From the beginning, the demon spat, blew sulphurous air, ejected spurts of flame, and more prosaically thumped his opponent with a rubber baton. The seraph struggled to hold his own weapon in what was essentially a wing, and ran through a medley of great hymns. Seraphs of legend sing ‘Holy holy holy is the Lord God Almighty’, but even the most patient of them found this single number a little limiting a long time ago, and moved on to more varied material. This one opened with ‘Mine eyes- OOOF- have seen the glory of the- OUCH- coming of- AAAgh- the Lord’, and managed to get as far as ‘I am-WOW- the Lord-OOOF- of The Dance’ before the pole rotated, and he was pitched, in a flurry of seraph-down, into the filth below. The demon blew off his own head in celebration.
The audience may not have been paying much attention, but they knew that this was an end, if not The End; they stopped what they were doing and turned to look towards the arena, unwillingly in thrall to whatever happened next.
The Devil sprinted from the sidelines and joined his filthy and smouldering team in a massive huddle, bouncing up and down and chanting ‘here we go’ even as various members enflamed in excitement. The representatives of the light were strewn around the field in states of despair, wings drooping, foam rubber heads and boots cast to the ground beside them.
“You’d better go.” Mary said to the young man. He looked up at her, his mouth downturned, a hint of moisture in the reddened rims of his eyes. He stood, brushed his hands down his thighs, set his jaw and began to descend the wooden steps from the terrace.
Mary thought back as she watched him go, shoulders slumped, to the conversation she had with Marcel that morning before the games began.
“What did you say? To them?” She had jerked her chin towards the thousands around the perimeter.
“What do you mean?” He looked sheepish.
“You know what I mean. All that slipping off and getting into little discussions with people outside.”
“Ah. That.” She waited, watched his eyes flicker away in an attempt to avoid hers. Eventually he spoke again. “I thought I’d take a leaf out of Pheme’s book. It’s amazing how quickly word spreads if it is something people want to hear.” He toyed with the lapel of his ghastly polyester blazer, stared ruefully towards the arena and the crowds beyond. “It was something Søren said. About them needing our belief for them to have power over us. I have to tell you those people out there don’t need much encouragement to stop believing that these fools, in their foam rubber and their bungee ropes, should have any control over lives, or deaths for that matter.”
“But what can they do?”
“I don’t know, but it was all I could think of to stop this farce. It’s down to them, I suppose.”
The slender figure of the youth seemed all too real, corporeal, approaching the centre of the arena, where the Devil waited, his face a picture of smug victory. Who knew what to believe?
All around the infinity that was the Afterworld, activity ground to a halt. For all of the increasing disregard for events being relayed on the big screens as they were occurring, everyone knew that what happened next was supposed to have a defining effect on their eternities. Somewhere in this space, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, a string of other US presidents, Colombian drug barons, Argentinean sailors, victims of natural disasters throughout the sub-continent, children, mothers, fathers and grandparents tuned in once more to learn whether the two days of nonsense had any actual meaning.
“Holy Cow!” said Strand, unaware that behind him a cherub in Friesian suit, including udders, but sans head, was passing disconsolately, “What a truly amazing finish that was. We’re gonna get a word or two with the captains here to see how they feel after what has been a rilly rilly fantastic contest.” The picture on the screen shook, Crantum becoming an orange blur swaying sideways and then re-emerging in centre screen, the camera pulling back to reveal a figure next to him. Black-haired, with a thin sculpted beard, swarthy skin and glittering eyes, it could have been someone selling you an expensive watch in Hatton Garden, though adorned with the red raw stubs of a couple of horns showing through the dark thatch.
“Yo! Satan! Great win for your guys! How’re ya feelin’?”
“It’s been a real rollercoaster, Strand, but I think we deserved to edge it. I’m really proud of the guys for displaying the disregard for decent behaviour and humanity I’ve tried to instil in them.”
“Big celebration tonight?”
“Oh yes.”
“Guess you’re glad it stayed fine, weather-wise?”
“Didn’t really matter to me one way or the other, Strand.”
“Ok. Still, nice to have high pressure and light westerlies when you’re suspended above a pool of water. I believe we have with us, and it’s a great privilege for me, I can tell you, Gahd!” Viewers throughout the Afterworld could hear a murmur as another figure moved to take up a position next to the weatherman. On the Everland terrace, everyone stood, even the Visigoths moving towards the rail to get a better view. Marcel and Geoffrey, their work over, stopped at the top of the stairs to see what was about to happen.
