Read The Worm of the Ages and Other Tails: Six Short Fantasies for Free Online Page A

enough to appease my customer for the trifling wrong that Salazar did him in life,  two deaths could not begin to make up for forty years of tramping through Hell and suffering every pain on the books. And that fell light in his eyes grew a little brighter; for he knew he had got to do it again. He fell on his sword a second time, and went to the Hell of Hell; to Hell squared, if you see what I mean. And he started looking for Salazar all over again.
    ‘Now, don’t you listen to people like Dante;  they’re no authorities. The really showy pains of Hell, the fires and forks and all, are all on the first level – the  public level, you might say, where the sinners are still hardened from life, and have not yet been broken down by damnation. The lower you go, the less  real the punishments become; but the souls get weaker, too, and lose the power of endurance. And it is part and parcel of their torment that they know what is happening to them, and see that they have become such weaklings that they go into frenzies over things that they could have laughed off in life. There is one advanced patient, a customer of mine in the old days, who does nothing all day but sit in a booth like this one, drinking water with an ice cube in it – not because he is thirsty – no, he is hungry, but iced water is all he can get; we make sure of that. And the ice is just a little too cold, and he has a chipped tooth, and taking the millionth sip from that glass, and feeling the same old boring pang shoot through his tooth again – knowing each time that he can resist it less – he would hardly have felt it as a living man, but now it is enough to put him in a towering rage, and he blasphemes and cries and tears what’s left of his hair. More than half the fun comes because he  knows he is overreacting, shamelessly, colossally; but he can’t help himself anymore. He is stuck in a rut that he can’t get out of, and will never do anything more now but plod round and round in the same tedious circle of mild discomfort and titanic reaction, for ever and ever, because there will never be anything else to do.’
    The devil gave a sigh of pure bliss. I had been on the point of reaching for my own glass, but I thought better of it. Water with ice in it, just at that moment, was the last thing I wanted. ‘Your customer,’ I said gruffly.
    ‘Ah, yes. My customer. It took him even longer this time to find Salazar and kill him – and longer the next. And each time the tortures grew subtler, and more attuned to his particular weakness; and he became desperate, for he feared that he would not be able to stick to his purpose. By now he had a hope, you see; and a hope, in Hell, is a thing that is taken away. It was his fondest wish – his  only wish – to go on killing Salazar for ever and ever; to track him down and murder him, over and over, from Hell to Hell, and to the Hell of  that Hell, and so on down through the infinity of perdition. If there was a deeper Hell than Our Father Below is in’ – here he made a ritual and utterly insincere obeisance – ‘he would chase his playmate all the way there, and kill him, and make us open up a new layer below  that.  It was just killingly funny to see.
    ‘Of course, after a while he stopped being the Spanish swordsman he used to be; and there got to be a time when he was so insubstantial – not like a phantom, not like smoke; only all gooey and slooshy and viscous – but he could not get a grip on a sword any longer; but he set out with dogged determination, just the same, and wrapped his gummy arms and body around Salazar, and  smothered him. By and by, he got so fluid that he could actually drown him – drown a man in the slush of his own body.’
    ‘If you don’t change the subject,’ I said, ‘I’m going to be sick.’
    ‘Oh, it didn‘t last. Even slush has a structure of a sort; enough for a spirit to haunt. There was not much left of his intellect by this time, and even