Gina the Witch
Way Worse
A year and a half in Hell was just too much, so on the last day of August, Gina decided to give her girlfriend the slip. Not that it was all bad, dating a succubus, but not all the sweetest sins of the flesh available in the underworld combined could fix a bad relationship. Plus, it was always midnight, and she hadn’t been able to wear a skirt since she moved into town because all the little dust devils in the neighborhood thought it was funny to blow them up over her head.
As soon as her girlfriend left for work at the Department of Perversions, Gina tossed her clothes in a duffel bag, drew a pentagram on the kitchen floor with sulfur scented dish soap, and fell from the sky ten feet above the fountain in front of the Celestial Mall.
There were angels everywhere, and each one was more eager than the last to help the dripping woman out of the fountain. Gina shook her head, though, and broke into a run as soon as she had recovered her duffel bag from the holy waters. She said, “Nuh-uh. Heaven is way worse than Hell,” and dove off the nearest edge of cloud.
How Low, Part One
Gina, the witch, fell from heaven and didn’t even take the time to enjoy the irony. Instead, using one of her large hoop earrings as a sort of magical bubble wand, she let the wind blow a huge bubble made of the sulfur scented dish soap and holy water wrung from her hair, then caught and pulled the shining orb around her, and disappeared into Limbo with a ‘POP!’
How Low, Part Two: Nowhere
Limbo. Nothingness. No darkness or light. Not even distance or time. Just nothing.
Frankly, Gina was enjoying the break. Her normal perception ended at the boundaries of her physical form, a state of such limited awareness which was wreaking a pleasant havoc on the mundane part of her psyche – it was trying to convince her that she was back in the womb. That was nice. Luckily, her magical self was less easily disoriented, even by such a difficult a thing to grasp as the void, and so she wasn’t lost in Limbo. She was just there.
Tragically, Limbo being the only real place that is both infinite and singular, it was a sure bet that Gina’s little piece of peace would eventually be interrupted, despite the absence of space and time.
“I’m bored.”
Gina didn’t hear the complaint, she couldn’t have because there was no medium for sound to travel through, but her ESP got the message, anyway. Along with the little wail had come the impression that it had been made by a childlike being, though definitely not a human child. But the witch didn’t particularly want to be bothered. She wasn’t the heroic or nurturing type, after all, or else relocating to Hell with her ex-succubus might never have been appealing in the first place. …Crap, had she thought that out loud?
“You’ve been to Hell? Will you take me back there?”
She did her best to be one with the nothingness.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
“I just wanna go home…”
Sunofa… “Look, kid, or whatever you are, I just left Hell. And I don’t want to go back, so take the hint and get lost again.”
“…”
I was quiet, but the other presence was, to Gina’s extra senses, obviously still present. Sigh. “Well?”
“I don’t think I can. There’s nowhere to go.” According to the witch’s magical empathy, the tot’s boredom and disappointment suddenly segued into playfulness. “So I guess you’re stuck with me until you take me home.”
“You little shit.”
“Nuh-uh, I’m a little dust-devil. What’re you?”
Gina extended her physical arm and closed her physical hand tightly around the gritty neck of the beast. The contact made them instantly clear to each other, psychically speaking. “I’m a big, bad witch, and if you piss me off, I’m going to turn you into a dead little dust-devil, understand?”
The little monster goggled his eyes and nodded his head. Demons especially didn’t want to enter Hell as disembodied spirits.
How Low, Part Three: The Middle of Nowhere
Gina didn’t let go of the little monster’s neck, she just relaxed her grip a little. He squirmed, but she refused to give him the pleasure of being shaken senseless. Instead, she made small talk, which annoys the Hell out of everyone except angels, who enjoy it for that very reason.
“So, pipsqueak, how did a little thing like you end up in Limbo?”
“My name is Flickbooger, son of Rugburn. Bitch.”
She pressed her thumb against his grubby windpipe. “Just answer the question, snot.”
He squeaked, “Mom sent me.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing, I swear!”
“Uh-huh.”
“I mean it! I didn’t do anything bad for almost an hour, so she banished me.”
Gina nodded her approval. “She sounds truly awful.”
He nodded happily. “She’s the worst.”
