Dante Alighieri, Supreme Poet and third crown of Italian literature blinked slowly, trying to take in his surroundings. A few moments ago, he had been in the arms of his beloved Beatrice in the silver halls of Paradise, basking in the soft golden light of a seraphim’s wings. Screwing his eyes up against the wall of blistering heat that shimmered from the ground, he made his way forward. The pungent bite of sulphur stung his nostrils, and a dark shape was coalescing from the clouds of red, sparking mist that enveloped him, a looming shadow waiting like an augury of death.
Yes, he recognized this place. It had come to him centuries ago in his sleep. The most important sleep of his life.
The gates of Hell yawned open in a silent scream. Its pillars pulsed with the agonized faces of condemned souls bubbling in a diseased sea of torment. Dante fell to his knees, looking around frantically, and realized he was alone: the virginal kisses of Beatrice were a cold memory, the warm hand of his Roman guide the ghost of a dream long forgotten. He almost raised his voice in desperate prayer but stopped just as soon as he began. It was as the letters wrought in burning metal above the portal proclaimed: ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE .
Yet, how strange…. another inscription had been added just below the infamous legend. Instead of gothic, towering script, a bright red sign proclaimed:
As seen in The Divine Comedy!!
Dante rubbed his eyes with the back of one hand. No, he had not imagined things, the odd sign was still there. Now he started to notice the addition of new slogans adorning the gate. Creeping slowly up to the infernal portal, he peered at a large plastic rectangle propped up next to the bronze doors. On it was a picture of a devil, holding a pitchfork in one hand. The imp’s other hand was held out, palm at about the height of Dante’s midriff. Some kind of white circle was emerging from between the imp’s fangs, filled in with the words: Must Be This Tall For Eternal Damnation. Another sign was hanging limply on a piece of string from the nose of a bellowing skeleton: Closed For Repairs.
Hell? Closed? Something was amiss, and all that remained was to get to the bottom of it. Well, that wouldn’t be too hard; he had completed this trek before (albeit in his dreams) so it should not prove too arduous of a task to do so again. Steeling his nerve, Dante marched right up to the gates of Hell, scanning their expanse for a possible entrance. He found none, but what he did find was a series of silver buttons set above a metallic grille. Small, thin plaques were placed beside each button, with one catching the poet’s eye: Management.
Dante pressed the button quickly. A sharp buzz, a pause, and then a dry crackle from the grille. A voice, dripping boredom through the metallic slats, oozed into Dante’s ears.
“’Ello? City of Dis, Sixth Circle of Hell, Inferno Incorporated, how may I help?”
Dante shuffled his feet. “Um…yes, good sir, apologies, I am seeking entry into Hell.”
Dante imagined he could just about hear the eyes rolling in the speaker’s skull through the grille.
“Read the sign, will ya? We’re closed.”
“Well, yes, I understand, but this is a matter of supreme importance.”
“Sir, if you have any complaints please solicit and fill out a form from our Customer Satisfaction department,” recited the voice. “If you have been damned and are seeking compensation, we are temporarily providing half-off bargains on entry to Limbo, until the fires of Hell are back in business.”
“No, you’re not listening, I have not been damned. I should be in Heaven right now”-
“Oooooh, no kidding? Pull the other one, mate, it’s got bells on. Like we haven’t heard that one before.”
Dante had never considered himself a violent man. Nevertheless, took a step back and counted slowly to ten. “My name,” he declared, “is Dante Alighieri. I have been chosen for salvation by the Lord himself. I demand an explanation.”
A stunned silence echoed from the mouthpiece. Dante craned his neck forward, pressing his ear against the queer device. He could hear a muffled, thick chatter squeaking from it, as if the voice had quickly pressed its hand down on the speaker. There was the faintest suggestion of another voice now, icy tones that clipped away at each vowel with the pincers of a surgeon. A fresh rasp of static and the first voice returned now, wheedling and apologetic.
“Beg your pardon, Mr. Dante sir, your honour, you should have said so earlier. We very much regret any inconvenience caused and Inferno Inc. would like to take this opportunity to offer you a complimentary gift package”-
“Just let me inside, will you?” sighed Dante. His head hurt, his lips were beginning to chap from the heat, and already his robes had secreted clammy ponds underneath his armpits.
