, but just looking at them filled me with a deep sense of dread.
I looked up to see Satan standing beside me, eyes squinting tight as he surveyed the work, his two polished black horns poking through holes in a plastic yellow construction hat.
“Hey, Derek,” he said, smiling down at me. “What are you doing on the ground?”
I scrambled up to my feet, made a poor job of brushing the dirt off of my trousers, and looked at Satan.
“So...” I trailed off. Now that the first part of my plan had actually worked I realized that I hadn’t really given any thought to what the next part was. “What uh....what are you guys building?”
“Oh this?” Satan grinned. “It’s a park.”
“It’s a park in the shape of a pentagram?”
“Well, this is Hell, Derek. A pentagram fits the aesthetic.”
“It’s Darren, actually.” I replied.’
“What’s Darren?”
“Never mind.”
“Okey-dokey, Derek.” Satan said. “But as you can see, we’re a little bit busy down here in Hell, and I can’t really afford to send anyone up right now to fix the portal in your living room. Why don’t you just ask Ms. Robbins to do it?”
“Ms. Robbins knows how to do it?” I asked, momentarily forgetting I was on a fact-finding mission. “Why didn’t you just tell me that over the phone?”
“Well, you seemed like you were in an awful hurry to get down here,” Satan replied. “I thought maybe you missed me.”
“What?”
“Is there anything else you need, Derek?” he asked. “As you can see I’m a little bit busy here.”
“All you’re doing is watching other people work.”
“You’re damn right!” Satan replied enthusiastically. “I’m the boss down here, and the boss’s job is to watch other people work and silently project the idea that they should be working harder.”
“Uhh...”
“Anyway, I’ll see you soon, Derek.”
“You will?”
But Satan didn’t respond, instead, the familiar black and purple flames kicked up around me and I once again felt that sensation of being sucked up through a straw.
I landed back in my kitchen, elbows and knees banging hard against the linoleum floor.
I struggled back up to my feet and saw that the portal in the living room had been sealed--Gary the octopus was gone, though the burn marks on my carpet remained.
“Satan called while you were on your way up,” Sarah explained. “He told Ms. Robbins that to seal the hole up because you didn’t like Gary. That wasn’t a very nice thing to say, Daddy.”
“But I didn’t-”
GRRREEEEEUUUUUUUUGGGGHHHH
The rumble vibrated from somewhere deep below the Earth.
“I think you hurt Gary’s feelings, Daddy,” Sarah said. “You should probably apologize.”
My fingers once again found my temples and begin massaging as I squeezed my eyes shut against the chaos of my living room.
I had come no closer to finding out what Satan was up to, and I was beginning to wonder if there were any potential side-effects from being repeatedly sent to Hell and back. And I still hadn’t eaten breakfast.
My eyes had been shut for all of ten seconds when I heard an earth-shatteringly loud bellow in my ears:
“YOU APPEAR TO BE SUFFERING FROM A HEAD-ACHE, PERHAPS I CAN ASSIST YOU.”
Franken Teddy was bent down, his face so close to mine that I could count the particles of Cheeto powder at the corners of his mouth.
“No thank you, Franken Teddy, I’m just fine.”
“VERY WELL.”
I turned towards Ms. Robbins.
“Listen, Ms. Robbins,” I began. “I don’t want to come downstairs to find any more portals to the Netherworld in my living room, nor do I want to come down to find a couch that talks and is suddenly useless to sit on.”
Ms. Robbins swelled indignantly.
“My teaching methods-”
“Your teaching methods are just fine if you’re teaching in your own home,” I cut her off. “But as long as you are teaching here, not to mention staying in the guest bedroom, you’re to follow the rules of my household. Which, and I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, include a ‘no portals to the Netherworld’ clause.”
Ms. Robbins glowered at me like she was a frog and I was an agile fly who had danced out of the reach of her gaping maw. Luckily, she must have decided that she was too offended for words, because she simply stormed off upstairs, reptilian tail thwapping each step as she went up.
“You know,” the couch said, cushions flapping up as if the three of them composed a giant mouth, “you’re useless to sit on too, but you don’t hear me throwing it in your face.”
“I BELIEVE THAT THE LADY ROBBINS WAS WOUNDED BY YOUR WORDS,” Franken Teddy boomed. “BUT I DO NOT BELIEVE THE WOUND TO BE FATAL.”
I sighed and wondered if it was safe trying to get another beer from the fridge--Sarah hadn’t mentioned anything about the portal in the kitchen being closed. But I knew I had something else to do first.
“Sarah,” I began wearily, “I’m sorry I interrupted your lesson.”
“It’s okay, Daddy,” Sarah grinned, her bright, blue eyes shining with a child’s carelessness, “I was ready for a break anyway. Can I go upstairs and play tea party with Franken Teddy?”
“Of course, Honey.”
“Yay!” Sarah squealed, streaming upstairs in a little girl sized blur before pausing at the banister and shouting at Franken Teddy: “Come on, silly!”
“YES, PRINCESS SARAH.”
I heard the stairs creak in protest as Franken Teddy’s immense frame rocketed up them.
“How is your head, Mr. Rogers?” I heard Ms. Hatchetface’s kind voice at my elbow.
“It’s okay,” I replied.
“Are you sure? Maybe I could make you a snack and that would-”
“NO!” I shouted out reflexively.
Ms. Hatchetface’s eyes had widened in surprise.
“I just meant, uhh...” My mind stalled as it searched for an excuse. “I’ll feel better once I get this mess cleaned up in the living room.”
“Oh, okay!” Ms. Hatchetface said cheerily. “I’ll help!”
We made our way over to the miniature mock classroom, Ms. Hatchetface to the blackboard and me to the desk. Ms. Hatchetface lifted the blackboard over her head and began carrying it towards the garage, but I didn’t touch the desk. I was looking at something I saw in Sarah’s notebook: The page she had been taking notes on had been ripped out, but there was a familiar figure in the indentations on the next page. I took the pencil she had carelessly left on the desk and began to edge it lightly over the indentations in the paper. When I had finished, I was staring at something I’d definitely seen before, that day in fact: a large pentagram dominated the page, little archaic symbols dotted between each gap between the star and the outer circle--the exact same symbols I’d seen in the colossus under construction in Hell.
I don’t know what Satan is planning, but I do know that whatever it is, Sarah is involved.
Submitted December 01, 2017 at 06:34PM by lifeisstrangemetoo http://ift.tt/2jAbzOe nosleep
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