by James Wymore
The blue demon waved a Gotcha, boss! kind of wave, then said something in a weird, guttural language I didn’t understand. The demons reached in and started helping the normals out, gave each one a ShamWow to squeegee off the lingering traces of lava that still clung to them, and then everyone meandered over to a door that had appeared on the near bank of the river. They opened the door—just a door, without frame or jamb or anything—and stepped through one at a time. The door disappeared when the last person went through. All that was left was the gentle flow of the magma, with an occasional lava bubble bursting onto the burnt banks.
A familiar hand curled around my neck again and lifted me to a standing position, then swiveled me around.
The Nerd shrieked, “I did my best! I did my best!”
“I know you did,” said the voice that had told Clarence to call it a day. “You’re getting better.”
And I completed my turn. Saw the guy who was talking. A demon. The moment I saw him, the computer shrieked again, as if on cue.
This demon was goat-footed and red, with big horns. I could tell immediately that he was a whole other realm from the ones on the bank. They were “demons,” this was a Demon .
The computer shrieked. And again. “Your d-mail is getting backed up, Roald,” said the demon.
The Nerd—I guess he was Roald, which was a good, solid, nerdy name for him—moaned.
“I tried. I’m trying, please…”
“Shh,” said the demon. “You’re doing fine. You’ll get there someday.”
“He wouldn’t let me tell him what’s happening,” said Roald. “It’s his fault I’m behind.”
The demon fixed a glare on Roald and said softly, “Blaming others just adds to the number of people you’ll have to process, Roald. You’ve figured that much out, at least. When you point a finger, four point back at you, remember!”
Roald began crying.
The demon ignored him and turned back to me. Speaking softly, as if to himself, he said, “Still, I supposed giving you to”—he pointed at Roald—“him was a bit like telling a minnow to catch a great white.” He tsk-tsked .
The demon had not let me go during this exchange. The huge hand wrapped all the way around my throat ended in razor sharp claws that I could feel drawing blood as they pierced my flesh. I couldn’t breathe. Everything started to darken. I batted at the hand, but I might as well have been slapping a brick.
“Well, Mr. Vincent,” said the demon with a smile that made his canines slide out to a point well over three inches past his lips, “I must say I’m a bit disappointed. I didn’t bother with the usual spectacle,” he said, pointing at the window and the lava river beyond, “out of what I supposed you could call ‘professional courtesy.’ I didn’t think you’d need to see the faces of the damned to properly drive home where you are, and where you’re going from here. Nor did I set you for the usual group orientation. It was just you and Roald.”
The darkness was swirling fast and hard. I could barely see the demon’s face. And the face was no longer smiling.
“But you couldn’t just sit and listen, could you? And now Mr. Roald’s penance has been backed up, the actors are probably going to file a union grievance over having their break interrupted, and—worst of all—I have had to come deal with you. Which I wouldn’t mind, really, if you hadn’t been so damnably rude.”
The canines came out again. A scary look. The only saving grace was that I could barely see them. Or anything else, for that matter.
“So have it your way. You get to leave this office.”
He shook me. Once. Very, very hard. I felt my neck snap. Felt everything go numb below my upper lip. My lungs stopped working.
The darkness wound to a pinprick of light. One shining bead of saliva on the demon’s right canine. That, too, dimmed.
“Welcome to Hell, Mr. Vincent.”
Then all was black.
And then it wasn’t.
I opened my eyes, expecting to see a demon looming over me, ready to toss me in the river of lava (without benefit of union to protect my interests), or eat me alive (was I alive?), or rape me with a pitchfork.
But none of those things happened. All I saw was a ceiling. Light blue. Rays of light playing across it.
I sat up. Took in my surroundings.
I was in a bedroom. Looked like something a little kid would sleep in. Transformers on shelves, books with names like Crecheling and Fablehaven and The Schoar of Moab and Billy: Messenger of Powers sitting on a red desk by the door.
The window was open. That was where the sunlight came from. Outside I could see a nice yard, well-kept. A fence. A two-story house that looked like the kind of things suburbanites sunk way too much money into in return for the joy of living “in a nice place near the city.”
I sat there for a moment, just listening. Birds tweeted outside as the wind rushed by. Somewhere in the house, a clock ticked.
Other than that? Nothing. No sounds.
In my line of work, you get a sense for houses. Whether they’re full of good people or full of bad, whether they’re places designed for seclusion or inclusion… or whether they’re empty or full.
This one was empty. I was certain of it. Still, I moved quietly as I stood and went to the door.
And that was when I realized something was very, very wrong.
I hadn’t noticed it before, probably because my brain wasn’t equipped to process it; no point of comparison for what was happening. But when I reached for the door, I saw my hand.
And it wasn’t mine. Or rather, it was mine, but it didn’t look right. It was small and soft and pink and when it reached for the doorknob it had to reach up to do so.
I felt that hand with my other one—they were both that way—then felt my arms, my chest… my face.
I couldn’t see myself, obviously, but what I felt… It brought madness to the surface.
