by Heide Goody
Rutspud tugged on Joan’s gauntlet. “Let’s do this,” he said and began to run for the door. “I know where the furnace is.”
Halfway to the exit, the contents of the tank gave an abrupt roar, louder than any before.
“Not good,” said Rutspud.
With an ear-piercing crunch, an outward dent appeared in the side of the tank.
“Too late!” shouted Belphegor. “Too late!”
He scooted away from the tank and, at the press of a button, a flamethrower and what look like some sort of automated scythe unfolded from the rear of his wheelchair. Another thump and another dent.
Thomas Aquinas leapt under a bench to hide. The Archangel Gabriel flailed about in panic.
“What do I do?”
“What did you do last time you faced an entity of vast and unspeakable evil?”
A third strike and the tank burst. A black fist bigger than a man punched through to freedom.
Trembling, Gabriel put his angelic horn to his lips and blew for all he was worth.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
“Quickly, come on, we might miss something!” yelled Nerys as they all settled into comfy chairs on her popemobile bus. They’d decided to combine a bus-warming celebration with an evening of drunken schadenfreude as they watched the live coverage of the PrayPal sins being published. The television schedules had been cleared, and there was a six-hour programme devoted to analysis and discussion of the sins revealed. Celebrity guest panellists had been chosen for their clashing personalities and caustic views, so there was the promise of character assassination, trash talk and generally appalling behaviour. Nerys was in her element.
Ben had constructed bingo sheets for them to use as they watched. He’d also created a calculation to feed the points they scored into The Game using the new currency they’d recently introduced called Social Moolah, with which they could buy and sell knowledge and influence. Nerys had a considerable stockpile, so Ben was keen to find ways that he might claw some back. Nerys looked set to make it a hard battle though, she had armed herself with a set of special bingo dabbing pens and she’d fastened her sheets onto a clipboard so that she could easily glance down and mark them. There were points to be scored for key phrases and also for celebrity names. Clovenhoof looked at his list and saw that he had Mary Berry and Tom Hanks. He didn’t hold out much hope there, but he did at least have Prince Philip.
The deadline passed and the screen was filled with scrolling text, while a pointless BBC voiceover talked viewers through the fact that there was a lot of data and it would take the analysts several moments to find the first ‘items of interest’.
Next came a room filled with desks. These were the analysts. Rows of them sat at computers typing earnestly and talking into headsets. There was a live studio audience, and the atmosphere was tense as the large overhead screen that would display the sins as they were live tweeted by the analysts remained blank and the announcer had to keep filling with breathless commentary about what people could see with their own eyes.
The first tweet went up on the board and Nerys squeaked with excitement.
Sybil Wainwright travelled without a valid train ticket
“Who’s Sybil Wainwright?” asked Nerys. There was an embarrassed pause as the same question echoed throughout the television studio and perhaps the country. The voiceover man on the television took a few moments to deliver the news that she had a minor hit in the sixties with a novelty song about donkeys. “Come on!” yelled Nerys, “where’s the people we’ve heard of?”
Moments later, the screen was filled with tweets, and it became challenging to follow them as they scrolled up.
“Ooh, Ed Sheeran!” shouted Nerys, dabbing at her bingo sheet.
“What did he do, I missed it?” asked Ben.
“Used the last of the toilet roll without replacing it,” said Nerys shaking her head. “To be honest I think some of his songs constitute greater sins than that, anyway.”
“I quite like his music,” said Ben.
“Ha! Let’s hope there’s better stuff coming up.”
“Hey look,” said Ben. “Claymore Ferret pushed his butler down the stairs. Do you think he’s related to Maldon Ferret?”
“His father,” said Clovenhoof. “Dead now, which is how Maldon came to be lord. I see Claymore racked up quite a list before he went.”
“Wow, he shot animals for fun,” said Nerys, scowling as she reached into her ostrich-skin handbag to pat Twinkle’s head. “I hope the bastard’s rotting in Hell.”
