Has The World Ended Yet?
Page 27
When Alistair was done with his face, he moved on to the rest of his body. He left the eyes alone though. He wanted to watch what he was doing to himself. I fast-forwarded through the moment because, as entertaining as it was, it wasn’t helping me to understand what Alistair was hiding. Because there was no doubt he was hiding something. How could he claim to not remember this way of suicide? And if he actually didn’t remember it, well, then what was really wrong with him?
He staggered out of the bathroom, dragging his now useless and shorter right leg after him, and I followed. Judging by the amount of blood he’d lost and was still losing, he didn’t have long left in this mortal world before he went off to wherever he was destined to go. Which should be Hell, judging from this memory, only it was a memory that Alistair didn’t seem to be aware he even had. If I were new to the job, I might think maybe he had a split personality or something like that, but I’d processed enough people with that condition – usually management types, for whatever that’s worth – to realize it had no bearing on things. But this was something completely different. This was like watching someone who wasn’t Alistair at all.
He went from the bathroom to a bedroom. There were a couple of skeletons in the bed, with room enough for a person in between them. Very cozy.
Malachi squealed from the living room, so I went out to see what had him so excited. The place had been savaged. The walls were streaked with blood, some fresh, some old. The furniture had been shredded with a knife, maybe the same one Alistair had used on himself. The floor was covered in shards of broken and bloody glass. A bonfire was raging in the fireplace, which was piled high with burning books. Presumably from the now empty bookshelves lying in pieces about the room. Malachi stood in the fire, trying to pick up the books, but he was too insubstantial to manage it. He shrieked in rage and jumped up and down in the flames.
Just then Alistair stumbled out of the bedroom and fell into one of the chairs.
“This is how you imagined it would end, isn’t it?” he said. He gouged out one of his eyes and threw it into the fire. Malachi opened his mouth to catch it, but it just sailed through him. Malachi sighed.
“It’s a shame I can’t do to you all those other things you fear so much,” Alistair went on. “But you have to make do with what you’ve got at hand, I guess.” He took the knife and rammed it through his other eye, into his brain. “I’ll see you in Hell!” he cried as he convulsed several times. Then he was still.
Ah. Now I understood.
I went over to the fire to make sure. I looked at the books Malachi had been trying to pick up. Malachi tried in vain to grab the eyeball, which was sizzling away. The top book was the tome bound in human skin I’d seen in the church. The Necronomicon. Everything you ever needed to know about summoning demons but were too afraid to ask.
“Baal,” I said, turning back to Alistair’s body. “What are you doing in there?”
For a moment nothing happened and I almost thought I’d been mistaken. Then Alistair chuckled and sat up. He looked at me, one eye sightless, the other with the knife still in it.
“How’d you know it was me?” he asked, and now his voice was like the buzzing of flies. Malachi spat at him and he spat back. Mutual dislike or friendly greeting? Who knew?
You’re probably wondering how I was able to talk to Baal in Alistair’s memory. It’s a demon thing. Once we’ve been in your mind, we never really leave. So Baal, or at least part of him, was still alive in Alistair’s mind, even though Alistair himself was dead and in Hell now. And Baal – well, who knew where Baal was these days? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he had once possessed Alistair.
“Was it the book?” he asked. “I knew I should have gotten rid of it sooner. But it comes in handy for certain things.”
“The book just confirmed it,” I said. “But what gave you away was the comment about knowing the things Alistair was afraid of. That’s your talent.”
The fact that Baal had possessed Alistair also explained why I was displaced from Alistair’s body in this memory. I couldn’t occupy it because there was already another demon occupying it.
Baal pulled out the knife and Alistair’s eye came with it. He didn’t seem to notice. “Yeah, I guess that was a bit of a giveaway. But I didn’t know you’d be here watching me.”
“Alistair’s in Hell,” I said. “It’s my job to look at his life.”
“So the angels took him for his sins anyway,” Baal said, and then the buzzing in his voice turned almost wistful. “But he won’t be staying in Hell, will he?”
“No,” I said. “He wasn’t the sinner. You were.”
Baal shrugged and tossed the knife into the wall, where it buried itself up to the eyeball. Malachi eyed the eye and licked his fangs. “I am what Hell made me,” Baal said. “Unlike this sad excuse of a sinner, I don’t try to deny or change that.”
“You know I have to report this,” I said.
“He summoned me,” Baal protested, looking at me with those sightless sockets. “I’m innocent. I was just doing my job, torturing the damned while you were wasting time with your precious paperwork, when all of a sudden I find myself in the mortal world in a binding circle. And here’s this flesh puppet pointing out the gap in the circle, saying, ‘Oops, I guess I made a mistake. Now you can possess me and do all sorts of terrible things to people in this world.’ Who could resist that?” He took Alistair’s phone out of his pocket and waved it at me. “It’s all in here. He kept videos of everything.”
“The paperwork is important,” I protested. “How are we supposed to keep track of –”
“He’s worse than some of us,” Baal interrupted. “We would have had good times together in Hell.”
“You may still get your chance,” I said.
Baal studied me. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I think Alistair is done with Hell, but maybe Hell isn’t done with him just yet.”