“Isn’t that that kid?” said Justin, disappointed.
“Yes.” said Ethel. “I thought he seemed nice. Where’s Ron? He should see this. God, at our holiday camp! Who’d have thought it?” She looked around, but there was no sign of her husband. On the retinas of the thousands surrounding the arena and on screens throughout this world, those watching saw Crantum and a shaft of light, or a warrior, a benign elderly gentleman, a cat, a snake. For those on the terrace, this was the youth who had been sitting amongst them.
“Gahd! Helluva a way to lose the final battle. How’re ya feelin?”
“It’s a huge disappointment, to be honest. I just thought good would triumph.”
“Bit of complacency, d’ya think?” Strand recoiled at the look from his interviewee, and moved hastily on.
“So, what happens now?”
There was a yell from the crowd. “Yeah. What happens now?”
“I think you’ll find that’s up to me.” Satan leaned into the microphone and smirked.
“Sez who?” This from a part of the crowd, populated, it appeared, mainly by Victorian poorhouse dead. Another murmur emanated from all around the arena. God clearly heard it but paid it little mind.
“I suppose we have to work it out between us. Me and…this.” He gestured to the smirking Devil.
“What about us?” This yell was followed by significant guttural echoes and cries of agreement.
“What about you? What have you got to do with it?” It was the Devil who said what God found himself thinking.
“You’re only there because of us!”
“Yeah! He’s right. Where would you be without us?”
A rumbling wave support echoed around through the crowd. In far-flung corners of the space, people were rising to their feet, raising fists to the screen showing the confused faces of these supposed supreme beings, shouting their own opinions.
“You are all my children.” said God. “Everything you have, you have because of me.”
“Everything we have?” A man was lifted onto the shoulders of a group of people nearest to the fence where the interview was taking place. “What have we got? We haven’t got everything you promised, we’re just stuck here, mushrooms, in the dark with shit being thrown on us. Children? You should be reported to the social, mate.”
“I’m in charge, now.” The Devil’s voice, deep and self-assured, rolled out over the crowds, and through the ether into the afterlives of the billions awaiting their fates. “You’ll get what you were promised, don’t you worry.”
“You can stick it, Nick. We’re not having it.” This came from another man, his chest showing the scars of the horrible slashing injuries that brought him here. Both God and Satan looked confused. The crowd was shouting, waving arms to the sky. There was an air of threat, a whiff of danger but more, a feeling of disrespect, antipathy. They both felt strength and
certainty leeching away.
“I MADE YOU.” God shouted. It was a noise that almost shattered the eardrums of all those inhabiting the Afterworld, near or far. Leaves blew from trees; the structures in Everland swayed as though in a hurricane. Dust rose from the floor and the sky above went dark, deep rolling clouds thudding angrily out to all horizons. An unearthly silence followed, beyond quiet, a stillness so complete that it could have been the moment before existence began.
The crowd had been forced back by the wall of sound, some thrown to the floor, all gazing in awe at the scene in the arena. A young woman stepped forward. She took three paces to the fence, stared at the figures gathered around the microphone, who stared back at her with barely concealed fury.
“No.” She said, her voice much less loud, but no less clear and strong. “We made you.”
EPILOGUE
1
As God made his way into the arena to face up to the interrogation from Crantum, Mary saw Ron from the corner of her eye, looking small and defeated, walk from the terrace back into the Entertainment centre. She followed.
Their steps echoed in the deserted cavernous space, and when he stopped he heard hers and turned to face her. The room felt cold and empty, despite the dramatic swoop of the bar and the clutter of the tables, the soft lights playing on the stage.
“What is it, Ron?”
He shrugged.
“I’m tired, Mary. We’ve all been trying to make the best of this for a long time, and then everything, or something, gets decided by those fools and all that nonsense they’ve been doing for the last two days. I’m tired.”
She didn’t know what to say. He absently scratched the steering wheel as though it were part of him, which in a way it was.
“Ethel told me she asked you how it works.” he said.
“What?”
“Heaven. How it knows what you want?”
“She did. It’s not something I’ve ever really been able to figure out. I understand the electronic bits, the code bits, the routines. But this is like some kind of Artificial Intelligence or something, like it can read people’s minds. I know it changes, though.”
“In what way?”
“Well, we met someone, Marcel and me, when we were, er, travelling, who had always thought, when he was alive, that he wanted a nice quiet death. Green fields, birds singing, blue skies and nothing much happening. We met him in a permanent dance party. He said that a hundred years here made him realise that he would go mad if he had much more nothing.”