“Have you learned your lesson?”
“Do I look like an angel to you?” His pride seemed hurt.
“Bad boy,” she said with a smirk.
Flickbooger looked fit to grin his head clean off his neck. “How did you get here?”
“Magic bubble wand, and before you ask, no, you cannot try it.”
“Aww…” He eagerly picked his nose. The moment he took aim, however, Gina jammed the prize all the way back to the nether reaches of his brain using his own finger for the dirty work.
“Hang onto your mucus, kid. We’re outta here.”
Gina took one step ‘forward’ and two steps ‘back’ and nothingness unhappened. Suddenly, the witch and the brat were surrounded by ramshackle buildings, abandoned cars, and a whole lot of rubbish.
“Hey, this isn’t Hell!”
“Fucking duh. I need to make a pit stop first.”
“Why didn’t you go back in the middle of nowhere? I did.”
She pitied the void voyager who coincided with that mess. “That’s not what I meant, and we were only Nowhere before. Now, we’re in the Middle of Nowhere.”
“Huh?”
“Forget it.” Gina dropped the runty demon on his tail. “Get lost while I look for something useful. Or else.”
Flickbooger’s lower lip wobbled. “Don’t leave me here, okay?”
“I’m not as mean as your mother, don’t worry.”
At that, he grinned again and ran off, kicking cheerfully at the garbage in his way.
Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers
Gina began picking through the heaps and lumps of objects that, apart from their generally intact state, resembled the sort of cast-offs one might find in any city dump on Earth. In addition to being whole, there were two other facts which distinguished them from garbage; one being that, because they were here in the Middle of Nowhere, Limbo, they didn’t decompose or otherwise break down, and the other one being that these things were never thrown away. Gina was up to her knees in objects and abstracts that people, angels and demons had lost.
The witch was looking for something, anything that might help her get back to Earth. Most of what she found was located beneath piles of odd socks that had been sent here by malicious clothes dryers. The socks themselves were interesting; striped, argyle, with and without toes, knee-high, lacey, athletic, and socks for all shoe-sizes and genders were represented here, but never in matching pairs. Gina found one that had been made by some skilled hand into a monkey puppet and couldn’t resist putting it in her pocket as a souvenir.
Somewhere amid the strayed footwear Gina found a rolling suitcase that had probably been sent here by disgruntled airport baggage claim attendants. Upon inspecting its contents, she upended the little black luggage and hoped to fill it with items that would be more useful to her than a men’s suit jacket, two pairs of boxer shorts, a Grisham novel, shaving kit, towel, and…she looked again…a vibrating dildo. She didn’t want to know, but she really couldn’t help imagining.
Errant socks were not the only prolific debris in The Middle of Nowhere. There were also millions of lost pens, glasses, shoes, toys, jackets (she found a charcoal knit jacket, the sleeves of which actually fit her long arms nicely), random messages jotted on sticky-notes and napkins, photos that had slipped free of their album pages, cosmetics, business cards, lighters, books, cell phones, cameras, ID cards, and brown-bagged lunches. Gina pocketed the cash from a several dozen lost wallets and found enough of the world’s loose change to make her rolling suitcase uncomfortably heavy. The money would come in handy after she made her way back to Earth, but it didn’t help her solve the bigger problem of getting there in the first place.
She doubted that any of the lost jewelry she was discovering had any magical properties. It was all the mundane stuff of Earth; people tended to keep track of their more powerful baubles. However, she did find several rings of lost keys, and even ordinary keys had great magical power in the hands of a witch.
Then she found something amazing. There were several cars around; she could identify them by the way they made some of the sock piles much higher and boxier than the rest. Gina had been ignoring them because she hadn’t wanted a car; until she stumbled upon a real beauty. It was a 1957 red Ford Thunderbird convertible. As she lovingly cleared away the clutter of lost things that had buried it over the years, she pitied the poor soul who had misplaced this fine machine (people thought that a lot of cars were stolen from outside of malls, but the fact was that they ended up here, lost in The Middle of Nowhere).
