HELL’S BELLS
HARRY TURNER
ACTUALLY BEING DEAD WASN’T AS PAINFUL as Septimus Throgmorton-Duff had imagined it would
be.
Dying itself, of course, was pretty nasty. Nobody with any respect for truth could pretend
that getting thumped against a brick wall by an E-type was a ‘Fun’ thing to happen.
It was thoroughly unfunny in fact. Painful too.
At the moment of death he knew that Hell was his final destination. No other place could
possibly take him after his life on Earth—of that he was quite certain.
Septimus Throgmorton-Duff had been a thoroughly bad lot. Blasphemer, fornicator, thief
(this in a mild sort of way, his victims usually being British Rail, W. H. Smith and Tesco
Supermarkets Ltd) and idolator.
So the prospect of Hell came as no surprise to him, indeed it filled him with a morbid
curiosity.
Seconds after the E-type had severed him from his mortal coil he found himself in limbo—a
sort of disembodied waiting-room, situated nowhere in particular.
Thin, wispy clouds scudded about his feet and dirge-like singing echoed tantalizingly in
the background.
He sat uncomfortably on a tubular steel chair, surveying with cool disinterest a pile of last
year’s Punch magazines.
In all, it was not unlike a visit to the dentist’s.
After a couple of hours a door, which Septimus had not previously noticed, sprang open
and through it emerged a fussy little man in a white nightshirt carrying a clipboard and pencil.
‘Mr Septimus Throgmorton-Duff?’ he intoned.
‘Yes.’ said Septimus. ‘I am he.’
‘You’ll have to wait another hour. Hell is very busy at the moment. The Governor seems to
be sending everybody there these days—and it’s driving me frantic I can tell you.
‘Oh,’ said Septimus. in what he hoped was a sympathetic tone.
‘Yes,’ said the little man, ‘frantic, now sit still and behave yourself—when they’re ready for
you they’ll ring a bell and flash a red light above that door.’ He pointed with his pencil,
dramatically. ‘That’s when your worries really start. Cheerio now, must dash, got to catch up on
my clerking.’
And then he was gone in a puff of cloud.
Hell, thought Septimus. At last. I wonder what it’s actually like.
Pits of acid perhaps, with tortured souls writhing in pain. Long tongues of flame scorching
and searing the flesh of the damned.
Moaning and weeping, the crack of the Devil’s whip, the stench of brimstone and sulphur.
Ghastly implements of torture, thumbscrews, racks, all the nasty hardware of the Middle
Ages sharpened and oiled to inflict agony for evermore non-stop.
Big hooks perhaps, dangling on endless chains from which the victims hang by their
skewered bellies like the chap in Madame Tussaud’s.
There might even be red-hot coals, against which your naked buttocks sizzled like
barbecued sausages at a beach jamboree.
Poisonous snakes, puncturing your throat every five minutes and making you swell up like
a balloon.
Hairy spiders as big as footballs crawling over your face twenty-four hours a day.
Constipation. Pimples. Earache. Nosebleed. Double-vision and chilblains.
Pretty ghastly on the whole, more or less to be expected though.
He glanced at his watch. Time was not dragging as he feared it might. Only ten minutes to
go.
He straightened his tie and combed his hair.
Not long now before the searing pain and relentless screaming began. Just a few more
minutes in the little waiting room and then—POW.
The red light flashed and a bell pealed solemnly.
Septimus stood up and braced himself. Slowly the door opened—beyond it was dark and
silent. He walked steadily towards it, his footsteps ringing on the stone.
Seconds more, he thought, and I’ll see it.
A short staircase covered in tufted carpet led down into Hell.
There was no fire, no smoke, and no anguished howling.
Hell, as far as he could judge, consisted of a small, square room with book-lined walls, a
record-player, and a couple of comfortable sofas. Over the tiled fireplace hung a print of a
Chinese woman with a green face.
Curious, Septimus moved quickly to the bookshelves and took down one of the volumes.
It was a bound edition of the Reader’s Digest. He replaced it and took another. This too was
a bound edition of the Reader’s Digest, and the next, and the next—
Septimus took a pace back and groaned. Nothing to read for the whole of eternity except
the Reader’s Digest—what absolute H—. He checked himself and grinned.
Music, he suddenly decided, might be the answer. The music of Hell—something
Wagnerian and heroic.
He switched on the record-player and watched the unlabelled disc fall on to the turntable.
