by Ben Stevens
‘STOP!’
The deep, authoritative voice seemed to come from every part of Hell at once. I dared to open my eyes and there was the big guy himself – horns, smoke, scaly whipping tail and all the rest. His eyes gleamed as he pointed one gnarled, scaly finger with a wicked-looking nail towards me.
‘Bring him to me!’ Satan ordered; and then we were sort of flying through all this choking black smoke and suddenly I was in what I can only describe as the ‘boss’s den’.
He was sat on a great throne made from human bones. I thought it looked awesome. On either side of him were bubbling cauldrons of lava or something of the sort. I don’t know what they were actually supposed to do – probably more an image-thing than anything else, I guessed.
The demons forced me down on my knees. I could tell they really, really wanted to get me way back high, so they could then drop me down onto the rocks.
Well, tough cheese, boys. ‘Cause I now had me an interview with the boss-man himself.
Bite me.
‘You escaped to – that place – and yet you’ve come back,’ said Satan in that impressive voice of his. ‘Why?’
I dared to raise my eyes and look directly into his. They didn’t seem angry – more curious than anything else. I decided to lay it directly on the line.
‘Master,’ I said, ‘I much prefer it here. I screwed up in my Earthly existence, but here… Here I feel as though I’ve been given a second chance.’
Satan nodded, his eyes searching my soul to check that what I was saying was the truth. It was, every last word and more.
‘Only one person has ever left – that place – before,’ observed Satan
‘Well, in actual fact been banished – cast out,’ he continued.
I nodded, to show that I was familiar with his ‘backstory’, as it were.
‘But you,’ Satan said then, suddenly appearing rather animated, ‘you not only escape from here, but also return some time later. Do you realize no one has ever achieved such a thing before? You should be proud.’
‘I am, Master,’ I said, before I’d time to check the automatic response. But Satan didn’t seem to object to my vanity at all.
‘You’ve shown you’ve got what’s needed down here in Hell, just in the extremely short time you’ve been here,’ he went onto say. ‘I’ve been looking for… Well, a ‘helper’, if you like, for some time now. Someone to keep an eye on things.’
It was like I’d thought before – the last time I’d seen Satan, I mean. The big guy was a little weary, a little jaded. He’d been doing this gig since the dawn of mankind, after all. He had his flying demons, but they seemed to be more – how can I put this? – brawn rather than brain.
Put it this way – if I was a demon and someone hopped onto my back, demanding that I carry them up to that cave, and saying the Lord’s Prayer (spit) into my ear as a way to make me comply… Why, I’d just pretend to do exactly as they said – only to then suddenly smash them against a rock face as they straddled my back. That would get that little piggy-backer off, for sure.
Easy solution – yet the flying demon who was now just another damned soul hadn’t thought of that one. So I guess Satan was looking out for his ‘helper’ being just that little bit shrewd – just that little bit smarter than your average demon here in Hell.
‘Master, please… I wish only to serve you, however you see fit…’ was all I could say.
Satan nodded, and again pointed his finger at me. Instantly, I felt my body start to change. To get bigger. I was becoming red, scaly. A tail and two horns sprouted. I had wings. I was no longer burnt, hot, hungry or thirsty. I was immune from all human misery and pain. I somehow knew my face stayed sort of the same – enough so Hitler would know me, the next time we met – but I was now a demon.
A special demon. Satan’s favorite. Red, not black. Allowed to keep some of my ‘human’ features. Distinguished from all the other flying demons. And in charge of them. Answerable only to Satan himself – my Master.
Not bad going, considering how ‘little’ time I’d actually be in Hell!
‘Go now,’ said Satan. ‘Fly and become used to your new form. We will talk again in time.’
‘Yes, Master,’ I replied. The smoke appeared – and then I was soaring out, passing over the millions of toiling, naked figures, whooping and rolling in that red sky.