“And it knew?”
“Somehow it knew, yes. It’s unreal, but then this all is, isn’t it? At the moment it sends you off to forever it knows exactly how you want forever to be.”
“And what about you? You and Marcel and the others?”
“Well, that’s quite interesting. Justin and I shouldn’t really be here, so we aren’t even in the system. Marcel and Geoffrey have been removed from their eternities, so they aren’t in there either. Like your Germanic friends.”
“Sorry?”
“Guntrick and his men. They died long before the Afternet. When I went to stop them being processed, I couldn’t even find them. As far as the system is concerned, they never existed. We’re kind of off the grid, all of us.”
“So you could be here forever?”
“Last chickens in the shop, that’s us.”
She didn’t doubt that she should never interfere with the sequencing of the Afternet. She also knew that she had nothing to lose.
Even as, unbeknownst to her, the crowd’s disapproval with God and the Devil swelled around Everland, their cries and catcalls reaching a crescendo, she sat in the Control Room, logged into the system, and found Ron and Ethel, making the changes that would bring forward their judgement and end Ron’s weariness. She stared at the cursor blinking, waiting to make the final keystroke. Would it actually work? Would they really be processed at once, shimmer in the space they stood and leave no trace? Would she be discovered, tracked down, somehow punished? Her finger hovered over the key.
“Fuck it.” She said to herself, and pressed.
Her first assumption was that she had hallucinated the whole thing. Seeing Ron leave, walking after him, seeing and hearing his distress, finding the Everywhere Door, hacking the program, striking the key.
They were there on the terrace, as they had been before. Ron leaned against the balustrade, Ethel next to him, their arms interlocked. Marcel and Geoffrey were bickering about something or other. Justin was patting himself as though searching for a wallet, and Guntrick and his men milled around behind them, looks of puzzlement on their faces. Death remained present, in the form of an incompetent Reaper. She turned from them to take in the arena, now empty of people, the pool clean and sparkling, Magritte’s structures glinting in sunshine. There were no crowds around the fences, no TV crew, no Crantum, no gods or demons shedding their ridiculous flapping skins.
What just happened? She too put hands on her body, felt solidity. Ron turned from the rail, and caught her eye, smiling. She barely recognised him without the steering wheel.
2.
The Control Room was a mess. The floor was strewn with food cartons, pizza crusts. The smell of ageing curry hung in the air. The Extinction Clock ticked over to record the final demise of the Common Two-Tailed Rat. Not so common now. The main screen of the Afternet scrolled inexorably and illegibly, blurring through the processing of those who awaited their final location, sending each and every one to their just deserts, their dreams or nightmares. The two operatives lounged in typist chairs, swivelling and rolling, staring at screens as though they would in some way give a clue as to how to spend the time.
“I’ve got more Popes than you, according to this.” the dark haired one with the horns said, clicking through some information on a screen.
“You’re welcome to them, mate. More trouble than they’re worth in my experience. If they’d gone the other way on contraception none of this might have happened.” The one with the halo shook his head, exasperated.
“Why didn’t you do anything about it?”
“Free f-ing will. What was I thinking?”
“You were always too soft.” Satan leaned back in his chair, interlaced long thin fingers behind his head. “Dull, this, isn’t it? Don’t know how they put up with it for so long.”
“Not forever, though is it?” said God, fingering the remains of a ginger nut.
“Isn’t it?”
“Nah. It’s just fashion, mate. So now they don’t believe in us. Think we’re irrelevant. Someone will come out of the crowd and get them all going again, don’t you worry.”
“I hope you’re right. This is Hell.” They both laughed.
“Spoof for who gets lunch?” asked God.
“It’s your turn.” said the Devil.
“It bloody is not. I got it yesterday.”
“I was ill. You can’t count when I was ill.”
“Ill my foot. You say you’re ill whenever you don’t want to do anything.”
“I have a delicate constitution.” The Devil said.
“Oh, alright.” God sighed, “But only if we play Kerplunk this afternoon.”
“Deal.” said the Devil. “We’ve got plenty of time.”
Thank you for reading The Afternet series. I hope you enjoyed the books, and guess if you got this far there must have been something in there to make it all worthwhile. I am always looking to improve on my work and would very much appreciate a review on Amazon to help in this task as well as to keep potential readers informed.
Peter Empringham
rayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share
The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet) Page 88