Because the top had been left down, the T-bird was filled with the drift of this place. Just to get into her prize find, Gina opened a door and practically shoveled the miscellanea out with her hands. When the mess was clear enough, she slid into the driver’s seat with a rapturous sigh. The motor would start, regardless of which of the lost keys the witch used, but she still felt a tingle of anticipation as she turned the ignition switch. “Yes, oh, yes,” Gina moaned, as the engine growled to life. She knew that cars could be powerful instruments for seduction, but she hadn’t realized just how sexy they could be in their own right. “Oh, baby.”
Somewhat reluctantly, she eventually got back to the business at hand. There was nothing more than a few tools and a spare tire in the trunk, but she made some unexpectedly lucky finds in the glove box. When Gina punched the button, out popped several abstracts that painted a vivid picture of the vehicle’s history. Someone had lost their Virginity in this car; no surprise, there. It twirled innocently a couple of inches above the passenger seat and looked nothing more than like a large, ringlet of snowflakes caught in mid-air. The rest of the story showed itself in the other transcendental objects that had come here with the car. Back on Earth, someone had lost their Temper (a radiant, red bull’s-eye of rage), lost a Bet (it spun and stopped like the cylinder of a revolver in a game of Russian roulette), lost their Big Chance (a camera-flash caught in mid-exposure), and ultimately lost their Life (a rosy, disembodied pulse caught in a puff of winter breath) in this car. Perhaps it was no surprise that the car wound up in the Middle of Nowhere.
Magically speaking, all indefinite items had value. The ones that Gina had just discovered were treasures in the extreme, and she was more than a bit shocked to find that the last of them had escaped the attention of The Middle of Nowhere’s only permanent resident. In any case, the witch recognized an opportunity when she saw one, so she scooped the magical swag into the suitcase with her other lucky finds, and stashed that in the trunk with her duffel bag.
She wondered if any of the other cars here were hiding worthwhile leftovers, but she didn’t get the chance to find out. At that very moment, something hard, though not particularly heavy, fell on her from out of Nowhere. It swore creatively and jumped up and down where it landed. It had very bony feet, causing Gina to say, “Ow, ow, OW!” until the unintentional attack ceased.
Death cocked its skull to one side and asked, “What are you doing here?”
“I took a wrong turn at Heaven,” answered Gina, helping herself to her feet in the absence of a hand-up. “I don’t have to ask where you’ve been, but what’s with all the profanity?”
Tiny blue sparks flew as Death ground its teeth. It was a gruesome sight. “One of those FUCKing doctors saved another life on me! Whatever happened to the days when medicine killed more than it healed? There’re over six billion humans crammed together out there, yet they fight me when I’m just trying to do my FUCKing job. What’s up with that?”
“I have no idea. Tell you what, though; send me to Earth, and I’ll give them a piece of my mind on your behalf.” Gina gave Death the sort of smile that it was incapable of giving back—a genuine one.
Death shook its skull. “No can do. Your options are Heaven, Hell, or Limbo, whichever you prefer. It’ll cost you, though. I’ve got to make a living somehow.” There was an eerie twinkle in its otherwise empty eye sockets.
“Very funny.” She gave it a small, sarcastic round of applause. “Fine. Hell it is. Just let me find my little monster, and—”
“You had a kid?” Death was aghast, or some other slack-jawed sentiment.
Gina looked like she might vomit. “Are you kidding? Don’t even think it!” She waited until the urge to make childish retching noises passed. “I picked up a little shit demon in Limbo, named Loogie, or something.”
The prey took the bait. “FFLICKBOOGERR!!” screamed the dust devil angrily as he bore down on them in the form of an irritating little funnel cloud full of abrasive debris.
She didn’t wait for him to lift her skirt. Instead, she reached down, grabbed him by the end of his pointed tail, and yanked. He whipped through the air and slammed face-first into the side of a car that was probably not as lovely as the T-bird she had adopted.
“Neat. Can I kill it?”
Gina really did laugh at that. “As much as I’d like to lose the little stain, I’m sure it’d just come back to haunt me.”
“You bet I would,” snarled the puny delinquent.
“Shaddap, kid.” Death rapped him on the top of his head with a bony knuckle. “What do I get in exchange for sending you both to Hell, if not little Phlegm’s life, Hmm?”
“Flickbooger!”
