“I hated that song in kindergarten.” Valerie felt as if her entire childhood had been defined by stupid boundaries and limitations. All around her the children would sing the round with a look of bliss upon their insipid little features, right before going home to play with their Barbies.
Valerie could think of a thousand better ways to spend her time. Her teachers always marked her social skills as poor. Her Stepford mother sent her to counseling. Her practical father gave her a library card and later a generous allowance, deposited directly at the local bookstore. Even after he’d gone, he’d had the decency to maintain that deal. One of the reasons she couldn’t hate him, even if she no longer knew him.
Her apartment hallway was narrow before she’d lined both sides with bookcases, now Eric could barely walk down it without his shoulders brushing one side or the other. Thankfully, they weren’t required to go arm-in-arm like Dorothy and her gang of thugs off on a witch hunt, but rather in a backwards conga line.
Not only was it the stupidest thing she’d ever heard, but she knew she hadn’t made her bed in days and there were dirty clothes everywhere. She hadn’t been able to slip away to straighten it up, and now everyone was going to dance backwards and wind up in her bedroom for no reason at all.
Eric started them off, with a surprising baritone, and headed off backward down the hall.
Row, row, row your boat,
As he passed, he grabbed Peter’s hips and Peter’s wavering tenor took up the next round.
Gently down the stream,
Peter grabbed Michelle’s waist in turn, blushing pink as he did so, almost losing the rhythm as he formed the next link in the retreating line of fools.
Michelle’s contralto overshadowed the others.
And finally Valerie and her soprano were pulled into the foolishness by the Devil’s firm grasp on her hips, dragging her backwards down the hall against her will.
Row, row, row your boat,
She really, really hated this song. Always the one to screw up the round the few times she’d been suckered into it by a foolish desire to belong, it represents another requirement of childhood she’d failed miserably. This time she focused on her own voice and ignored the others as she danced a backward conga, shuffle, shuffle, kick, kick. At the end of the first line she tossed the lock of her chestnut hair into the air. More dull brown, but the others had all insisted it was rich chestnut red.
Gently down the stream,
She lofted a handful of fried potato chips.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
A flutter of torn cookbook manuscript pages added to the mess in her hallway. She wasn’t a neat freak, but between the cookbook disaster and remains of breakfast in the living room, the Hungry Ghost’s destruction of her kitchen, her unkempt bedroom, and now the pile of crap in her hallway, the apartment was a disaster. Too embarrassing to even call a cleaning service.
Life is but a dream,
And the curled brown leaves of Phil the “died” philodendron fluttered to the floor. Maybe she’d just move, it would be easier. Pretend none of this ever happened. Maybe even keep paying the rent so that the landlord never saw it either.
Row, row…she started again, except she was the only one singing.
Even as Valerie turned to look, she caught her heel on the edge of the bedroom carpet and the Devil dragged her down. Together they fell backward—onto a grassy field.
DAY THREE
And God Said,
Let the waters under the Heaven
be gathered together unto one place,
and let the dry land appear.
And God called the dry land earth.
Chapter 21
Eric caught her arm as Valerie crash-landed on her butt.
“Careful.”
Valerie squinted as her eyes adjusted to the bright sunlight. They were high on a grassy slope that swept down to a private cove facing a sea, a vast sea of blue-green water and, Valerie was glad she was sitting down, lemon-yellow wave crests.
The only building was a house some distance along the glittering beach, its white sand so bright she couldn’t look at it for more than a moment or two. Even from here the house looked cozy and welcoming, a small house with a broad veranda. The day was impossibly beautiful. She could happily die and live out her days here. The air smelled of sea air, daisies, and just a hint of wild mint. It was pleasantly warm, which was good because she’d left her coat back in her apartment.
Her apartment!
She turned to peer back through the still cocked open door. She could see all the crap she’d strewn down the hallway. The opening was framed by meadow and sky where the door jamb and walls should be. Like a rectangle cut into the face of the world. Even the back of the door didn’t show. No terrycloth bathrobe on the hook. Instead, there was just more sky, apparently the piece of it that was missing where the door was open.
She turned to look in the other direction and immediately regretted it.
The comfortable house in the quiet cove beneath meadow-covered hills still stretched from their feet to the brilliant sea. But on the other side of their grassy knoll there rolled desolate hills, dry and covered with scratchy sagebrush. But that wasn’t what bothered her.
It was the mountains. They were just wrong.
Great soaring peaks, that looked to be made of nothing but splinters of rusted iron. She’d never been a hiker. She’d always imagined backpacking to be a form of torture that looked, well, exactly like those forbidding and jagged peaks. A distaste for prehistoric, hunter-gatherer based activities had been one of her few shared opinions with Landau.
