Lawyers in Hell

by Morris, Janet

  His chauffeured black limo waited for him at the curb.

  Gravelog, his scaly-skinned demon driver, opened the door and Arkiel slid inside. As usual, the rehabilitated demon said little. He saved his voice for the relentless, and for him, joyful task of howling abuse at the other denizens of hell during the commute. With demonic driving, they made it in record time to the courthouse, a massive, columned, white-speckled granite edifice from whose upper floors unsuccessful litigants were often defenestrated.

  Arkiel got out of the limo and walked up the front steps, nodding to the uniformed guards who stared vacantly at the damned souls queuing up for court. The officers passed him through.

  “Have a hell of a day, counselor,” said one sergeant, a ghastly soul with haunted eyes who had died only days before full retirement.

  Arkiel sighed. The sergeant always said that to him. A bailiff let the angel into his assigned courtroom. He took his seat and unpacked his brief at the prosecutor’s table. His paralegal was absent today, but Arkiel was well-prepared and needed no help with today’s case.

  The doors swung open and Arkiel’s plans for an early lunch flew out the window as the androgynous demon, Yoko, one of hell’s highest-ranking advocates of evil, walked in. The demon wore an impeccably tailored suit and too much jewelry. It was followed by its client, an Aztec priest in his ceremonial robe of flayed human skin – in hell, the skin was his own.

  Trailing them was a succubus, and like all succubi, she was enough to raise the dead, in every sense. She wore a pin-striped jacket and Arkiel couldn’t tell if she wore tights on her fantastic legs or merely dye. Her tail with its heart-shaped tip floated behind her; she was erotic perfection incarnate: only the best for Yoko, hell’s ranking demon of lust.

  Yoko gave him a jagged smile that suggested the demon knew every detail of why the angel had been assigned here. The three seated themselves on the defense side.

  The doors behind the dais opened and in floated a softly glowing ball the size of a man. Its dull gray surface resembled the clouds of a summer storm.

  A bailiff and a skeletal clerk followed it. “All rise,” the bailiff intoned. “The Appellate Section of the Grand Court of Hell, Pandemonium Division, is now in session.”

  Arkiel stood, leaning forward on the table in front of him, grateful for loose trousers. The succubus smiled and winked at him. He concentrated on thoughts of ice and snow, remembering his last case in Niffelheim.

  The skeletal clerk, dressed in black, frowned. “Are counsels present and ready in the matter of Hell versus Huemac?”

  “Demon for the defense is ready,” Yoko said.

  “The prosecution is ready,” Arkiel said.

  “Oral argument having been requested,” a somber voice rolled from the cloudy ball atop the dais, “counsel for the defense may proceed.”

  “Oh, Great Demonic Being –” Yoko began in wheedling tones.

  “‘Judge’ will do,” said the ball.

  “Ah, yes, Judge. We merely wanted to demonstrate our respect for this high court of hell.”

  Arkiel sighed – it was going to be one of those cases.

  “We come before you, in the final act of this longest-running case on the docket,” Yoko said, “to finally make an end to these persecutions of my client, Priest Huemac, wrongfully convicted –”

  Arkiel shot to his feet, ignoring the stirring in his trousers, which was adding to his damnation with every thrill he felt: lust was sin for an angel, and Arkiel was living the doom.

  “Objection. My learned colleague seeks to distort the record. There is no question of guilt in this matter, only severity of the sentence. It is uncontested that Huemac slaughtered four thousand, one hundred and fourteen men, women and children in ritual human sacrifice.”

  “Ah, but the defense,” Yoko said, advancing around the table, “contends that those are merely facts and separate from the issue of guilt.”

  “Counselor Arkiel,” the judge said, his glow brightening, “please remember this is an appellate court with no jury to sway. Displays of righteous anger only waste the court’s time. I will hear this.”

  Wonderful, Arkiel thought, the great glowing gasbag is in a mood today. “Yes, Judge.”

  “Judge,” Yoko resumed, “my client is a man of true faith. His people looked to him, with approval – with approval, mind you – to explain the world to them, for protection from the elements, from their enemies, from the supernatural. It is true that, as with so many earthly religions, the early practices were somewhat … sanguinary. But whose fault is that? What power is it that blocks the eyes of men to the truth and misleads them?”

  “That would be demons like you and your master,” Arkiel interjected.

  Yoko sighed theatrically. “Judge, could you remind the learned advocate of the concept of a rhetorical question?”

  “Counselor Arkiel, please restrain yourself.”

  “Yes, Judge.”

  “But to address the point raised,” Yoko continued, “even my dark master is a creation of heaven and operates under the mandate of the Creator. All the Almighty need do is raise its little finger to lift the curtain hiding the truth, and we demons would be ended.

  “I submit that my client,” Yoko turned to the Aztec, placing one clawed hand on each of the small, dark man’s shoulders, “is a good and devout man, a pillar of his community, indeed at the apex of his society. He was falsely led, by a religion he merely inherited from his parents before him. Through innocent error and the primitive state of his culture, he did not know better. The requisite evil intent for the severe punishments of hell is simply not there. We beg this court to overturn this sentence and release my client from further torment.”

