Chapter 1: Accounts Payable
LINE 1: "Rent," $0.
LINE 2: "Snacks (Angel)," $4,200.
LINE 3: "Replacement doors (Angel)," $9,000.
LINE 4: "Vibes," $400,000, initialed with a little drawn heart.
LINE 5: "Favor owed to A. (TBD)," no dollar amount, just a doodle of a smiling face that someone has scribbled over hard enough to tear the paper.
You put the ledger down. You pick it back up. You turn it over, in case the real books are on the back. They are not. The back is a coloring page of a happy cartoon sinner climbing a staircase into a cloud, and someone has colored it in very carefully, staying inside every line.
"Okay," you say to the empty office. "Okay. I've seen worse."
You have not seen worse. You were a forensic accountant for six years, and then you were a different kind of accountant for about eighteen months, and then you were dead, and in all three phases of your career you have never seen anything as bad as the books of the Hazbin Hotel.
The office is a converted linen closet behind the front desk, about the size of a parking space. It has a desk, a lamp with a fringed red shade, a filing cabinet painted the exact pink of a stomach remedy, and a framed motivational poster on the wall that reads YOU CAN DO IT! in looping script, under which someone, probably the spider, has written in Sharpie: (DO WHAT?). Vaggie walked you in here this morning, handed you three shoeboxes of receipts and the ledger, said "Charlie believes in you," in the voice of a woman who did not, personally, believe in anything, and left.
You've been at it for six hours. You have made a spreadsheet. You have made a second spreadsheet to track what is wrong with the first spreadsheet. You are, for the first time since arriving in Hell three weeks ago, almost happy.
Then the filing cabinet quacks.
You stop typing.
It's a small sound. A squeak, really. The specific rubbery squeak of a bath toy being stepped on. It comes from the bottom drawer, the one you haven't opened yet because the label on the front says MISC??? and you were saving it for last, like a dentist appointment.
You wait. Nothing. You go back to your spreadsheet.
The filing cabinet says, in a man's voice, very quietly, "Shit."
You get up. You cross the office in one step, because that's all it takes. You pull the bottom drawer open.
There is a man in it.
He's folded up like a lawn chair, knees to his chin, a white top hat crushed sideways on a head of pale blond hair. He is the whitest person you have ever seen, and you have seen a man in Hell made entirely of bone; his skin is the color of good writing paper, except for two round flushes of red on his cheeks, like someone pinched them before he left the house. His suit is white too, very fine, with red at the cuffs. He's clutching a yellow rubber duck to his chest with both hands, and the duck is wearing a tiny green visor.
He looks up at you. His eyes are gold.
"Hi," he says. "So. This isn't what it looks like."
"It looks like there's a man in my filing cabinet."
"Okay, so it's a little bit what it looks like."
You consider him. He considers you. Somewhere out in the lobby, faint through the door, you hear Charlie's voice, high and hopeful, calling, "Dad? Daaaad? It's time for our trust-building exercise! I've got the blindfolds!"
The man in the drawer closes his eyes, as if in pain.
"Please," he whispers. "Please don't tell her I'm in here."
His name, it turns out, is Lucifer.
Not a Lucifer. The one. Lucifer Morningstar, the Fallen, the first sinner, the King of Hell and of all the damned, father of the hotel's owner and, according to the half-dozen paintings of him in the lobby, a great deal taller in person than he actually is in person.
"Those are artistic license," he says, when you mention it. He's sitting on the corner of your desk, because there's nowhere else to sit, swinging one foot. He has fished a little cane from somewhere, topped with a red apple, and is spinning it idly between two fingers. "Every king gets a little artistic license."
"In the big one you're on a horse."
"I look great on a horse."
"The horse is on fire."
"That's a very normal horse in Hell." He squints at you. "You're not very scared of me."