Then I went and found my friend Hitler. He did his best to appear unimpressed, but I knew deep down he was pleased to see me again.
‘Yah, yah,’ he said peevishly. ‘So you decided to come back, huh? And look at you now, Mr. Big-Shot – I’ll have to wait maybe a thousand years or more to become a flying demon, but you…’
He shook his head with exasperation. I actually quite felt for him.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘leave it to me. I can’t promise anything, but maybe if I have a few words with the right person, pull a few strings…’
Hitler stared straight at me, his icy-blue eyes shining with some sort of light I’d never seen before.
‘You’d do that,’ he said quietly – ‘for me?’
‘Yes,’ I returned.
Then Hitler grunted, spat and returned to hacking at the rock face with his pickaxe.
We understood each other. I flew away again – I’d return soon.
It wasn’t long after this that perhaps the most satisfying thing of all occurred. There I was, hovering above the entrance in the rock face – at ground level – that discharged all the newbies into Hell. It always has to be manned; often I just left one or a couple of the flying demons to it, but I liked sometimes just to hang out there, flapping my great wings for all the new entrants into this Kingdom of the Damned to see.
Then who should rock up – who indeed? That pompous, fleshy face; that little nose like a nipple in the middle of it… He emerged like the others, stark-naked, shit-scared, blinking rapidly at the heat, noise and light…
I’d only to look at someone to know what they’d done to merit being in Hell. It was one of my powers, so to speak…
Actually, one thing I should quickly say here… It’s not in fact true that Satan or any of his helpers in any way ‘assist’ people with any evil deeds done during their time on Earth – or that we somehow ‘lead them’ into some sort of dastardly temptation.
Uh-uh. ‘We’ – by which I mean Hell as a whole – are just like a prison, basically. With a mandatory sentence to last for all eternity. We have nothing to do, so to speak, with whatever evil crimes a person may have committed – we just punish them. So, looking at things that way, maybe you can see now that Hell’s been given something of a bad rep.
Are we really that bad…?
Anyway, looking at Judge Timothy J Green, I knew instantly (thanks to my Satan-given ‘super-powers’) that some indecent pictures of children had been found on that sanctimonious, preaching, turkey-necked old bastard’s computer. Charged and released on police bail, his life and precious career ruined, he’d then hanged himself in his garage.
So two counts against him – the kiddie porn and the taking of his own life.
‘Remember me?’ I roared at him, grinning and revealing my fangs as he cowered and held up his hands.
‘No… No…’ he whimpered.
‘Course he didn’t. He’d probably sent a load more people off to Death Row or just jail since between the time I’d been topped and him arriving here. So it was hardly fair for me to expect him to remember lil’ old me in particular…
But I remembered him. Oh yes. And now he was going to get the special treatment. Speaking in Hell’s own language (the ability to converse in Hellish had occurred exactly the same time as I’d been given my new body), I ordered two of the flying demons to take the honorable judge off to the torture area. In particular, I quite fancied taking off that repellent, nipple-like nose of his with a pair of pliers.
That would do for starters.
Then…
Oh, the mind just boggled with possibilities…
I smiled, and uttered a great roar of laughter, which caused the ceaseless flow of new entrants into Hell to cower and whimper.
Life was good…
Well – not exactly life as such, but…
You get my meaning.
The Mannequin
She’d moved.
Sure as shit she’d…
James Robertson blinked several times, scratched the back of his head and wondered if he was going nuts.
The cavernous store-room was situated right at the top of the shopping center. It was here that any number of things were stored, from the artificial Christmas tree that was several stories high, and required scaffolding to erect and decorate it each year, to the forty or fifty mannequins that were congregated in one corner.
Robertson had noticed her almost immediately. She stood out, for the simple reason that she had on make-up and wore a brown wig. She was also smiling slightly, and her painted eyes seemed to follow Robertson wherever he went in this large, silent room.