She ignored him, and offered up her pair of huge hoop earrings. They had a high alchemical sheen about them. “How about a couple of magic bubble wands?”
“Lovely. What do they run on?” Death asked, giving one an experimental wave and pop-pop-popping with a skeletal finger the string of oily orbs that resulted. Each sparkling burst dropped the shadow of a still-beating heart into Death’s deft grasp. It crushed them in a death grip and pressed the grains of their essence to its own breast. For a fraction of a moment, a glimmer of life swam over Death’s hollow form. Its ghostly visage wore a dreamy smile.
“Sulfur soap and holy water. Do we have a deal?”
“Mmm…yes.”
Gina kicked Flickbooger while he was down. “Get in the car; we’re leaving.” They had barely cleared the T-bird’s doors when Death gave them an absent wave. Within the span of a blink, they were in Hell.
“Yay!” cheered the miniature devil, jumping up and down on the seat.
Gina grabbed him by the neck, chucked him out of the car, and threw it in drive. Then she got the Hell out of there.
Home Sweet Hell
Flickbooger pissed on his mother’s bed of fire-flowers, then rang the bell and ran away before she answered. While she raged in the front yard, he let himself in the back door and immediately made a mess of the kitchen. He stood there with the fridge door open, drank right from the soul carton, and left spills on the floor.
His mother was less than delighted to see him home. “Flicky!” she cried upon seeing him, extending her arms in a gesture that wasn’t meant to be inviting.
Mama’s little dust devil grinned happily while she strangled him into unconsciousness.
Hotter Than…: Part One
The Highway from Hell was deserted; as usual, far more souls were headed in than were leaving. In spite of the open road, Gina didn’t speed. She didn’t want to draw any unnecessary attention to herself. That was hopeless, of course.
“Hey, lady!” shouted the semi-human beast that stepped from its hiding spot on the roadside and into the path of the witch’s T-Bird.
Automatically, Gina slammed on the brakes. Had she been thinking, she’d have stepped on the gas and run the damned thing over. “Shit,” she said as the hitchhiker gave her a very canine grin.
“Thanks for stopping. Gimme a lift over the border?” The werewolf used his thumb to indicate the seemingly infinitely distant horizon behind him.
“No,” Gina said without hesitation. Picking up hitchhikers on Earth was stupid and doing it in Hell it was much worse; that wasn’t just asking for trouble, it was more like demanding it. She revved her engine at the werewolf.
He shrugged his muscled, hairy shoulders. “Suit yourself,” he said, not actually moving from his spot in front of her car, “but you’ll never get past Border Patrol without papers.”
“Border Patrol?” Gina rolled her eyes exasperatedly.
“It’s just another bright idea that Satan stole from Earth, except he uses it to keep souls in rather than out.”
She pinched the bridge over her nose, feeling a wrath-borne headache coming on. “And I assume you are just the werewolf I need to see if I want papers to get out of here.”
“You’re a quick one.” He was grinning again and his tail swayed a little, involuntarily. “It’s an easy deal. You give me a ride, I give you papers, and we leave Hell together without any fuss.”
Gina shook her head. “No, this is the deal: You give me papers, and then, if you don’t give me a reason to conjure a silver bullet directly into your heart, you can ride with me across the border. If that’s too hard, too bad. I’ll take my chances with the Border Patrol.”
He nodded. “Fine by me. Let’s go,” he said, coming round to the door and hopping over it into the passenger seat. Without being asked, he pulled the paperwork out from a pocket inside his vest and showed them to Gina.
She took one look at them and then glared at the hitchhiker. “Why is there a marriage license?”
His toothy grin was back at full force. “It’s our cover story; when they ask what the purpose of our visit is, we can say we’re newlyweds honeymooning in the mortal realm.”
“Uh-huh…” said Gina, skeptically. “If that’s the best you could come up with, it’s no wonder you had to hitchhike.” At that, the werewolf made a beautifully terrible sound somewhere between a human laugh and a wolfish howl. It made the little hairs stand on end all over Gina’s neck and arms.
“Just mark your name on the line at the top and sign the line at the bottom. The rest is already forged,” he instructed, showing his own papers as an example.
Gina gave him another odd look. “How do you pronounce that name?”