‘And now,’ said an American voice on the record. ‘sixteen hours of non-stop entertainment
from The Sound of Music.’
Septimus seized the disc and reversed it savagely.
‘Sit back folks,’ said the same American voice, ‘and enjoy eleven hours of the wit of Tony
Blackburn.’
Septimus switched off the record-player and flung himself onto a sofa.
Almost immediately a thin, stooping man of about forty-five materialized on the far side of
the room. He wore the bland, unfashionable clothes of a provincial grocer and carried a copy of a
prominent do-it-yourself magazine.
‘Nice weather for the time of year,’ he remarked in a Midlands accent.
Septimus glared sullenly.
‘Mustn’t grumble,’ the grocer went on, smiling benignly, anyway a bit of rain does the
garden good.’
Septimus pretended not to hear and looked away.
‘It’s colder than last Tuesday,’ said the grocer, ‘but there you are. Can’t complain, really,
because it could be worse. It’s warmer than last Thursday fortnight. And it might be warmer than
next Friday. It’s been a pretty average summer. Mustn’t grumble. Mustn’t complain. If it’s not
one thing. it’s another. Well I must be off. Be good. If you can’t be good, be careful.’
And he vanished in a plume of smoke that smelt faintly of ledgers and bacon.
‘Ugh,’ commented Septimus, and opened a small cocktail cabinet that had sprung up by his
right elbow.
Inside, jam-packed under pink strip-lighting were countless bottles of Babycham. A hidden
tape played Greensleeves discreetly in the background.
Septimus recoiled in horror and tried the larder door—which by chance had appeared in
the wall by the fireplace. It was bursting at the seams with individual fruit pies and jumbo-size
packets of fish fingers.
Covering his face with his hands Septimus withdrew to the far corner of the room.
A trapdoor sprang open and up popped a middle-aged American tourist with blue-rinsed
hair, Bermuda shorts, and seven assorted cameras.
‘And now,’ said the voice from the record-player, ‘Mrs. Mamie Washington will show you
her 8,500 photographs of Paris, France, and follow this treat with a three-day symposium on
varicose veins, their cause, effect, and cure.’
Septimus howled in anguish and tried to crawl under the sofa.
A hand fell on his shoulder and he turned to meet the gaze of an imposing gentleman with
a pointed beard, horns, a tail, and a three-pronged trident.
‘Are you the Devil?’ gasped Septimus.
The Devil nodded.
‘That’s right, ducky—so watch your lip.’
‘Does it go on like—this for ever?’ moaned Septimus in a pleading voice.
The Devil placed a slender hand on his hip and grinned.
‘Gets worse, dear. Never mind about going on like this for ever.’
‘Worse?’ he said, ‘it can’t do.’
‘Oh, but it does,’ said the Devil. ‘Tomorrow when you wake up you’ll be a traffic warden in
Barnsley—with constipation. That will last for about six thousand years and by then we’ll have
thought up something else for you.’
Septimus collapsed weakly on to the sofa.
‘But that’s ridiculous,’ he protested. ‘Aren’t you going to roast me in sulphur or flay me
with red-hot chains?’
‘Gracious me no,’ said the Devil, polishing the prongs of his trident with a little silk hankie.
‘Well I think it’s an absolute fraud,’ grumbled Septimus. ‘It’s nothing like I expected.’
The Devil smiled. ‘It’s nothing like anybody expects it to be—but it’s Hell all right-believe
you me, ducky.’
‘And it’s so small,’ continued Septimus. ‘Just this tiny room.’
The Devil sniffed enigmatically.
‘This room is just one of many—we have rooms to suit everybody who comes down here.
‘In fact—they have exactly the same type of rooms up there too.’
He pointed towards the ceiling with his trident.
‘In Heaven?’ gasped Septimus. ‘You must be joking.’
‘Not at all,’ replied the Devil. ‘This little room is Hell for you dearie, absolute bloody Hell. And
its yours for eternity. Up there the identical room would be someone else’s idea of Heaven.’
Septimus closed his eyes and groaned again.
The Devil turned swiftly and minced towards the fireplace.
‘’Bye now,’ he said, over his shoulder, ‘have fun.’ Then he vanished up the chimney.
Septimus sat humbly for a few minutes and then went across to the bookshelf. He took
down a volume of Reader’s Digest stories and returned to the sofa.
As he turned the first page—‘How a Vladivostock Crane Driver Overcame Pimples’—a
celestial choir sprang up in the background, belting out the first verse of I Could Have Danced All
Night.