There was a brief pause, and then a hideous cacophony as the Gates of Hell swung open with the slow weight of oblivion. Dante made his way along the sooty cobblestones, wincing as the Gates roared shut behind him. He knew what was to come, could prepare himself for what to expect (he had written it, famously, hadn’t he?). Dante braced himself for the leering, hollow-eyed stare of Charon the ferryman, for King Minos and the leathery rasp of his serpentine tail condemning sinners to their justice. He felt a ripple of goosebumps as he remembered Cerberus with his sixfold bilious eyes, his maw dripping with filth. What he hadn’t expected was the train.
Not that it really was a train. A thin track of rails snaked off into the red fogs of Hell, and a plastic awning had been erected as some kind of miniature station. The ‘train’ was nothing more than six cars, with no roof and small enough to hold four people each, the outside of the carriage painted in a lurid scarlet. Dante sidled over to the nearest car and crawled in, feeling exceedingly stupid. His knees were pressed uncomfortably up against the seat in front of him.
The piddly little train gave a juddering start and began trundling jerkily along the tracks, as a disembodied female spectre, addressing Dante from somewhere inside the vehicle, cooly reminded him to always keep his hands within the ride. It puttered along, leaving Dante to gawp at his surrounding as they passed him by. Fields belching fire and pitch, putrid swamps writhing with cancerous mangroves, their leaves dripping with scorpions. Brittle forests leaking bloody sap. In the sky, the imps were a murmuration of defiled angels, black batwings casting leathery shadows as they swarmed, chasing down stumbling, naked sinners. Sinners, yes, everywhere Dante looked he could see them. Whipped and scourged against toothy rocks, dashed against the cliffsides and splattered in a gale of icy wind. Groaning sinners laden with gangrenous sores, skewered sinners stacked neatly atop one another in the heat of an unending sun, and from their throats a Babel of tongues crying out in languages from every corner of the Earth.
The train was playing a tune that chimed merrily from an invisible speaker. Dante couldn’t catch all the lyrics over the incessant misery of the damned, but he thought it went something along the lines of It’s A Small World After All.
Mercifully, the train slid to a creaking halt soon enough, depositing Dante outside of a towering building that appeared to have been pinched at the base and stretched upwards as far as possible. Dante did not have to wait too long: a shadowy figure was moving towards him from inside the building, masked by its translucent glass doors. They swung open to reveal what appeared to be a man like Dante
The demon (because what else could it be?) was wearing a crisp white shirt, stapled tightly in place against his chest by suspenders with silver buckles. His shoes were slick leather arrows, his tie a bloody slash dripping down from his neck and his face was lined with the thin, stretched wax of a Botox operation. The demon’s grey-flecked hair had been combed back in a sheen of oily gunk and some kind of perfume reminiscent of paint-thinner was crinkling the air around him.The fiend was on the bemused Dante in a flash, grasping his hands in a manicured vice. The poet noticed that the devil’s sleeves were winking at him: tiny metal pitchforks held his cuffs in place. Dante also caught a glimpse of the laminated badge pinned to his breast:
Hi! My name is: Beelzebub.
“The man himself,” beamed Beelzebub, sewing a smile onto his face that was all canines. He did not give the spluttering Dante any time to recover, clapping the poet amicably on the shoulder and steering him towards the door of the building, ignoring his squeaks of muted Italian protest.“Honestly, you don’t know how much of an honour this is-sorry about that unpleasant business at the entrance, Paimon is still a bit new to the job-but of course once we heard it was you, well, we’d move Heaven (excuse my French, aha) and earth for Dante Alighieri,” drawled Beelzebub. He stopped at a desk right before a pair of elevators, behind which a bored looking woman with frazzled hair was clacking away at a computer.
“Straight up to Management, Lilith, be a doll,” said Beelzebub, winking at the woman, who responded with a look probably older than Hell itself. The nearest elevator dinged open. Beelzebub all but thrust Dante into the clammy box, leaning against the opposite wall. The demon was smiling so widely Dante feared his head would split open.
