gomiboy

The machineries of hell churn. Sluice gates empty into clotted black rivers of animal fat and liquid sulfur. Massive pig iron grinders pulverize bones for the peculiar pale, brittle bricks used in the buildings and streets of hell. But the brickworks themselves are empty. Oil pressed from the few remaining skins of the damned is used to lube the gargantuan machines (hell is, after all, one big factory; imagine an oil refinery the size of the known universe). A bruised, stinging smoke belches from mile high chimneys formed from the bodies of the ancient dead: desiccated and fossilized, flexible as leather and tough as steel.

But the streets of hell are barren. Even the demons, the original fallen angels, have deserted the place. Tortured weeds sprouting eye and finger blossoms press up through the cracked flagstones in the city of Dis, the underworld's company town. A gust of wind belches from one of the refineries where the dead's jewelry, fillings, artificial limbs, stolen cars and murder guns are melted down to make new machines. The wind kicks up a page from Hell's long-forgotten newspaper, Vertias et Bellus, Truth and Beauty. The banner headline reads:
HELL HARROWED
ALL CHECKPOINTS OPEN

Lucifer, under permanent house arrest in his palace, Pandemonium, watches over his decaying kingdom. On the front gates of his estate is a sign, a joke that no one will ever read, written in the blood of his demon valet who was trying to sneak off to Purgatory:
Room To Let.