Free Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean by John Shirley Page A

whiskey and Bosky and Geoff drank them off before Garth could stop them. But Bosky wasn’t glad he’d drunk it—the whiskey burned in his empty belly, and he felt only dizzy, not jolly.
    “Ha ha,” said Butterworth, returning from the WC. He pronounced each ha as a clear, separate syllable. He added a couple more as he picked his way over the rubble. “Ha ha. The boy looks like he swallowed something he’s not used to! That’ll teach you to try to be a man before you’re—”
    “Here, Butterworth!” Skupper said, scowling at him. “I told you not to use that bog! It’s not connected to a sewer anymore! Find an empty house!”
    “There’s some empty houses at the darker end of the village,” said Annie Weathers, her face looking haunted in the candlelight as she came in from the street, stepping through a hole in a wall. “For three more of us have been taken.” A prim woman, with her hair still in the same blond helmet shape it had been in before the earth had swallowed up her home, and wearing the same long blue coat, only a little muddy at the bottom edges. Her thin face—too thin for that mollusk of hair—was smudged by tears, however. Her eyes were unfocused; her mouth slack, her fingers trembling at her sides. She had never in thirty years been seen in the village without her purse, until now.
    “Here,” Butterworth said, taking her arm, leading her to one of the intact booths. “Have a seat, Mrs. I’ll get you a brandy.”
    “Why thank you,” Annie said when the brandy was brought to her. “I’m afraid I . . . I have not yet . . . not yet quite reconciled myself to my . . . to my fate. Perhaps—perhaps I don’t understand what we’ve done to . . . to deserve this.”
    “ ’Tain’t fair, right enough,” said Butterworth, sitting across from her, looking out through the crack in the ceiling at the fluorescent stalactites poised like a mouth full of teeth over the village. “But the Lord works in mysterious ways—so mysterious, even the Vicar’s down here with us! And our Vicar Tombridge is well known to be a good man, and no hypocrite. Spoke to him in his vicarage, not an hour ago. He was trying to make a cup of tea by piling up pieces of wood on his stove, talking to himself. ‘One makes sacrifices,’ he says, ‘and this is one’s reward—some detestable outer circle of Gehenna,’ he says. I don’t know what he means by sacrifices, exactly, but I heard Mrs. Galway offered herself to him, and he turned her down.”
    “Here, don’t be speaking of ladies like that!” said Garth. “True or not!”
    “The woman’s dead now,” Butterworth said, shrugging. “And it doesn’t matter anyhow. I mean, are you saying I’ll be punished somehow for speaking ill? Eh? We’re in Hell. What more punishment can happen?”
    Even as he said this, the gray hand of a grippler was reaching unseen through the crooked frame of the back door, stretching toward Geoff, who stood behind the others. No one saw the gray hand stretching its way into the room. Another hand, on a long, long arm, came through the door just behind the first and a little higher, moving more like a tentacle than a limb . . .
    “I reckon we could take up weapons,” Bosky said. “My da left a rifle. Mum’s got it locked up, but I could get it. Could be them things can be killed.”
    Garth shook his head from side to side, in the motion of a bell tolling mournfully. “You cannot kill demons, boy. Only God can do that. ’Specially, in Hell, where they’re strongest.”
    “I don’t believe this is Hell,” Bosky said. “I’ve read up some on Hell, and there’s a lot of descriptions of it, some one way and some another, but none like this. This is more like . . . like a big kidnapping, something like that . . . using magic maybe.”
    Even as he spoke the word kidnapping, the four-fingered hands clamped tightly around Geoff’s mouth and throat, and began dragging him backwards—but as Butterworth was laughing