  “Counselor Arkiel?” the judge said.

  Arkiel rose, trying to hold back his anger. “‘A pillar of his community?’ Indeed, he took members of that community, tied them to pillars, and had their intestines pulled out. ‘At the apex of his society?’ Too true. He stood at the apex of their ziggurats and with a piece of sharpened rock, ripped through their living skin, cracked their ribs and dug out their internal organs before their dying eyes, for no purpose –”

  “He did not know that,” Yoko said, leaping up. “He thought he was warding off famines and drought –”

  “Silence, Counselor Yoko. You’ve had your say.”

  “Your Honor,” Arkiel said, pacing before his table, “if the universe has one immutable law, it is that to kill without need, slowly, with the intent of causing pain, as did this man –” the angel jabbed his finger at the dark-eyed priest, “– is inherently evil. The youngest children quickly learn that to hurt others is wrong and wrongs are punished. Only adults seek to find justification to excuse evil behavior.

  “Counselor Yoko would have us sympathize with this butcher of humans. I ask you to take a different perspective. You are a man, a woman, or even a child, seized by men dressed in jaguar skins for no reason other than being too close to the land of this priest. Sometime later you are dragged in front of a blood-maddened mob to the top of a ziggurat. You are thrown onto a slab before a crowd hungry for blood and entertainment. Then this… this… priest, begins to vivisect you … and smiles while he does it.”

  “Counselor, enough theatrics, confine yourself to the case,” said the glowing ball.

  “But that is the case, Judge. Counselor Yoko seeks to excuse evil with sophistry, invoking cultural relativism, on the grounds that terror, violence and ignorance were the norm in this priest’s world. How many other societies, with even less understanding of the universe, developed humane punishments, instead of rituals of institutionalized murder that required them to war with all other peoples to feed their cultural appetite for human sacrifice?

  “Plainly stated, Judge, there is no new evidence to consider in this appeal. Evil has been done and is again admitted by the defense. This issue has been raised and disposed of by this august court before. This case is no different from the cases of millions of damned souls
in hell who are currently being gassed, shot, starved and worked to death repeatedly, suffering the same torments they inflicted on others in life. If this court respects its own precedents, it can show no more mercy to this villain than he showed to those under his knife.”

  The globe pulsed with more light and less gray. “Surrebuttal, Counselor Yoko, to Counselor Arkiel’s appeal to stare decis?”

  “Surely, Judge,” Yoko rose and said smoothly, “there can be no comparison between those new dead penitents to whom my colleague alludes – who were beneficiaries of the Enlightenment and other moral advancements – and my client’s Neolithic culture. Look at him. Can you hold him to the standard of people raised in the age of Einstein, Gandhi, and so many other humanitarians?

  “My client was merely a cog in a machine, following orders. His choices were to comply with the norms of his society or end up on those very same sacrificial altars. How easy it is for us here, safe, to say how bravely we would have resisted evil.

  “‘We would not have wielded the knife. We would not have fired the rifle. We would not have turned on the gas.’ Hypocrisy!” said the demon. “All beings are entitled to survive. There was no resistance movement for Huemac to join. Yes, it is easy for us to be brave here. Even accepting that my client had any awareness that his acts were evil, he had no choice.”

  “Well argued,” the glowing judge said.

  “If I may, Judge,” Arkiel said. “Counselor Yoko has indeed argued well, saving the best arguments for last and they merit a response.”

  “All right, Counselor, but make it snappy,” the judge allowed.

  “My colleague seeks to excuse Huemac for his Neolithic culture, as if kindness and decency are inventions of later societies. The earliest hominids, who shared their food, and cared for the elderly when they were no longer useful, were more moral than the people of many technologically-advanced countries.

  “Man is gifted with choices. While this fiend in human form, or Torquemada, or Jim Jones may claim the mantle of heaven to exonerate their actions, heaven denies them. Humans have free will and must lift the curtain on good and evil themselves. It is ludicrous to claim that any person can believe cutting apart another person is not evil.

  “‘I was just following orders.’ ‘I was given the choice of being victim or victimizer.’ Can expediency excuse evil? Can we exonerate a man of evil-doing because that evil was done while choosing between his own life and the lives of others?

  “Each day that choice of self or other is made a million times. The universe does not protect one from choices, or from consequences. You’re not automatically rewarded for making the right choice.

  “Anne Frank died young; the man who turned her in lived a long life, in the home he denied her. Yet who would choose to be that man?

  “Huemac saved his own life at the cost of over four thousand other lives. The price was too high. His enjoyment of the sufferings of his victims, documented by those victims themselves, is too well-established to ignore.

  “‘I was just following orders,’ excuses nothing. ‘It was them or me.’ Well, some sympathize with that argument. I submit that this case merits no sympathy. To each soul may come the choice to succeed in a bad cause or be destroyed in a good one.

  “This case has been delayed by every conceivable legal device for too long. Let justice be done now.”

  Yoko rose, black eyes gleaming. “To paraphrase Melville:

  ‘Is it I, God, or who that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?’