You think about it honestly. He is clearly powerful. The air around him has a faint, expensive taste, like the inside of a church, and when he gets agitated the gold of his eyes runs red at the edges, and you have a strong animal suspicion that if he wanted to, he could fold the hotel up like a paper fan. But he also came out of a filing cabinet labeled MISC??? with a duck in his hands and a hat dent.
"I was a forensic accountant," you tell him. "I've audited men who owned whole senators. You're not the scariest person I've ever met. You're not even the scariest person in this hotel."
He brightens instantly. "Is it Alastor? Tell me it's Alastor so I can tell you you're wrong."
"It's Vaggie."
"Oh," says the King of Hell, sobering. "Yeah. Yeah, that tracks."
He holds out the duck. It takes you a second to understand he's offering it to you.
You take it. It's heavier than a bath toy, very well made, the yellow glossy and even. Up close, you can see that the visor is hand-stitched, that there's a tiny pencil tucked behind where the duck's ear would be if ducks had ears, and that somebody has painted a pair of half-moon glasses on its face in fine gold leaf.
"It's an accountant," Lucifer says. He's watching your face, suddenly not swinging his foot at all. "I made it this morning. When Charlie said she'd hired an accountant. I thought, hey, the new accountant probably doesn't have a duck yet, that's a tragedy, someone should fix that. So." He shrugs, too casually. "Fixed it."
"You made this."
"I make all of them." He says it the way another man might say I'm a doctor. "I've got a workshop. At the palace. Big operation. I could show you sometime, I mean, you'd probably hate it, it's very loud and there are a lot of ducks, but."
You turn the duck over. On the bottom, very small, in gold, he's signed it: L.M.
"Thank you," you say, and you're surprised to find you mean it.
He looks at you for a moment like no one has said that to him in a while. Then the moment passes, and he hops off the desk, and peers out the gap in the door. The lobby's quiet. Charlie's voice has moved off toward the stairs.
"Coast is clear," he says. "Thank you for your discretion, Madam Accountant. Very professional. Ten out of ten. I'll write you a reference."
"Why are you hiding from your daughter?"
He freezes with his hand on the doorknob.
"I'm not hiding," he says. "I'm strategically relocating. She's got this whole program. Trust falls. Feelings circles. Last week she made me write a letter to my inner self." He makes a face. "I'm Lucifer. My inner self is a lot. I'm just saying, a man needs a break sometimes. And nobody ever comes in here."
"I'm in here."
"Yeah, but you're new," he says, as if that settles it. He tips his crumpled hat at you, and is gone.
You get back to work. You put the accountant duck on the corner of your desk, facing you, so it can supervise. At seven o'clock, when the lobby lights dim to their evening red, you get to the last shoebox, and the last bank statement, and you find the thing you've been half-expecting all day.
The hotel shouldn't exist. That's what the numbers say. The rooms are free. The food is free. The guests break things at a rate that would bankrupt a small airline. By every metric you know, the Hazbin Hotel should have folded months ago.
But every Friday, at precisely midnight, a deposit arrives.
It comes from an account called L.M. Holdings (Ducks & Misc.). It is never the same amount, but it is always enough. Enough to cover the doors. Enough to cover the snacks. Enough, every week, to make the books balance exactly to the penny, as if someone very powerful has been watching the hotel's account from very far away and quietly filling in the hole every time it opens.
There's a memo line. It's the same every week.
For my girl. DO NOT tell her.
You sit back in your chair. You look at the accountant duck. The accountant duck, with its little gold glasses, looks back.
When you get in the next morning, there's a second duck on your desk. This one is wearing a tiny bathrobe and is holding a tiny coffee cup, and tucked under it is a note on heavy cream paper, written in a looping golden hand.
Saw you were in early. Hope you take it black. Sorry about the filing cabinet. Please don't do anything with the Friday thing. — L.
Under that, in smaller letters, like he'd hesitated before adding it:
P.S. You were the first person since Eden to say thank you for a duck.