None of the other mannequins that had been placed tightly together were so instantly noticeable. They did not have painted eyes, or a wig, or that damned slight smile that seemed to…
‘Stop looking at me,’ said Robertson suddenly, his voice disturbing the stillness of the room. He’d been sent up here with a trolley to get a section of counter for one of the shops downstairs. Only he couldn’t find the section among all the junk that had been placed up here over the years, and this mannequin was severely freaking him out.
He’d first noticed her earlier, when he’d been sent up here to get an ‘On Sale NOW!’ notice board. This was his second week employed at the shopping center as a temporary staff member, and (by and large) it wasn’t so bad. Poor pay – always one of the disadvantages of agency work – but he was at least able to move around, constantly being sent to get or transport something from one part of the mall to another, and the meals at the staff canteen were cheap and tasty.
His friend Lawrence Gallagher, another agency worker, had been doing this job before. But approximately two weeks before Gallagher had just disappeared. Vanished. No one knew where he’d gone and he’d said not a thing about wanting to shoot through. He’d seemed happy enough, just another young man content to do some casual work and get enough money to be able to drink some beer and chase girls most evenings. He’d been one of Robertson’s best drinking buddies – they had a similar sort of humor – so it was fair to say that Robertson missed him quite a bit. Wished he’d get in contact, if only to say that he’d moved on someplace else but was at least all right.
It was also fair to say that Mr. Myers – the boss at the employment agency – wasn’t quite so concerned about Gallagher’s well-being. So far as Myers was concerned, Gallagher had neither snuck off somewhere to take his own life (for reasons of depression or such), nor had he been abducted by aliens.
To Myers, Gallagher had pulled his vanishing act purely out of spite; to try and damage the lucrative contract Myers had with the management team at the shopping mall. The team which often asked Myers to supply the mall with one, two or sometimes three or even four temporary workers.
‘I’m taking you off the warehouse job and assigning you to the mall,’ Mr. Myers had told Robertson in his usual dramatic fashion, making it sound as though he was being sent on some sort of SWAT mission. Robertson didn’t much care either way. Work was work, wherever he was placed. One of these days he’d quit fooling around, and would seek something more permanent – and better paid. But for now, aged only twenty-three, he wasn’t too fussed…
Really, that mannequin was looking at him. Seriously freaking him out. He felt its eyes following him around as he searched for this bit of counter he was supposed to take down to the shop floor. He wanted to get down there as quickly as possible. To be among people, noise… To be away from this cavernous, silent room with this mannequin and its painted eyes and its smile…
But had it really moved? That was the 64,000 dollar question right now. When Robertson had previously noticed it, the last time he’d been sent up to this store room, it had been stood in a certain way. Leaning slightly to one side, its head angled a little to the right. An elegant enough pose, on the occasions it was used to advertise clothing or such.
But now Robertson was damn-near certain that the head was inclined in another direction and it was leaning in another way.
Impossible. It had been placed almost directly in the centre of the other mannequins. So there would be no way of repositioning it without first having to move most of the mannequins out of the way…
And why? For what possible reason would you want to reposition it in the first place – up here in this cavernous store-room that was entered only infrequently?
She’d moved
‘She’? A minute ago he’d been thinking of it as – well, ‘it’, basically. But now ‘it’ had again become ‘she’…?
‘Stop staring at me, goddamn it!’ he almost shouted at the mannequin. He was stood perhaps twenty feet away from it on the whitewashed concrete floor. It – she, whatever – stared back at him, the slight smile seeming mocking but also slightly…
Alluring?
What the fuck? Was he starting to get the hots for a mannequin wearing a brown wig, for Christ’s sake? Sure, it had been a fair while since his last lay, but, come on…’
‘Would you like to fuck me?’ the mannequin said suddenly, her voice sounding low and alluring in the large room.
‘Shit!’ Robertson exclaimed, staggering slightly backwards in his surprise. The mannequin’s lipsticked smile became just a little larger, now exposing gleaming white teeth. Her head moved slightly to look directly at him.