“This is really super, just brilliant, the big boss has been bugging me for aaaages to get you down here, a gesture of gratitude, you know how it is-”
“G-gratitude?”
Beelzebub flicked a fly from the edge of his nose. “Well of course!” he laughed, “none of this would be possible without you. I mean, talk about free publicity!”
“Publicity?”
“Yeah! We haven’t had a win for marketing like this for centuries. Sure, there’s always a couple of good ones that come along: Rimbaud was alright, and that Milton guy gave us some good press”-Beelzebub extended his hands out, as if visualizing a giant billboard- “Satan: But He’s The Good Guy! Imagine that! The Big Boss had a field day with it, he hasn’t shut up about it since.”
The elevator chimed to a halt. Dante blinked in the drab light from the humming lamps on the roof. As far as the eye could see stood cohorts of plastic boxes. Gray, apathetic faces blurred and shambled along the way as they went, the colourless ocean only occasionally broken up by gaudy nick-nacks, post-cards and fading photographs. The smell was a pervasive miasma of stale coffee, acrid ink, paper stewed in the printer and “pinewood” air freshener fighting an unending battle with stinking ventilation. A large corkboard to Dante’s right showed a grinning demon in a suit and tie sitting eagerly at a desk, flashing a thumbs-up at the invisible audience, chirpily announcing “BETTER TO REIGN IN HELL THAN SERVE IN HEAVEN!” Underneath, someone had taped up a sticky note with the less inspiring legend: ‘Turkey sandwich in fridge is mine-Samael.’ There was a coffee mug that had been left out in the nearest cubicle. It was unusually long and bore the inscription “You don’t have to be eternally ripped from the loving bosom of the Lord to work here-but it helps!”
Dante pinched his nose. This wasn’t making any sense. “Sorry-The Big Boss?”
“Oh, that would be the leader of the old guard. You know, Lucy.”
“Lucy?”
“That’s what his friends call him,” preened Beelzebub, inflating with the barely concealed smarm of someone who knows people in high places. “Unfortunately, he can’t be here to meet you-there’s souls to corrupt, humans to damn, you know the drill, he never lets up, but that’s the boss-man for you. He’s a busy guy, been running this gig since…. well, since…zero, I guess you’d call it.”
“The rebellion of fallen angels?”
“Pssh,” snorted Beelzebub, making a face. “Rebellion of the fallen angels’-classic union busting is what I’d like to call it. There’s no justice in the world,” sighed Beelzebub. His eyes took on a mad sheen. “Well, except for us.”
“And us is……?”
“Inferno Incorporated, silly! Though I don’t like all that corporate slang. I prefer to think of us as one big, happy family, not a company,” purred the demon. Dante took in the swarm of haggard faces scribbling away in their cluttered cubicles, every sluggish scrawl of a pencil a symphony of despair. There were probably families like that, Dante could concede, though the kind that would leave the drinks cabinet locked during Christmas dinner and be unable to get to dessert without a nervous breakdown from Mum.
“Fine, but what is it you do here?”
“Oh, same old, same old, infinite damnation, torture beyond the limits of human imagination, etc, etc,” said Beelzebub. “We do a pretty mean guided tour now though-did you like the train ride? Though of that one myself, though I tell you it was a drag to be able to get the song”-he elbowed Dante playfully and painfully in the ribs- “those Disney guys, huh? And I thought we were bastards,” he snickered in a way that made Dante suspect Beelzebub memorized a lot of comments of the kind for moments like these.
“We like to think of ourselves as a modern company, ya know? Ah, here we are, this is what I wanted to show you!”
They had stopped in front of a room flanked by a large plate-glass display case. Dante shuffled into the room, squinting at rows and rows of shiny plastic racks bedecked with paraphernalia. A bunch of scratchy T-shirts caught his eyes. They were emblazoned with pathetically desperate attempts at jovial wit, the kind of thing that was comedy gold to beer-swilling dads looking to inflict fresh agonies of humiliation onto their cringing teenagers. One said: “MALEBOLGIA? I HARDLY KNOW HER!” Another said: “I VISITED THE CITY OF DIS AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT.”