“You have a plan?” Baal asked, and now his voice was the sound of saws in flesh.
“Maybe I don’t have to report you after all,” I said. “If you don’t say anything about this, then I won’t tell the lower-downs.”
Baal chuckled again. “I’ll see you in Hell, my brother.”
“I’ll see you in Hell,” I agreed, and then I left Alistair’s life and went back to my own.
Now Alistair was in front of me again, his eyes and ears and nose and skin all intact once more. I wanted to reach out and pull him closer with my talons. I wanted to flay him and eat his disgusting organs. I wanted to rip out his eyes and turn them to face him so he could see what I was doing. I wanted to ... well, you get the idea. Instead, I forced myself to remain calm. I did have to admire him a little. It was a good plan, and he almost got away with it.
“It turns out you’re right,” I said. “You don’t belong here.”
He looked at me for a moment, and then he smiled. It was the same smile as when he tortured that dog.
“I told you there was a mistake,” he said.
Malachi leapt for his eyes, but I knocked him away with my tail. He wasn’t allowed to torture Alistair. Not yet.
“There was no mistake,” I said. “The angel was right to bring you here. You did all those things it said. Only it wasn’t you, was it?”
His smile only faltered a little. He was a cocky one. He would have made a good demon. He still might someday.
“I was possessed,” he said, without missing a beat. “Nothing I did was my fault. It wasn’t even me doing it. It was Baal.”
“No, it wasn’t you doing it,” I said. “But you enjoyed it as much as if you were doing it, didn’t you? After all, you were still along for the ride, so to speak.”
“I know the laws,” he said. “Both human and infernal. Technically, I never committed a crime worthy of Hell.”
“No, Baal did,” I said. “You made sure he’d do all the things you secretly wanted to do when you left that mistake in the summoning circle.”
“You didn’t do anything against your will.” I put my feet up on my desk and studied my talons. It was probably time for another sharpening. But first I had to get rid of this processing backlog. “I mean, of all the demons you could choose to summon, why Baal? Why not Azaziz, who can make gold out of dirt and teach you the secrets of transmutation? Why not Gwynesh, who can take the form of any succubus you desire and satisfy your every craven – and no doubt unimaginative – sexual desire? Why not me, who can tell you the secrets to staying out of Hell?”
Now Alistair didn’t say anything at all, just eyed Malachi, who glowered at him and chewed on the end of his tail.
“You chose Baal because he can see your secret fears,” I said. “Which means he can also see your secret desires. You let Baal possess you – you made Baal possess you – so he would do those things and you’d have the memories. But none of the sin would be yours. You could live a life worthy of the deepest floor of Hell, but you’d get to escape Hell.”
Alistair couldn’t help himself. He laughed. “And I did it, didn’t I?”
“You did,” I agreed. I smiled with him.
“I beat Heaven and Hell,” he said. He looked up at the clouds overhead, which were threatening to rain down lightning now. “I won. Where’s my ride out of here?”
“You might have beaten Heaven,” I said, “but you certainly haven’t beaten Hell. You’ve only delayed your damnation.”
“You said it yourself,” he said, looking back at me. “I didn’t do those things. It doesn’t matter if I enjoyed them or not. I didn’t do them. The facts of the case are what they are.”
“You didn’t do them,” I said. “But you will.”
Now his smile faded and he showed his teeth. “What do you mean?”
I kept on smiling. “You can leave. We have to let you leave. You’re not worthy of Hell. Not yet, anyway.” I waved over the next angel that fell through the clouds, and the damned cried out at the sight of it. “But you’re certainly not worthy of Heaven, either.”
“Where are you sending me then?” Alistair asked, for the first time looking anything other than confident.
“You’re one of the lucky ones,” I said. “You’re being given a rare gift that most mortals don’t get. A second shot at life. You’re going to be born again. Same soul, new body.”
“You can’t do this to me,” Alistair screamed as the angel descended toward us. “I haven’t done anything.”
“Not yet,” I said. “But you will. You can’t help but be true to your nature.”
The angel landed and sent everyone flying again, except for me. I hung on to my desk and explained things as clearly as I could so that even an angel could understand it. By the time I was done, Malachi had dragged Alistair back out of the crowd.
“I’ll just do it again!” Alistair screamed. “I’ll do it for the rest of eternity! I’ll summon another demon and keep killing and torturing and sinning and there won’t be anything you’ll be able to do about it!”
“Eternity is a long time,” I said. “You’ll slip up eventually. And we’ll be here waiting. Hell waits forever.”
“Take me to Heaven!” Alistair screamed at the angel, and the other sinners in the waiting room screamed the same thing and surged toward us.
“Heaven is only for the pure,” the angel said, its voice like the wind. “You are of the flesh and the sin. It is to the flesh and sin that I will return you.”
And then they were gone, and the sinners all fell back to the ground weeping. Alistair’s last words were lost in the howl of the angel’s ascent back up into the storm and to the mortal world. I had no doubt I’d see Alistair again, though. In fact, I was looking forward to that meeting. And I had some ideas for a new floor of Hell we could create just for him.