No longer worrying about being heard by whoever owned this place, I threw the door open. Found myself in a hall with two doors other than the one I had just left. I burst through one and saw the room I was hoping for: the bathroom. Ran to the sink, to look in the mirror, to see…
…nothing.
I saw nothing. Not because I was blind, not because the mirror had been enchanted in some strange way. No, the mirror simply wasn’t there . A line of spherical light bulbs ran in a large square, boxing in the space where a mirror should have been, but there was no silvery surface between them. Just a blank wall with a tiny sticker in the center. I leaned in close to read it, trying to keep myself from vomiting as I realized how short I was—maybe only a foot taller than the sink.
The sticker was white with elegantly scrolled black letters that said, Know Thyself.
For some reason, that sticker terrified me.
I ran through the house. It had three bathrooms, all without mirrors. Just empty space with the same sticker where a mirror should have been. In one of the bathrooms, I pulled open the drawers and found a makeup compact. I flipped it open, and where the small mirror should have been was black plastic with a sticker so tiny I could barely read it. But barely was enough.
Know Thyself.
Fear, which had already crawled into my belly and made its home there, took complete control of me.
I started screaming. My voice was higher than it should have been. The reedy pitch of a young child. And that just made me scream louder.
No one came. When I finally stopped shrieking, minutes or hours later, I could hear the birds again. But nothing else. No one else.
I wobbled to the kitchen. There was a phone on the counter by a microwave oven. I picked it up and dialed 911, all too aware of the irony of making such a call.
The phone rang once. Then picked up.
“We’re sorry,” said an androgynous voice, “all our customer care specialists are assisting others. You can wait on the line for help, and answers will be received in the order of the call. You are the”—the voice changed to a grating electroni
c voice—”8,745,000 to the power of 6,000,000,017”—it switched back to the androgynous voice—“caller. Please stay on the line and be patient. Or you can start to Know Thyself.”
I stared at the phone in horror. Dropped it from nerveless fingers as Kenny G started a soulful melody to keep me company as I waited.
I ran.
I don’t know how long I ran, or where I went. I only knew that I was running, running, running. My too-small legs pumped endlessly, and even though I was in what I now suspected to be the body of a five-year-old, I still covered ground.
I ran and ran, and when I stopped running, I realized I was in a city. Not suburbs, an actual city. I was next to a store that said, Cal’s Deli . On the other side of the street, a storefront read Kam and Kam, Attorneys at Law .
There was no traffic.
I realized I had seen no people during my mad flight. None at all. Not as I ran for miles in a body that should not be, and not now that I stood silent and still between two high-rises in a place that looked like New York or Chicago or maybe Philly.
I went into the deli. Before entering I stopped in front of the storefront window. For some reason the window—so clear and clean a moment ago—suddenly fogged with dirt and grime. It looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years, and all I could see of my reflection was a general outline.
There was a pattern in the center of the grime. I gradually realized it was cursive writing, so elegantly placed that it seemed like art more than words. A beautiful mistake, a small miracle in the way that the dust had settled during the momentary eternity of my approach.
But there was nothing beautiful in the message.
Know Thyself.
I shivered.
Over the following days, I discovered these facts:
There was plenty of food and drink. Faucets provided clean, clear water, and wherever I went the cupboards and pantries and kitchens were well-stocked with far too much food for one person to ever hope to consume.
When I went to sleep, I awoke the next morning at precisely 5:19 a.m. I don’t know why, but that is the time that invariably showed on whatever clock was nearby. If I stayed up all night, that was fine and dandy, but the next time I fell asleep I would sleep through until the following day at 5:19 a.m.
There was electricity. There was gas. Everything I needed to heat my food, to keep warm or cool—whichever I wished in whatever house or store or office I passed my time. I would not die—if dying were even possible here—of exposure.
I had all the memories of my life, even those I wished to forget. I could call up memories of conversations, moments of anger, of love, of life, and death. All of it perfectly recalled, all of it capable of nearly transporting me to the place and time it had happened. But of this life, this new world to which I had been born… nothing. I had no idea why I was here, or what I was to do.
I couldn’t even tell what I looked like. There were no mirrors anywhere . Only myriad exhortations to Know Thyself wherever any reflection should be. There was no shiny surface that did not cloud when I approached, and somewhere in the dust or in the fog that clouded the surfaces, that same message would appear when I got close.
Once I tried looking in a koi pond and the fish went crazy as I approached, agitating the water so much that I could see nothing of my features. Several of the fish died for no discernible reason. They floated belly-up on the frothing water, and in their scales, drawn in deep blacks and vibrant oranges, that same message. An instruction to know myself hand-in-hand with the impossibility of even seeing what I looked like.
Nor could anyone tell me: I was completely alone. There was food in the pantries, there were cars in garages with keys in ignitions and enough gas to drive hundreds of miles. There were books left open on nightstands as though the owners had put them down and simply forgotten to return.
But the people themselves were gone.
For the first few days I walked silently, skulking from place to place, afraid of who I might encounter in this strange ghost-city. After a week of that, I found a silver whistle hanging on the dummy’s neck in a sporting goods store. I took the whistle and blew it every thirty seconds or so as I walked aimlessly through a metropolis that seemed to exist for no one but me.
