Has The World Ended Yet?
Page 29
Beelzebub looked at me. “Well, special investigative demon, how shall we punish such a transgression?”
I could see his problem. Unbinding a demon with a random ritual wasn’t exactly a common sin with a clear punishment. But I had an answer. I was starting to get the hang of this special investigator business.
“Baal needs help in Admissions and Exits,” I said.
Beelzebub just stared at me with all those eyes.
“There’s a backlog,” I said. “He can’t record the names of the newly damned fast enough in the Books of Blood.”
Then Beelzebub started to shake. It took me a moment to realize it was laughter. Either that or he was about to explode. Maybe it was both.
“I didn’t know the situation was so dire,” he said, and I knew he’d caught on.
“Oh, it’s dire all right.” I smiled at Pride and Adultery.
“I will, of course, authorize overtime,” Beelzebub said.
“I think they’ll need to work around the clock until we’re caught up,” I said.
Pride and Adultery cried out in horror as they suddenly understood. Even Lust moaned a little.
The punishment was to be more paperwork, but now they would have no freedom to write whatever they wanted, no freedom to come up with new rituals. Instead, they’d have to record the names of all the damned in Hell, every new arrival, while time moved even slower for them. They’d spend the rest of eternity filing paperwork.
Beelzebub ripped open another hellmouth in the wall, to the waiting room at the entrance to Hell. He tossed Pride and Adultery and Lust through. Then he looked at the other damned. “How do we ensure these ones don’t come up with another ritual?”
“That’s exactly what we want them to do,” I said. I turned to the damned. “From now on, your reports are to be about one thing only. How to spawn a demon that cannot be unbound.”
They groaned but started typing. They couldn’t do anything else. They probably wouldn’t figure it out. It would have happened already if it were possible. But maybe they would. Then we’d come up with something else for them. There’s always a new torment in Hell.
“Perhaps we should transfer you to R & D,” Beelzebub said.
“I’m still learning how to do this job,” I said.
I went through the hellmouth and Beelzebub closed it from the other side. There was a larger crowd of damned than usual in the waiting room. Among them were a number of people missing arms and legs. The sort of thing you see in war victims, but this group were all wearing tuxedos and formal dresses. They were telling others in the waiting room how they’d been watching a production of Faust when the actor playing the demon had suddenly leapt into the audience and began tearing them apart. Like a real demon.
I’d solved another mystery: where Zqqerrty’fll had gone. But I decided not to tell Beelzebub, in case he thought I was the best demon to bring Zqqerrty’fll back to Hell.
I watched as Pride and Adultery dragged Lust into the crowd, in search of a way out. But this was Hell. There was no way out. I let them be for the moment. The anticipation of their new damnation was a torment in its own right. And I hadn’t even told them the best part yet: they’d be donating the flesh for the new Books of Blood. Baal was going to like having assistants. Now I just had to find him in this crowd to tell him the good news.
Before I could start looking, Malachi scampered out of the crowd, chewing on something that looked like a finger. I didn’t bother reprimanding him. He’d earned a treat.
I hadn’t really expected him to stay dead. It was impossible to truly kill an imp. Hell knew I’d tried. They always came back, though. This looked like the same Malachi anyway. But who really knew with imps? He climbed up my scales and settled in among my shoulder spikes, where he crooned happily, or maybe sadly.
I sighed and stepped into the crowd, to begin my search for the demon hiding among all the sinners.
We Continue to Pray
FOR SOMETHING TO END OUR PRAYERS
We expected the world to end in fire, or maybe flood. An asteroid from the heavens, perhaps, or a drowning ocean from the melted ice caps. We expected a plague to arrive on every flight that descended into our cities, for our own bodies to rise up against us. We expected something apocalyptic. Something we deserved. We watched the skies and the seas. We watched each other. And we waited.
The first sign we had was when all the people died in that church in Nashville. They went in for morning service in their best clothes and didn’t come back out. Those of us who didn’t love God as much as they did arrived later to pick them up and found everyone inside dead. The bodies were all still sitting in the pews, still holding hymn books, collection plates, cellphones. And, despite what some of us later said, they weren’t all pointing at the Jesus hanging on the wall.
At first we assumed it was a mad gunman or a suicide cult, because it had all the signs of a mad gunman or a suicide cult. Except there weren’t any wounds on their bodies, no traces of poison or chemicals in their systems. The autopsies revealed there wasn’t anything wrong with them other than their hearts had all stopped beating at once. We searched for a reason but there was no reason.