‘I’ll do whatever you want,’ continued the mannequin. ‘Anything at all. I’m your dream woman – I never say ‘no’.’
‘You… I… wait…’ stammered Robinson, his mouth gaping stupidly open.
She seemed almost to drift through the other mannequins stood between her and the young agency worker. None of these mannequins moved… yet somehow she passed through them, to now stand within a few feet of Robertson. The wig no longer seemed like a wig but like real hair. The previously painted eyes sparkled with sexual desire. She was stark naked but had absolutely no pubic hair. She held her full breasts in her hands and moaned erotically as she stared into Robertson’s eyes.
‘Fuck me, James, whichever way you want,’ she said, starting to walk slowly towards him. ‘Do whatever you like to me.’
‘How do you… how do you know my name?’ whispered Robertson, a lustful bulge showing in his jeans. Something faint whispered in the back of his mind, urging caution, telling him to run away and quickly… Then it was banished by the strong sexual instinct. He was mesmerized, hypnotized by this brown-haired, big-breasted, nude, perfect woman who was advancing steadily towards him.
She cupped his bulge with one hand and it was his turn to moan.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll do whatever you’ve seen in those movies you watch and more… But first, a kiss…’
Her glistening red lips battened onto his own, her tongue entering inside his mouth. Her arms wrapped around his body. It was heaven at first; then he thought… ‘Give me a minute, here… I can’t breathe…’
He tried to pull away, gently at first but with increasing panic as he realized that she was holding him fast. He really couldn’t breathe, that tongue now seeming almost to touch the back of his throat, choking him…
He tried to lift up his hands to her throat, to choke her or whatever the fuck he had to do in order to get out of this viselike grip – but it was hopeless. She now felt like hard plastic; she was hard plastic. A dummy to be sporadically placed on the shop floor. A mannequin.
She pulled away from him and he felt a momentary relief before he realized that he couldn’t move. At all. He was frozen upright with his arms by his sides. He couldn’t even move his eyes, which
saw her drift back among the mannequins, moving to where she’d been stood before. There was another mannequin beside her; and now Robertson saw (as he’d somehow been wholly unable to see before) that the face bore an uncanny resemblance to the man whom he’d replaced in this job – his missing friend, Lawrence Gallagher. And he saw that the expression in this mannequin’s face was one of frozen despair.
He looked at the other mannequins in his direct line of sight. Now they all seemed different to him, facially-speaking, except for one thing – they all had the same expression as the mannequin which looked uncannily like Gallagher. Yes, every single one of them looked the same – expect for the mannequin that was made-up and smiling slightly, wearing a brown wig.
Robertson couldn’t move, couldn’t cry out for help… He was absolutely immobile and incapable of producing the slightest sound.
He heard the door to this storeroom open. There came the voices of two men talking as they entered.
‘…I sent him up here, least half an hour ago,’ one of the men was saying. Robinson recognized the voice of Ryan Collins, who ran the shopping center’s stock delivery department and who’d dispatched Robinson on various errands.
‘God knows where he’s got t– ’ Collins abruptly stopped talking; then said, ‘Now how do you reckon that mannequin got over there?’
‘No idea,’ said other man, whose voice Robinson didn’t recognize. ‘I’ll just stick him back.’
Robinson was startled when, a few moments later, he was picked up and carried over to where the mannequins were assembled. He couldn’t feel anything in his body, which (he realized) was now, somehow, entirely devoid of clothing. And made of hard plastic. He was set on his feet, facing directly in the direction of the door towards which the two men were now returning.
‘We’ll have to get onto the agency again,’ Collins was saying. ‘Get them to send someone reliable – not like the last two jokers we’ve had.’
‘Reminds me of that guy who started working here a year or so back – remember he just suddenly vanished one day?’ remarked the other man. ‘Went off somewhere and didn’t even bother picking up his pay check…’