Dante rifled through a couple more (“I’M USED TO HELL: I’M MARRIED, AREN’T I?” “NUMBER ONE SUCCUBUS SEDUCER”) smiling weakly at Beelzebub, who was watching Dante with the look of a small child who had just handed their parents a drawing done in crayon.
“Pretty neat, right?” said Beelzebub. “Though of course, we don’t actually have any Succubae anymore, not after all that women’s-lib crap, ya know?” Beelzebub did not wait for Dante to reply and instead slunk over to a large coffee table laden with pyramids of glossy books. “And look, here we go!”
He handed Dante a book . It had flames on the cover, and a golden title in a rather overdone font: The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. A sticker read: “NOW A MAJOR COSMOLOGICAL ATTRACTON!”
“Not too shabby, if I do say so myself,” said Beelzebub, cracking his suspenders like gunshots. “Got bumped up to Head of Marketing a couple of centuries back. It was supposed to be Mephistopheles but he left to strike out on his own in showbiz, all the fame went to his head after that Dr. Faustus nonsense,” muttered Beelzebub, stopping as he noticed Dante. The poet was looking at the book with disgust. “You OK?”
“This-this says the Divine Comedy.”
“Yeah…..?”
“This is only Inferno !”
“So?”
“But-but it’s a trilogy,” wailed Dante. “What about Purgatory, what happened to Paradise? The long, painful but redemptive struggle to salvation, the journey from despair to hope?”
“Oh no one gives a shit about that, it barely sells,” snorted Beelzebub. “You humans want all fucked-up karmic justice contrapasso stuff, why else do you think we made this place? Anyway, I thought you’d be happy,” said Beelzebub. He set down the mug and began flicking through a copy of the Inferno. “I mean, you came up with all this stuff, right? Could have reached out to us about the title though, not sure about this Divine Comedy stuff-not exactly a laugh a minute. I thought you were a funny guy?” said Beelzebub. The demon flipped to a random page and made a face.
“Terribly inaccurate too if you don’t mind constructive criticism. I mean this place used to just be your run-of-the-mill lake of fire. Funny thing is, sinners would start showing up and have all these questions, all these complaints: what about the Seven Levels of Hell? Is the Forest of the Suicides a dog-friendly zone? Where are all the icy wastelands, don’t all the flames get a bit repetitive? Blah de blah de blah, you get the idea. Wouldn’t be a good idea to disappoint the customers, right? Dealing with the contractors alone was-well, aha, –Hell. I mean come on, seven levels. Overkill man, real overkill,” tutted Beelzebub, sticking his hands in his pockets.
“We had to fly in a Cerberus, now that was a chore, I’ll tell you. Three different rabies shots, fed nine times a day and those PETA goons still aren’t happy. All that Greco-Roman stuff you put in there too, we’ve had to outsource half our workforce to centaurs and harpies, plus they’re all undocumented. Though between you and me,”-Beelzebub lowered his voice to a stage whisper- “they do twice the work for a third of the pay, so it all turned out well, eh? Still, it’s no picnic,” he sighed, with the world-weary heaviness of a boss who is utterly convinced they’re the only person doing any work.They had left the room during this monologue, and now Beelzebub was leading Dante down another corridor. The demon lit a gold-tipped cigarette, a burst of flame licking from the tip of his finger.
“Naturally we had to change a few things, got rid of the more…problematic elements of the old Inferno. Not that I personally care, but you know how it is with all that ‘wake’ nonsense or whatever. Some of those sins were just plain nasty, and antithetical to the inclusive, diverse and modern image Inferno Inc. wishes to project to its loyal consumers.” This last part was recited in a dry rattle reminiscent of a bored schoolboy reading out lines in detention.
“You can’t just change my work!” squawked Dante, flushing. Beelzebub shrugged.
“Take it up with them,” he said, flicking his wrist in the direction of a door. Dante wandered over and cracked the door open. Inside was a series of massive wooden crates, squirming with wailing, naked humans bound and gagged in chains. The crates were labelled FUEL and FOOD. Dante closed the door and read its brass plaque:
HUMAN RESOURCES.