The werewolf held his paw-like hand out to shake, “You can call me Vincent, because you’ll never be able to pronounce my real name. It’s a pleasure to meet you—” he paused to read the name she’d written, “—Angelina? Unlucky, you.”
“Yeah, it’s a curse. You should call me Gina.” She gave his hand a quick shake, but only because he apparently wouldn’t let it drop without some acknowledgement.
“Shall we go?” He asked, tucking their papers back into his vest.
“Definitely.”
As soon as they reached the Border Patrol’s outpost on the Highway from Hell, they were flagged down and surrounded by a mob of humongous, vicious-looking pyre-demons riding Clydesdales made of billowing, black smoke. “EXIT PAPERS!” demanded the most diminutive of them in his smallest, quietest voice. Vincent hid his nervousness with a lippy smile and gingerly set the documents in the demon’s massive claw. The papers singed at his touch, but didn’t burn outright; official documents in Hell were protected that way. The demon barely looked at the forgeries before he gave the witch and the werewolf the evil eye. “PURPOSE OF YOUR VISIT?” He asked, making it more of an accusation than a question.
Vincent licked his chops in Gina’s direction, “I just bagged the bitch of my dreams, and I wanna take her somewhere nice for our honeymoon.”
It was all Gina could do not to punch him in the back of the head for that. Instead, she dredged up a smile so sweet she thought she might sick up from it and leaned over to deliver a long, wet lick up the length of Vincent’s pointed earlobe. She’d learned a few things from her ex-succubus.
Vincent’s left foot thumped like mad in the floorboard and he shivered. “Oh, baby, you’re so bad…” he moaned a little, drooling.
The pyre-demons flared at their edges, enjoying the lascivious display. The one with the paperwork hesitated in his duty on the off chance the lewdness would escalate. When it didn’t, he crushed the documents in his fist and pitched them back in Vincent’s lap. “GO!”
Gina kept her smile dazzling as she slipped the T-Bird back in drive and slowly accelerated through the gate of the last outpost on the Highway from Hell. She didn’t let her grin turn into a scowl, or her speed to climb up over fifty-five until she could see no sign of the Border Patrol in her rearview mirror, but as soon as she could, she did.
When she snarled and stomped on the accelerator, Vincent reached frantically over his shoulder. “Where are the seatbelts on this thing?” he howled over the rising wind and engine roar.
“There aren’t any,” answered Gina. As the needle passed the highest number on the speedometer, she let the car drift until it straddled two lanes.
“You’re crazy!” Vincent said, hooking the fingers of one hand under the seat and bracing himself against the dashboard with the other.
She came back with, “I thought you said I was quick.”
His eyes were watering and his tongue was practically lolling in the wind as he shouted, “This is not what I meant!”
Gina threw her head back and cackled like the witch she was.
After that, Vincent kept quiet and held on for dear life until Gina suddenly laid off the gas and swerved into her own lane. “What’s up?” he asked with a very dry mouth, still not daring to release his grip on the seat or dash.
“We’re here.” She turned on the radio and twisted the dials until she found something in English that wasn’t country music.
“It doesn’t look any different. How could you tell?” He hung his head out the side of the car like a dog to survey their dusty surrounds for some sign that they’d really crossed into Earth.
“Two things; one, you’re a lot less hairy all of a sudden,” she paused while he bravely let go of the car long enough to inspect his hands and un-wolfish good looks in the side-view mirror, “and two, Arizona is hotter than Hell.”
Vincent took a second to test the air and said, “Well, what do you know? I always thought that was just a saying.”
Hotter Than…, Part Two: Flickbooger’s Tale
When she’d finished choking him senseless, Flickbooger’s mother threw him out the front door and went back to watching her shows on the Hellevision. She didn’t know how he’d escaped from Limbo, and she didn’t care. As a demoness, it was her job to make sure that her children, all fifty-odd of them, turned out as horribly as possible; what kind of hellish parent would she be if she took an interest in them?
Flickbooger woke up a while later; face down among the fireflowers he’d fouled earlier, with aching horns and a sore throat. He sat up and spat out a dirt clod and threw a little temper tantrum, further wrecking his mother’s flower bed, and that made him feel a bit better.
