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Ashley couldn’t help but think that the two men, near the back of her group, probably weren’t Christian and weren’t really getting into the whole Hell House thing.
“Where are the posters? Difficult Roads Lead to Lousy Destinations, And So Do Easy Roads? Do Not Lick The Walls?”
They were a very tall man with disheveled straw-colored hair and a somewhat shorter, dark-skinned man with oddly colored eyes. For some reason, the taller man made Ashley think of toads.
“Ever licked them?”
“Course I licked them, who wouldn’t? I had to rip my tongue off to get unstuck, and have you ever tried to explain that to Incarnations? Point is, if they think this is what Hell is like, they have a nasty surprise coming.”
“I like nasty surprises.”
A gutteral chuckle. “Yeah.”
They weren’t actually in the Hell portion of the house yet. They were in the bit where several people from Ashley's church pretended to play Dungeons and Dragons. Ashley thought the set-up was wonderful, all sinister lighting and occult books on the walls. The actors were rather less wonderful. "I, uh, attack the zombie with black magic," one said woodenly, and rolled dice that had been taken from Ashley’s monopoly set. “Um, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, bow to my will because you must!”
Ashley's job was to narrate, so she narrated. "They have sold themselves to occult powers—"
"Where's the zombie?"
The shorter one shrugged. "Maybe they're too expensive. That's something that humans worry about, isn't it? Expensive?"
The straw-haired one made a disgusted noise. “It’s just bait and toggle, is what it is. If they're going to advertise zombies, then they should raise up a proper zombie. All it takes is eternal allegiance to Hell and some sort of fish."
"We could make this into Hell, you know," the one with the eyes said. "Or close enough. Endless corridors, leaks, posters.”
"See if they lick the walls?"
"See if they eat each other when they can't find anything else, and realize they’re never getting out."
There was horrible relish in his voice. Ashley realized she was holding her breath.
The straw-haired man looked intrigued. Then he said, "That would take at least a day, though. How fast do humans starve, anyway? And this lot is almost ours already. It’s us who have to answer for it if they developed something disgusting like real compassion or real humility. Why don’t we just go convince people there’s lysergic acid in the sweets?”
The other one smiled, and then—they weren’t there anymore. It wasn’t like they disappeared. More as if they hadn’t been there in the first place.
Maybe they hadn’t been.
Almost ours already.
It was stupid. Ashley knew it was stupid. But she couldn’t escape the notion that she’d had a brush with real, raw evil, and escaped because real, raw evil was easily bored.
“You know what?” Ashley said, sounding high-pitched to herself. “Let’s just skip the rest of the Hell House.”