Rutspud and Joan did their best to help Belphegor fight a rear-guard action as the collected sin of billions of souls took its first steps to freedom. The thing that emerged from the tank walked on oily black tree trunk legs which supported a barrel-like torso and a fat, malignant tumour of a head. It crashed with a toddler’s indifference through workbenches, maintenance cables and the general structures of the room.
Belphegor doused it in another sheet of fire from his flamethrower (which seemed to do little but dazzle the thing). Rutspud picked up a device that appeared to be mostly blades and needles, flicked the activation switch and flung it at the thing’s face. Joan sliced at any hand that that swung within range of her blade.
“Why’s it taken on a humanoid form, boss?” Rutspud shouted over the din of its rampaging progress through the room.
“Human sin!” Belphegor shouted back. “Boris is composed of human desires, human evils. It is nothing but human thoughts and feelings. It might even think it’s human.”
They were now in the relative shelter of the doorway to the Infernal Innovations office. Gabriel had fled before them, blabbering something about reinforcements.
“I’ll lay down covering fire,” said Belphegor, “and you two go back to prepare to barricade this entrance. This is the only exit from the room.”
A fist swung at them. Joan sidestepped and brought her sword round and up, gouging the monster’s arm. Boris reared back and roared. He had a voice with a depth and reverb that would have made Darth Vader reach for a copyright lawyer.
“Now!” said Belphegor.
He swung left and right, filling the room with flame. Rutspud and Joan dashed back through the to the office beyond.
“You, you and you!” yelled Joan to the damned who were simply standing and staring. “Desks, cupboards and wardrobes, against this door!”
With a strength born of adrenaline (and a regular weights and Pilates training regime), Joan hauled a filing cabinet into place and prepared to brace it against the door. She waited for Belphegor to get out first and get out he did, reversing at speed through the doors and not stopping until he collided with an unfortunate damned in a roll neck sweater.
“Ah, Steve. Glad to see you’re making yourself useful,” said Belphegor.
The door swung back and Joan shoved the filing cabinet against it.
“Heaven preserve us!” she whispered and heard the tremble in her own voice.
“Heaven is here,” said Gabriel in a voice suddenly more confident and louder than before.
Joan looked round.
A phalanx of angel soldiers, armoured in gleaming gold and bearing standards, spears and swords came trooping into Infernal Innovations. Their glorious rank and file was disrupted by St Peter barging his way to the front.
The one-time rock of the Christian church, now disgraced saint and replacement overseer of Hell was followed by his pudgy PA, Emperor Nero.
“What is the meaning of this intrusion?” he demanded.
“Heaven can do as it wishes, Peter,” said Gabriel sternly. “Remember your place.”
“This is my place! It’s Hell! The question is what are you doing here?”
“We are rectifying a gross negligence of duty by one of your chief subordinates,” said Gabriel, pointing at Belphegor. “Hell has deceived us.”
“I would have to add,” said Joan, honestly, “that it was done with some collusion from our side.”
Boris the sin-b
east slammed against the double doors, shaking the barricade and sending furniture tumbling.
“What is that?” said Peter.
“It’s Boris, my lord,” said Rutspud.
“A demon?”
“A giant lump of sin, my lord.”
“It’s alive,” said Joan. “It speaks.”
“See what your underling has wrought!” said Gabriel angrily.
“It was under control until you let it go,” countered Belphegor.
“That switch should have had a label on it!”
“It was big! It was red! It said ‘do not touch’!”
Their argument was cut short by another bash at the door. Damned workers hurried to replace fallen bits of the barricade.
“It’s contained for now,” said Belphegor. “And no one is harmed.”
“Yeah,” said Rutspud slowly. “There’s a couple of issues with that.”
“Like what, demon?” said Peter.
“Um, first of all, the shunter is in there.”
“The what?” said Gabriel.
Joan groaned. “The mechanism that took us to earth. If it figured out how to use it…”
“It won’t, it can’t,” said Belphegor although he did not sound overly sure.