So, as we usually did in those days, we talked of miracles and divine, secret plans. We argued on news shows and comment threads about whether this was the rapture or a freak event, a statistical anomaly. We wanted to know why they were special. We wanted to prove they weren’t.
And then the same thing happened in other churches. Detroit. Little Rock. Houston. That airport church in Toronto. The body count hit the hundreds. We stopped arguing about the existence of God and instead wondered why he was massacring his followers.
And we couldn’t get enough of it. More people went to church for the first time than we could remember in our lives. We watched videos online of people fighting to get into services until the servers crashed, or we were the ones elbowing and kicking others aside to get through those doors before they closed. We prayed – some of us openly, some of us privately – but we all prayed. We prayed we would be next. This was the kind of time we lived in. This was when we thought there was still someone to hear our prayers.
And then it spread outside the churches.
An entire aisle full of shoppers in a Toledo Walmart dropped to the floor in unison, like they were one of those flash mobs. We found the pilots of an Air Canada flight dead in their seats after the plane landed in Vancouver. A squad of firefighters went into an office tower in New York to investigate a gas leak and collapsed in a pile on the cafeteria floor. There was no gas leak.
We didn’t know why they weren’t all taken at once, why instead they died over the course of the summer. Some of us who were experts on the subject – and we didn’t know we had experts until then – went on the news shows to say God was waiting for us to confess our sins before he took us. Or waiting for us to finish our good deeds on earth. Or waiting for us to finally accept Christ into our hearts. Others said Heaven was likely a bureaucracy, a government office for souls, and it took a while to process everyone. So we accepted Christ into our hearts even if we didn’t believe in him, and we confessed our sins in the sanctuaries of our bathrooms, and we smiled at each other in the motor vehicle licensing branches and tried not to get upset about the waiting.
But then it spread to those of us who weren’t Christian. Buddhist monks dropped in the streets in Thailand. An entire parade ground of soldiers fell dead in China in mid-salute. That’s when we worried it was some new disease, a new bird flu. We put on the surgical face masks again, although some of us had never taken them off. Then a hundred men in a mosque in Iran bent to the floor in prayer and didn’t get up again. We ran photos of them in the Iranian state media; row after row of them slumped with their heads to the floor. Forever frozen in prayer. We said it was a Jewish chemical attack. We ran the same photos in the Israeli media. We said it was proof the Iranians were experimenting with chemical weapons. This was back when we still had governments.
We wondered if our gods were fighting and prayed for them to stop or prayed for them to hurry up and end it all. We prayed to each other’s gods, just in case. Those of us who were still atheist held street celebrations in cities around the world on the same day. We called it Judgment Day. We said the gods were finally taking their own and leaving the world a better place. At last, peace on earth, we said. But when all the atheists dancing around the Burning Man effigy on that Seattle street dropped dead, even the ones dressed like Jesus, we went home and didn’t celebrate anymore.
We grew desperate in our search for a cause, for something to explain it all. We speculated it was a new disease. An AIDS of the new century we hadn’t discovered yet. A new Ebola. We argued about vectors and viral memes. We seized the bodies of the dead, sometimes with legal papers, sometimes with soldiers, and cut open their brains. We couldn’t find anything different in them. Their dead brains were the same as the rest of ours. There was nothing in them.
We were dying and we didn’t know what was killing us. We occupied the abandoned auto factories in Detroit. We cried out that maybe if someone brought the jobs back the dying would stop. We rioted in Paris and burned the Louvre. We shouted in the streets that it was the end of history. We staged coups in Africa and fought border skirmishes in South America. But none of us truly believed some government was responsible for what was happening. Our generals and presidents appeared in the media and apologized for not being able to attack anyone. We launched missiles into space in random directions, anyway, in case it was an alien attack. But we ran out of missiles.
A ferry drifted into a harbour in the Philippines with everyone aboard dead.
Passenger jets flew past their destinations and no one responded to our attempts at communication. The pilots of the fighters we scrambled reported no signs of life inside the planes before they went down into the clouds and crashed into the ocean.
Our research bases in Antarctica stopped sending us messages. We didn’t dispatch anyone to investigate. We’d find out what happened to them later. If there was a later.
We kept on praying, even though we’d lost faith in our gods. We prayed to the forgotten gods: Anubis and Shiva and Zeus. We prayed to Gaia, to the earth itself. We prayed to the made-up gods: Cthulhu and the thetans. We prayed to Stephen Hawking and all the dead astronauts.