I was so lost in the daydream of Alistair’s future suffering that it took me a moment to notice Malachi screeching at the latest sinner to arrive. For some reason the angel that dropped off the sinner was coming over to my desk, followed by what seemed like all the damned in the waiting room again, begging him for salvation. Then I realized there was no sinner and it was the angel itself that Malachi was screeching at.
“What do you want?” I asked the angel.
“There’s been a mistake,” the angel said, its voice thunder that dropped the sinners in the waiting room to their knees. “I don’t belong here.”
Yes, it was definitely one of those shifts.
A Murder
IN HELL
People die in Hell all the time, but I’d never seen a dead demon before. Not until now.
I stared down at the body of Zqqerrty’fll sprawled lifelessly on the office floor near the water cooler. There wasn’t a mark on his scales, but the fire in his eyes had gone out, leaving nothing but black, empty holes. The first murder in Hell, and I didn’t have a clue what had happened.
I thought it was the first murder anyway, but I couldn’t say for sure. I’m not an archivist demon. My name is Molox, and I’m more of a special investigative demon. I’d be a cop if there were such things as law and order in Hell. But there’s not. There’s only fear and punishment.
Killing the damned doesn’t count as murder, of course, because they’re sinners and they get what they deserve. Besides, the damned don’t stay dead in Hell. Sure, they die horrible, violent deaths when we load them onto Flight 666, the plane that crashes for all eternity into the Lake of Fire, or when we lock them in the Zombie Mall overnight for the rest of time, or when we force them into the Elevator of Doom, or when we ... well, you get the idea. But after they die, they always wake up back in whatever level of Hell they started in. And we do it all over again. Getting killed in Hell is just your damnation. But coming back to life and finding yourself still in Hell, with no chance of ever escaping – that’s your real punishment.
But no one had ever murdered a demon before. In fact, I had thought we couldn’t be killed. But here I was in Infernal Office 272B, looking down at Zqqerrty’fll’s body, as my imp, Malachi, capered around the scene, gurgling with delight. Or maybe despair. It’s hard to tell with imps. Besides, I wasn’t really paying attention to him on account of the demon looming at my side. Beelzebub. One of the lower-downs that really put the fear and punishment into Hell – so much so that even other demons like myself got nervous in his presence.
“Well, what manner of madness do you think happened here?” he asked. He slapped his face tentacles together to make the words, and splattered me with black ooze. I didn’t dare edge away from him, though. And I didn’t answer his question because I didn’t know the answer. I had no idea what had happened here.
The truth is that I’m not really good at my job. I was spawned to be a processing clerk in the Department of Admissions and Exits, not a special investigative demon. But I kept encountering strange cases and solving them, like the innocent sinner who the angels dropped into the waiting room of Hell, to say nothing of the angel who sought asylum in Hell. It was all part of being on the front lines of the admissions process, but the lower-downs were so impressed that they decided Hell needed a special investigative demon. And so I was reassigned from my comfortable desk of living bone in the Department of Admissions and Exits to roam around Hell, solving problems that didn’t fall under anyone else’s job category.
For instance: we’d heard rumours that people in the mortal realm were receiving phone calls from their damned relatives and friends in Hell. It took me a while to figure out that all the screaming in Hell sometimes created a sort of signal that the newer, more sensitive phones on the market could pick up. It was all very complicated and involved frequencies and spectrums and other things that a couple of engineers explained to me at Malachi’s urging. The imp could be very persuasive. The solution to the problem was simple: we made the sinners scream a different way. You can’t e
ver accuse Hell of being stuck in the old ways, as delightful as they were.
Mostly though, my job consisted of tracking down demons who’d wandered away from their job to get a snack or find a warm, fiery place to nap. It was a hard problem to get a handle on, as most of the damned didn’t exactly rush to report their torturers missing. Although some did. That’s Hell for you.
When Beelzebub opened the hellmouth into the abattoir where I’d been on my lunch break and pulled me through into Office 272B, I thought it was just another missing demon case. That was before I saw the body now before me on the floor. The body I couldn’t explain.
I looked around the office. The damned condemned to the desks here barely looked away from their computers. They kept on typing, and none of them raised a hand to take the blame for Zqqerrty’fll’s death. I wouldn’t have either. I looked back at the body.
It had to be murder, because demons don’t die of natural causes. But there was no blood, no chunks of meat torn from an attacker in his claws. All he held was paperwork. His shirt was still tucked into his dress pants, his tie still perfectly knotted. For some reason the pattern on the tie matched the pattern in the worn carpet: golden cherubs playing harps on a brown background. Something R & D must have dreamed up to further torment the damned. Sometimes the devil is in the details.
I sighed and scratched my head with my tail. “This is all really a bit beyond me,” I said.
I didn’t point out to Beelzebub that I didn’t really have any talent for this kind of work because I hadn’t been spawned for it. Demons don’t have any choice in our particular talents. One eon we’re just mindless lava, happily bubbling away, and the next we’re being bound into our forms by the spawning demons. And they didn’t understand the process any better than us. They just spoke the ritual words of binding that had been in their minds when they’d been spawned, without even knowing what they meant. Hell works in mysterious ways and all that.