He fell back in line behind Beelzebub, who wrapped himself in a fresh, smug fog of tobacco smoke. They had come to the end of the room, in front of a mahogany door with Beelzebub’s name written neatly on it in gilded script. Beelzebub opened the door for Dante to come inside. The room had large glass windows with a view of the cracked, crimson mountains of Hell, flashes of lightning throwing shadows periodically along an enormous desk no less polished than the demon’s smile. A gleaming red phone squatted on the tabletop next to a kitsch Chinese lamp, a blocky computer and an angular trophy proclaiming the recipient as employee of the Millenia.
In the centre of the room a strip of acid-green turf and a small hole in the ground marked a miniature indoor golf set. An actual bag of golf clubs, bristling with iron, was leaning against the side of the desk. The walls were filled with boring looking leather volumes that had long ago given up trying to suggest that their owner had actually read them. A woman in a sensible black skirt and pressed white top was in the room, ordering discarded files on Beelzebub’s desk. She looked up as the two men entered.
“Thanks for the help, but can you give us the room darling?” said Beelzebub, holding the door open. The woman’s lips thinned but she said nothing, leaving briskly. There was a painful ‘crack’ as her hand slapped Beelzebub’s questing fingers away from her backside.
“My secretary, Ishtar,” said Beelzebub, rubbing his hand. “Nice enough girl, Babylonian or something. Diversity hires, I swear man, this affirmative-action shit is killing me, but you didn’t hear that here,” he said sourly, winking conspiratorially at Dante. Beelzebub collapsed into his chair, putting his feet up on the desk, puffing away at his cigarette.
“So, man, can I offer you anything”-
“No. I’ve really wasted enough time as it is already,” said Dante brusquely. He had put up with this bizarre charade for quite enough time already and was ready to go home, away from this smarmy demon and his unctuous speeches, away from this bastardization of his poetry running on crushed dreams, dirty money and poor air conditioning.
“Well, yikes, man, we just wanted to let you get to know the place for old times’ sake,” said Beelzebub. “It’s not like we can actually keep you here. We wouldn’t want to make the Big Man Upstairs upset,” he added, and now a truly ugly look that was a little hate and a lot of fear flashed across the demon’s face.
“Just say the word and we’ll buzz you right back up.”
“Thank you,” said Dante . “I’m sorry to offend, but I will always prefer Heaven.”
“Me too pal,” said Beelzebub, and smiled slyly. “But we get more visitors.”
Dante was about to leave. Then he remembered something. “Before I go-I would want to work something out.”
“Oh?”
“It’s about the Inferno. Well, my Inferno. The way I see it, you’re all using my ideas, my images, my poetry to sell your shirts and your books. Clearly this is not an…unsuccessful endeavour, and though I am humbled, my pride as an artist forces me to inquire as to why I was never approached about any of this.”
Beelzebub was sitting up straight in his chair, squinting at Dante. “Well, the way we see it, we were here for quite a bit of time before you even put pen to paper, pal. Inferno Inc. claims exclusive rights to all intellectual properties pertainingregarding Hell,Tartarus, or any other domain of eternal damnation.”
“They’re still my ideas. As you said, before this was all just a lake of fire. I transformed it into something eternal. No, not just eternal. Something iconic. And I’ll be damned if I continue to receive no compensation for the use of my work.” Dante wouldn’t budge. Remembering the song on the train, he decided to take things a step farther. “We wouldn’t want to make the Big Man Upstairs upset, is that not what you said?”
Beelzebub bit his tongue, steepling his fingers. “I can make no promises, Mr. Alighieri,” he said, the ice returning to his speech. “That being said, have a pleasant return to Paradise. I promise, Inferno Inc. will be in touch…. presently, to discuss any subsequent concerns you may have with copyright with our team of legal advisors.”
Nodding curtly to the demon, Dante turned to the door but stopped again.
“Legal advisors…. You have lawyers in Hell?” he asked. Beelzebub threw his head back and laughed so hard his cigarette flew out of his mouth.
“Oh man,” he hooted, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes, “I knew it! You really are a funny guy!”
Pablo Lacalle Writing 