  “Counselor Arkiel hands out mighty burdens to humanity. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Yet even the appellate angel falls short of these marks, or he would not be cast down among us damned souls. He wants humans to be angels while he himself, giving in to temptation, is a fallen angel.”

  A rumble rolled from the judge. “No ad hominem attacks, Counselor Yoko, or I will hold you in contempt. Arkiel is cast down for lust; he is no fallen angel who contested with God.”

  “I thank Your Honor,” Arkiel said. “I am glad the court knows the difference between a fallen angel and one who has merely been cast down for a time to pay penance. Indeed, I am grateful to my learned adversary for bringing a ‘succubus slash paralegal’ to court today. Perhaps my own transgressions seem more … understandable with her standing there and, after all, I harmed no one else –”

  “And that will be quite enough digression, counselor,” the judge said, a prim note creeping into the voice of the glowing ball.

  “Ahem. Yes, sir.”

  “The court has heard sufficient for its purposes. This appeal is denied. The defendant is to be taken immediately to continue serving his sentence. He will be sacrificed as he sacrificed others … four thousand, one hundred and fourteen times.”

  Huemac gave an anguished scream and sank to the polished marble floor.

  “Let me lodge but one more plea before this learned court,” Yoko said. “Fifty-seven of his sacrifices died of natural causes while being dragged … er … accompanied to the temple. Another thirty-two suffered mental collapse and never knew what disemboweled them.”

  “Counselor Arkiel?”

  “The prosecution does not see how scaring a person to death is a mitigating factor: no reduction of sentence is appropriate. As regards mental collapse, so long as he absorbs the suffering of the families, we raise no objection.”

  Yoko grimaced. “So stipulated.”

  Huemac’s mouth opened but no sound came out.

  Arkiel looked down at Huemac. “I’d save those mental collapses for the end. Give yourself something to look forward to.”

  The brazen doors at the far end of the courtroom were flung open. Five demons, caricatures of the priest with flayed skin robes and large obsidian daggers, seized Huemac and dragged him out. The doors led not to Pandemonium but to a verdant jungle under a harsh red sky. Stone buildings lined a road leading to a ziggurat. People thronging the streets stared silently: Huemac’s victims and their loved ones, waiting for their revenge. The doors clanged shut on Huemac amid the throng and the Neolithic vista.

  “Court adjourned,” said the globe, drifting toward its chambers.

  “All rise,” demanded the bailiff.

  Arkiel leaned against the table as Yoko and the succubus rose.

  Yoko looked at the paralegal, saying, “Would you mind waiting outside, honey? I have to congratulate opposing counsel and you might prove to be too much distraction for Arkiel.”

  She laughed, a tinkling sound like crystal near a waterfall. Arkiel watched appreciatively as she swayed out of the courtroom.

  Yoko walked over, extending a red-clawed hand. “Well done, Arkiel, though you did start with the upper hand.”

  “You argued well too. I was worried by the victim/victimizer speech.”

  “Nah, the guy was too much of a prick. He deserved the obsidian enema he has coming.”

  “What, no sympathy for your client?”

  “That little shit? No, really not much for any of ’em. I mean, I’ve got a job to do.”

  An odd thought struck Arkiel. “I know how I got here. How did you?”

  The demon looked embarrassed. “Truth is, kind of the same thing, opposite side. I mean the cut on me is I’m too … sexy for a demon. So I drew this job, defending these no-account little weasels. Screw them, I say.”

  “Looks like we have more in common than I suspected.”

  “Maybe even more than you
think, Angel. You know, a body could get used to Hell. There are some pretty decent parts. Yeah, admittedly they’re in the ’burbs and the commute is … well, hell.”

  “What are you saying?” Arkiel asked.

  “Just that there’s two sides to the bar and maybe less difference than you expect. I could use an advocate with your passion and intelligence. I can’t trust anybody at my firm. They’re all evil, of course. After all, hell is other people, just like Sartre said. It would be nice to have a straight guy on the team.”

  Arkiel laughed. “Oh, please, Yoko. Me? Work for a law firm run by the demon of lust? Not even a downcast angel would stoop that low, especially one with a clemency review coming up.”

  “Come on,” Yoko said. “Tell me you won’t miss the old place, the variety, the action.”

  “I’m in hell,” Arkiel shouted. “Hell, hell, hell!”

  “Relax, Arkiel. I’m just saying that after hell, heaven would bore you silly – if you ever got there. Anyway, good case, and I’ll see you around the circuit.”

  “Sure, Counselor.”

  Yoko left and Arkiel gathered up his things, bemused by his conversation with the demonic advocate. Buoyed by his win, he only barely winced when the guard sergeant said, “Have a hell of a night, Counselor.”

  Gravelog was out front with the limo but he wasn’t alone. Yoko’s succubus was there, leaning against the fender, studying Arkiel with ruby eyes.

  He walked up, holding his briefcase in front of him, thinking icy cold thoughts, baseball scores and anything else that could distract him. Every time his body betrayed him, his sentence in hell got longer.

  “Hello,” she said in a voice that thrummed on his nerves.

  “Can I help you?”