Aloha from Hell

I stand on the corner and let the angel out of the attic long enough to expand my senses and do a kind of quick minesweep to see if there’s anything alive or lurking in the burned-out buildings. Sunset is dazzling through the angel’s eyes. The smoldering street with its torched trees is like a line of suns down a glory road of trembling atoms and subatomic particles.

The first time I saw Hell, it was a very different story. I was dragged down through Mason’s floor and landed in a naked heap on a main street in Pandemonium. I must have been out cold for a while, and when I came to, the first thing that hit me was the stink. Nothing human smelled like that. It wasn’t just waste. It was filth that had been packed, compressed, and locked away for a million years. Hell is the bottom of the universe and Heaven isn’t going to let Lucifer pollute the rest of existence with Hellion shit and candy wrappers. So they still bury it in the deep, deeper, deepest caverns in their craptacular kingdom, where it sits, cooks, and festers in its own juices until the end of time.

The angel gives the all clear. I shove it out of the way, but I don’t lock it up. Unfortunately, I’m going to need all of me to get through this, and that includes my divine squatter.

I head west down Sunset so I can cut up Las Palmas to Max Overdrive. The strrdrive.angel better be right that it’s clear down here. I’m not above self-trepanation.

I can still see the Hollywood Boulevard riot when I cross Vine Street. And Cahuenga.

Getting down Sunset is harder than the road by the cemetery. The fault lines are wider and the broken pavement is pushed up higher and at steeper angles. Sinkholes have opened around whole blocks, forming skyscraper islands with sewage moats. Maybe that’s why everything feels so wrong. I’ve only gone a couple of blocks but I swear it feels like I’ve been walking for-fucking-ever. Who or whatever built this L.A. got the proportions all wrong. The buildings are right, but some of them are in the wrong place. The Cinerama Dome still looks like a giant golf ball dropped to the earth by aliens, but it’s on the wrong side of the street. Some of the side streets that used to cut across Sunset have twisted around like asphalt taffy and now run parallel.

That is not good news. It means that even if someone tells me where Eleusis is, I might not be able to find it in these deranged goddamn streets. And I can’t even use maps. Lucifer was such a control freak that most of the maps you find Downtown are wrong. He didn’t want the riffraff knowing exactly which roads led where or which were wide enough to hold rebel troops. That means I’m going to need a tracker who can walk and take me to the doorstep of Alice’s asylum.

A hell of a quake must have hit the concrete island ahead of me. An entire block of gleaming new office buildings has fallen in on itself and half disappeared down a massive sinkhole. The acres of broken glass and steel reflect the burning street like the last ice floe at the end of the world.

I check out Hollywood Boulevard at the next corner. It looks clear and there’s no noise that way. I run the whole way.

Seeing the Boulevard here, it’s easy to understand why the crowd is tearing things up down the street. The place is picked clean. The ground floor of every building is gutted and burned. Bloody Hellions with broken limbs wander through the rubble looking for food, potions, or pills to make the world stop hurting. Damned souls are scattered all over the street staring into space like shell-shocked children. Finding themselves free but still in Hell was too much for their already tortured minds. They don’t react when I walk by, but the Hellions see me and scatter like roaches into the empty buildings. The universe has entered a new level of weirdness when Hellions are the ones afraid to be caught out after dark.

Half a block ahead is the only intact, well-lit building on the whole street. When I get closer I understand why.

Praise God and pass the ammunition. Now I understand. Now I know everything.

Peter Murphy was wrong when he said Bela Lugosi’s dead. He’s not. I just found his retirement home.

It stands where Grauman’s Chinese Theatre should be. I mean it’s still the Chinese Theatre—all supersaturated reds and golds—but it’s a different version. It’s twice as big as it should be. It’s r fIt so wide that it takes up half the block and the golden pagoda roof looks like it’s high enough to rip open stray blimps. A fifty-foot metal electrified fence marked every few yards with lightning-bolt warning signs surrounds the place.