“And, secondly,” said Rutspud, “and I can’t over emphasise how secondary and insignificant this second issue is…”
“Yes?” said Gabriel.
“Has anyone seen Thomas Aquinas?”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Clovenhoof, Ben and Nerys had finished the bingo game. Nerys won by a landslide after Ben wasted valuable minutes looking up what frottaging was and Clovenhoof was banned from having a pen after defacing the tour bus.
The announcer had spent a considerable time crowing about the viewing figures for the programme, which was in its third hour. It had broken numerous records and nobody was walking away as the sins kept coming.
“Isn’t it funny how the small sins are almost as interesting as the big sins,” said Nerys.
“No they’re better,” said Ben. “They’re more relatable.”
Clovenhoof wondered about that. Could it be that being exposed as a minor sinner might be beneficial for some of these celebrities?
“Ooh, you got a mention Jeremy!” shouted Nerys.
There was a banner across the screen, asking Where did the PrayPal app come from?
“The three entrepreneurs are thought to have made millions from the app, and it’s unclear what motivated them to reveal all of the personal data that it captured from their customers,” said the presenter. The screen was filled with portraits of Clovenhoof, Felix and Bishop Ken. “We have attempted to locate them for comment, but two of them appear to be in hiding, and all attempts to contact Jeremy Clovenhoof have been rebuffed with marketing messages for his breakaway church and nation state of Hooflandia. On the one occasion that we managed to get a call through to his personal mobile phone, we listened to thirty minutes of him singing the hits of Kiss before terminating the call.”
“I remember that evening,” said Nerys. “I didn’t realise you were on a call.”
“Neither did I,” said Clovenhoof with a shrug. “Surely, people can’t think I’m up to anything. I’m as honest as the day is long –”
“In the Arctic winter perhaps,” muttered Ben.
The TV presenter was interviewing some talking head, identified as ‘Anette Cleaver, former Head of Communications, Birmingham Diocese.’
“Anette, you believe that Mr Clovenhoof has been less than honest about this leak of sin data.”
“That’s right, Huw,” said the woman in the severe suit. “We have been fed a line about this leak being the responsibility of a rogue programmer. Felix Winkstein has been presented as a lone wolf, a Julian Assange type who was willing to sabotage his own fortune and livelihood for some puritanically moral purpose. This is entirely untrue. It is clear to anyone with a marketing diploma or two years’ experience of dealing class A drugs that this is a blatant misuse of personal data and a deliberate tactic by the so-called Church of Hooflandia.”
“That piss-gargling, stuck-up bitch,” spat Archbishop Nerys. “Just because she got caught receiving holy communion from some knob’s piss-pipe, she wants to drag us down too.”
“What we see here,” continued Anette, “is an aggressive takeover of a beloved institution. They undercut the valuable work of the Church with their tacky little app, flooding the market with free forgiveness, until such point as the Church was pushed to bankruptcy. And then – and this is the clever part, Huw – having got millions hooked on their faith brand, they pull the rug out from underneath them and force everyone to shift to their more expensive product, the Church of Hooflandia. Basically, it’s the plot of the James Bond film Live and Let Die and Clovenhoof is our drug-pushing Dr Kananga.”
“And for our younger viewers, Anette, Live and Let Die is…?”
“The one with the speedboats, Huw. The speedboats and the voodoo man.”
“Thank you, Anette.”
“Shit-biscuits,” said Nerys.
“The annoying thing is that it’s a really good conspiracy,” said Clovenhoof. “If I’d thought of it, I’d have definitely done it.”
“I’m starting to think you have,” said Ben, suspiciously.
“It’ll all blow over by morning,” said Nerys, with more hope than conviction in her voice.
Joan stood before the doors to the barricaded laboratory and glanced back at the spearhead formation of angelic soldiers.
“Ready?” she said.
“I am the one leading this assault,” said the Archangel Gabriel at her shoulder.
“Oh, do you want to go in front of me?”
“I meant I am in command.”