Of course the little dust devil hadn’t hoped for a warm welcome home, but somehow he didn’t feel quite satisfied with the abuse he’d received. It was a bit of a let-down after being grounded in Limbo, to only be strangled and kicked out of the house. And he’d done a fairly quick job of messing up the house as soon as he got home… No, Flickbooger definitely felt there was something lacking in his mother’s ill-regard. He wasn’t smart enough to define the thing, but whatever it was, it made him want to go pout in a corner rather than set fire to his home, and that just didn’t make any sense given his demonic nature.
So, as any other young monster at loose ends would do with its confusion, Flickbooger plucked himself up out of the filth and went looking for worse mischief. In his dust devil form he sprang down upon unwary demonesses and blew their skirts up around their waists. That was fun for a while, but since most female demons were intentionally immodest his antics didn’t bother them enough for them to do more than slap him silly and punt him into the gutter. Their mild annoyance instead of fury left him feeling even more let down by being back home in Hell, and he soon sought bigger trouble.
He spun in his dizzy, dirty dust devil way around Downtown and out to the ‘Industrial’ sector of Hell, where all the condemned souls were forced to queue up and wait in tortured suspense for their punishment. He had a good time tossing spirits around and howling at them until they wailed, and generally making a mess of the seemingly infinite line of the damned, but then a couple of imp guards flew over from their posts and casually beat him with flyswatters until he gave up and buzzed off.
It was another lackluster rejection and Flickbooger could hardly bear it. He snarled and raged and blew and twisted so fast and so hard that, along the streets he traveled, windows cracked and all the vibrant flame trees in his vicinity were extinguished and left only slightly smoldering. Flickbooger tore up a track of deliberately murdered lawn and flung it in clods at passersby, and then he abraded the paint off a few sinfully luxurious automobiles parked in Hell’s upscale neighborhood.
When he was finally beginning to feel a bit better for having beaten his own record for vandalism and harassment, Flickbooger finally stopped to survey the path of destruction he’d left across Hell. Sure, he was a still only a little dust devil, but he’d really thrown himself into the mayhem, and he could see it even from where he squatted on the steps that lead up to the highest point in Hell, Satan’s Seat.
He realized where he was sitting at the exact same time he realized he was being picked up off the steps by his head. “OWOWOWOWOW!!” he screamed, flailing and kicking at whatever possessed the gigantic red claw that squeezed and crushed until it seemed that little Flicky’s eyeballs might pop out of his skull.
“HOW DARE YOU SIT IN MY PRESENCE WITH YOUR BACK TURNED TO ME AS IF THIS WAS YOUR KINGDOM AND NOT MINE?!” Satan’s rage could be heard the length and breadth of Hell, and it left several tons of silence in its wake. Understandably, Flickbooger trembled and soiled himself in terror. “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?!”
Sobbing, the little dust devil stuttered, “F-f-f-f-f-flickb-b-b-booger, s-s-s-son of Rugb-b-b-burn—pleasedon’tthrowmeintothepit!”
“THE PIT?! NO, I’VE GOT WORSE PLANS FOR YOU.” Satan wadded the young, dirty little demon into a roughly ball-shaped blob of congealed fear in his fist. “GO TO EARTH, SNOTLING!” And with that, Satan hurled the little dust devil out of his sight and all the way out of Hell with one strong pitch.
Satan, as near to being all-powerful as he was, still didn’t have the last word, however. From his Seat to the border between his kingdom and the human world, the residents of Hell heard the exiled pipsqueak scream, “IT’S FLICKBOOGER!!” as he streaked across the sky toward Earth. Satan was so enraged by Flickbooger’s backsass that if he could have, he would have brought the brat back to Hell just so he could exile him to Heaven instead.
Lucky for Flickbooger, he landed minutes later on the fringes of Earth and therefore out of his Dark Lord’s reach. He was injured and alone in a strange place, but he was grinning widely enough that if there had been anyone around to see him, they would have been able to count all of his teeth with ease. It had taken pissing off Satan himself, but Flickbooger finally felt appreciated and appropriately abused. Leave it to the Prince of Darkness to treat his subjects the way they deserved.