And then the statisticians and mathematicians among us produced the models that confirmed that whatever was happening was random. We didn’t want to believe the first reports, from the group in Moscow, especially after they turned up dead themselves in their respective apartments. But our autopsies showed there was nothing mysterious about their deaths. They’d been poisoned with radioactive isotopes placed in their tea by some of us who belonged to a security force that was the latest in a long line of security forces. None of us were particularly upset about the killings. We didn’t want to hear the message these dead men had been trying to tell us. We didn’t want all the other deaths to be random. We didn’t want them to be meaningless.
But then the special team assembled by Stanford and Cambridge said the same thing as the Russians did, and Google revealed its Black Lab had come to an identical conclusion. We looked at the patterns and they all said there was no pattern.
And that was the worst thing of all. Worse than when we first started dying. Worse than when day and night around the world turned into twilight and remained that way, when we realized time had frozen in place. As if the universe’s operating system had crashed. Worse than when we realized we didn’t need to eat or drink or sleep anymore, which meant we didn’t need to worry about buying food, about securing shelter, about any of the things we had always done to make meaning of our lives. Worse than when we realized no one was dying now, even when we beat and stabbed and shot each other and ourselves, and we realized no one was ever going to die again. This was the way it was going to be from now on, and there would never be an escape.
It was just random. Nothing we’ve done has mattered. Some of us were taken but we remain. And now everything is over. We rest in our ruins and wait for a rescue that will never happen. All we can do is relive the past and what might have been. Perhaps we deserve better, or perhaps we deserve worse. But we deserve something.
We continue to pray. We turn our gaze to the empty sky. We pray for something to happen. We hide in the empty buildings. We pray for anything to happen. We call out to each other, a chorus of voices around the world. We pray for the dying to start again. We dig our own graves and wait. We pray for someone to hear our prayers. We would weep, but we have no tears left.
We expected the world to end.
NOTES
“Beat the Geeks” was originally published in Tesseracts Eleven.
“Déjà Yu Makes the Pain Go Away” was originally published in Taddle Creek.
“The Last Love of the Infinity Age” was originally published in Abyss & Apex.
“We Are All Ghosts” was originally published in Innsmouth Magazine.
“The Only Innocent Soul in Hell” was originally published in On Spec.
“We Are a Rupture That Cannot Be Contained” was originally published in SubTerrain.
“We Continue to Pray for Something to End Our Prayers” was originally published in SubTerrain.
ART CREDITS
Details from a selection of pulp magazine and sci-fi novel covers have been chosen to complement the stories throughout this collection, as well as assembled as a collage for the front cover. On the following pages, the full artwork and publication information for these works is presented. All illustration credit was sourced from the The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (www.isfdb.org), with the exception of the credit for Operation Interstallar, which was sourced from Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org).
Cover collage; page 304: Earle K. Bergey, Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1951.
Cover collage; page 306: Earle K. Bergey, Startling Stories, July 1950.
Cover collage; page 298: Harold V. Brown, Startling Stories, July 1939.
Page 6: James B. Settles, Fantastic Adventures, July 1949.
Page 8: Allen Anderson, Planet Stories, May 1952.
Page 22: Bob Hilbreth, Amazing Stories, December 1946.
Page 76: Earle K. Bergey, Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1941.
Page 100: Arnold Kohn, Amazing Stories, May 1950.
Page 108: Earle K. Bergey, Captain Future: Man of Tomorrow, March 1944.
Page 142: Malcolm Smith, Operation Interstellar, 1950.
Page 176: Robert Gibson Jones, Fantastic Adventures, November 1952.
Page 194: Lawrence Sterne Stevens, Amazing Stories, May 1952.
Page 216: Arnold Kohn, Amazing Stories, August 1947.
Page 282: Matt Fox, Weird Tales, July 1949.
Peter Darbyshire is the award-winning author of the critically acclaimed books The Warhol Gang and Please. Under the pen name of Peter Roman he also writes the Cross series of supernatural thrillers about an immortal drunk angel killer, which he swears isn’t autobiographical at all.
© Peter Darbyshire, 2017
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Buckrider Books is an imprint of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers.
Cover image: Assembled using illustrations by Earle K. Bergey and
H.V. Brown, scans from timetunnel.com
Interior images: Scans from timetunnel.com, except for page 282 from openculture.com
Cover and interior design: Michel Vrana
Author photograph: Arlen Redekop
Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro, Futura BT, DCC Hardware and Sivellin.
Printed by Ball Media, Brantford, Canada
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Canada.
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