“Just get on with it,” said Rutspud, who was nearby but clearly not part of any attack formation. He knew his place. He was a lover not a fighter, and what he loved most of all was his limbs and vital organs. “By the sounds of it, Boris is getting increasingly violent.”
“You’re right,” said Joan. “Thomas needs us.”
“I was thinking more of the valuable equipment,” said Rutspud.
Joan nodded to the damned souls and they quickly dismantled the barricade. She adjusted her grip on her sword and rolled her shoulders.
The second before Joan led the charge through the swing doors, Rutspud found himself thinking that if Boris had just pulled instead of pushed, he could have got through those doors any time he’d liked. There was probably something deeply philosophical in that, but the minor demon didn’t have time to ponder what that might be.
Joan ran forward, sword raised high.
“By the power of all that is holy, I command you to stand down!” she shouted.
“Oh, yeah. That’ll do it,” muttered Rutspud and followed the charging soldiers at a safe distance.
The creativity hub was a ruin. Tables were overturned. Ducts and machinery were smashed. Chemicals, alchemicals and diabolicals fizzed, burned and screamed in little puddles on the floor.
Boris turned to face his attackers. He was still a giant, malformed humanoid but there was now a greater definition to his features. His nose was a proud slab of evil. His brow was a heavy ridge above empty eye sockets. His hands, no longer shapeless mitts, had sprouted fingers like distended German sausages.
“Stand down!” demanded Joan.
Boris lifted a giant hand and swatted her aside, but not before she’d briefly skewered a leg with her sword. Angels poured in around her, jabbing, slicing and making a general effort to look like they were doing the decent thing. Boris swung his hands back and forth like machetes, chopping at angels like dry stalks of grass. Belphegor zipped forward in his wheelchair and sprayed the creature with flamethrower fire, but to little effect.
“Remember!” he shouted. “That’s concentrated sin! Keep a safe distance!”
Gabriel scoffed. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil!”
Boris kicked out and an angel went flying, a smear of black ichor across his face. The angel came down on his feet and wiped the goo away with the back of his hand. Rutspud saw the fiery frenzy now in the angel’s eyes.
“I fucking hate being an angel!” he roared. “I hate harps! I hate hymns!” He lowered his spear towards Gabriel. “And I fucking hate you!”
The angel lunged at Gabriel and if Belphegor hadn’t intervened, knocking him out cold with the flat of an auto-scythe, the Celestial City might have needed to advertise for a new archangel to blow their horns.
“Now,” snarled the demon lord, “does anyone else want to quote trippy Psalms at me or shall we all listen to sound, scientific advice?”
“Y-yes,” said Gabriel, stunned. “Everyone keep a good distance!”
Rutspud didn’t need telling. If the lab were bigger, he would be keeping an even better distance. He had already scanned the room and was waiting for the right moment to act. If he could disable the shunter and if they could also seal all the pipes and vents leading from the room, then Boris would be trapped. They could leave Boris to rage and rampage in solitude until Doomsday.
For now, Boris stood directly between Rutspud and the shunter. There was no way through without risking an existence-squishing and promising-career-ending attack. Although, if Rutspud squeezed under that desk, maybe he could sneak by…
There was something under the desk. It was fat, wrapped in a monk’s habit and making a most undignified sobbing noise.
“Oi, Tommy boy,” hissed Rutspud.
Thomas Aquinas looked up from his hiding place. His face was blotchy with tears.
“Quit blubbering and get out of the way,” hissed Rutspud.
“I wasn’t blubbering,” sniffled the saint. “I was praying.”
“You’ve got tears in your eyes.”
“Overcome with love for our Lord?” suggested Thomas but crawled out from under the desk anyway.
Across the way, several brave (stupid but brave) angels distracted Boris with their bronzed spears while Joan snuck up from behind. With a powerful overhead chop, she sliced off the creature’s hand at the wrist. Any sense of victory was very short-lived because, even before striking the floor, the hand had shifted and remade itself and now an oily dwarf of solid sin stood beside its ogreish brother.