No one ever answered the whistle. No one called. No one shadowed me as I walked.
Alone.
That lasted three months or so. A mixture of skulking and hiding and crying out for attention. At night I found whatever bed was handy and slept, and woke at 5:19 a.m. the next morning on pillowcases that had grown wet with tears shed in a dreamless sleep.
After three more months, I started trying to amuse myself. The computers worked, same as the gas and water and electricity, but when I tried to connect to the Internet, the same message always appeared: Connection Lost—Please Be Patient and Know Thyself. There went any idea of perhaps contacting someone or even sending an email. I remembered every day the screams of the “d-mails” arriving, and soon they were not pained shrieks but a welcoming chorus. They were human voices and I so longed to hear them again.
The phones all gave the same message I had heard previously. The number “in line” that I was may have changed slightly; I could never be sure. I almost wrote the number down a few times, but stopped myself. The number was so astronomically beyond my ability to fathom, that writing it down for the purpose of seeing if I had advanced in the call queue seemed an exercise in self-castigation.
There were televisions, of course—there was no place so strange or lonely or just plain wrong that you could not find the comforting company of the Idiot Box—but they all showed snow when they went on. Every channel… except channel 519 on some cable boxes. That channel showed a repeating loop of a monkey arm wrestling a kangaroo, and whenever the kangaroo won, which was always, the feed would reset and the letters KT would blink in large red letters.
I found some tablets that had e-books loaded and tried them, but whenever I hit the nineteenth word on the fifth page, the remaining text all disappeared and was replaced by LOW POWER—KNOW THYSELF.
No. Nothing fun to do, no joy to be found in anything electronic.
But the cars worked. And all of them—all of them—had gas in the tank and keys in the ignitions. I found a brand-new, spit-shined Lamborghini Huracán—probably worth a quarter million dollars—just sitting there, waiting to be driven.
In life I had always enjoyed the idea of fast, beautiful cars. It was part of what drew me to my job. Part of the appeal of the lifestyle I undertook. But I’d never been able to enjoy something this gorgeous, this smooth.
And I quickly found that I still couldn’t.
I got in the car, sunk into the luxury leather… and couldn’t even see over the dashboard. This damn body, this little child I had become was betraying one of the few things I had found in months that generated even a bit of excitement.
Still, I had time. Not much else. But plenty of time.
After a few days of searching, I found some pieces of wood and tied them to my shoes. Locating some phone books took even longer—no one uses those things anymore, apparently not even in Hell. But eventually I did find them and stacked them on the driver’s seat.
With the blocks I could reach the pedals. With the boost of the phone books I could barely see through the front windshield.
I turned on the car. It hummed like a demon—and I would know. I was in its maw, its gut, ready to willingly throw myself into its power.
“Let’s do this,” I whispered.
Bam! I slammed my right foot—or my right blocks—down on the accelerator.
The thing leaped forward so fast that I half expected to find myself hanging in midair, the car roaring away from me on its last plotted trajectory. It felt great. Fantastic. Beyond anything I expected.
And I quickly drove straight into problems.
I did all right on the straightaway, the first long run down an empty city street. Then I braked, spun the wheel right to turn down a side street.
The car felt like it was super-glued to the asphalt. Not even a squeak. Just perfectly balanced gears up and down shifting, wheel suspension maintaining a near-constant level.
“Yeah!” I screamed. “Suck it, bitches!” I had no idea who the “bitches” might be—probably just screaming at Dad, who had told me I’d never succeed. Well, look at me now!
I rode the car faster, pushed it harder. Took a turn. A two-mile straight run, over a hundred-fifty miles per hour. Then another turn. Blurring my way through an empty city whose sole purpose appeared to be my existence.
This is the life.
And then I had to brake, because the street I was on ending on a T-intersection. Time to turn, right or left, right or left, right or—
What the…?
I tried to lift my foot off the accelerator. It wouldn’t come up. I tried to kick it off with my other foot. But my left foot wouldn’t move, either.
I looked down and saw instantly what had happened. The blocks and ties had slipped as I drove. The right side had turned into a tangled mass that held my foot, the blocks, and the accelerator pedal all in a bizarre Gordian knot. The left side was simpler but just as dangerous: the ties on the blocks had slipped and then looped themselves over the brake pedal. Which would have been fine were it not for the fact that some of the blocks had slipped under the brake pedal. So even with my left foot pressing as hard as I could, there was no way to stop the car.
I looked up. Saw that the Lamborghini really was fast. So fast that in the time it took to figure out the problem, any fixes I might have come up with became academic.
The car hit the curb at the end of the street. Bounced a good five feet in the air. Rising like a gorgeous, Italian-made UFO. Slamming grill-first into the stone façade of an office building.
I flew forward. My arms went up over my head. Then…
Pain.
Dark.
Nothing.
I woke up in blood. Lying across the hood of the car, which was buckled under me like a spent concertina.
I tried to push myself up. Failed. My right hand seemed to work, but my left kept slipping. Slipping. Slipping.