Michelle coming up beside her, must have noticed the direction of her attention.
“The Mountains of Hell. Welcome to my home.” The ironic twist of voice was almost lost on Valerie.
She shook her head, and when that wasn’t enough, she shook her whole body like a wet dog. “Your. Home.” Complete sentences were still beyond her mental capacity.
Michelle merely nodded, “That’s my house down in the cove.”
Valerie became aware of Eric’s arm around her shoulders. “Are you okay?”
She turned to look at him, “I don’t think so.”
Valerie could feel her knees go weak. Without the support of Eric’s arm she probably would have fallen. This was not where she had expected to be when she’d woken up this morning, nor when she’d walked backward down her front hall scattering potato chips and dead leaves. Taking a deep breath she patted his hand in thanks and stepped away to stand by Michelle.
Eric turned to inspect her frameless apartment door with St. Peter. It just stood there in the middle of the meadow, a door with no bedroom to hold it upright.
She had to fight to keep her voice from shaking as she asked the woman, “We’re in Hell?”
Michelle pointed to the impossibly cruel mountains without saying another word.
Valerie noticed the sun was hanging high above them, “How did the sun get up there?”
“Think of it as…a different time zone than Seattle.”
“That’s your house on the beach?” It looked like any nice-sized rambler stretched along the shore. Fruit trees. And the occasional oak. It was shaped like an immense half-bowl facing the ocean with the grove and house at the bottom center, the slopes between here and there were mostly dried grasses and low scrub. Though the cove was well over a mile across, there was only the one house.
“That’s it.”
A slight chill went up Valerie’s spine, “Michelle, I hate to sound stupid, but where are we?” She was almost sorry that she’d asked the question.
Michelle turned to look at her, the tilt of her head and the pity in her eyes were too clear. This woman was exactly who she said she was, the Devil Incarnate. Valerie was somewhere she had never believed existed.
She trul
y stood in Hell.
# # #
Time seemed to stand still as Valerie watched herself turn slowly back toward her apartment door. Peter pushed it shut as Eric came around from behind it. The click echoed in her ears. She raced over, dove for the knob, but it faded like a morning mist: there one moment, and nothing but sky and meadow the next. She tumbled onto the grassy slope beyond, taking Eric out at the knees. They tumbled and rolled together on the lawn which didn’t fill her with any of the joy such an activity might be expected to do in any decent place.
Again, her brain felt cudgeled. Hell, by definition, wasn’t a decent place. Was it?
Peter looked at where the door had been and turned to Michelle. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. Michelle, what’s going on?”
Valerie attempted to stand, but her legs failed her and she sank, very slowly, like she imagined a leaf on the wind must feel, until she was kneeling in the grass. She was in Hell, but was she dead? Her heart still beat in her chest, making her alive? Her arm didn’t feel connected to her body as she pointed to where her door had been. Eric touched her shoulder and the world came rushing back to life.
“I don’t know, Peter. Give me a moment.” Michelle paced once slowly around where the doorway had been. “I think the system has decayed further without the Universal Software being in residence.”
“Maybe the system isn’t working at all.”
Peter looked as worried as Valerie felt and that was without understanding the implications.
“I think we may be in deep trouble.” Without another word the Devil headed down the hill toward the beach and her house.
Valerie struggled to her feet and followed, picking her way through orange poppies and tall lupines until they reached a narrow path. Eric was not far behind. Supportive at first, but in moments chatting with Peter about some arcane technical conundrum involving decision gates and signal flow. Perfect. They were all following the Devil down a narrow, crooked path into Hell.
She nearly ran into Michelle where she had stopped beside an ugly, murky pool. The meadow here was broken by a deep swale filled with slime that made Ghostbusters-demon slobber appear pleasant. It smelled of brand-new sneakers, that unholy combination of fresh rubber and fresher dog-poop stuck deep in the treads.
“Here’s someone who can tell us if the software still runs at all normally,” Michelle offered her hand to a tall man struggling to extract himself from the mire.
His silver hair lay matted to his head. A dripping wet toga clung to his body. He arose with a dignity and grace that belied his condition.
“Greetings, my friend.” Michelle held his hand for a moment. “Is this a result of your picnic?”
“No,” he shuddered. “That was far, far worse. This is merely the opposite of a cool desert evening, though it is not what might be termed a particularly pleasant experience.”
“My good man, haven’t you heaped enough abuse upon yourself yet?”
“I have yet to succeed in my purpose.”
She wiped her hand on her jeans leaving a long smear of mud or whatever it was. “You are lucky that you are dead already, considering how your battle has been going.”
“Lucky to be dead? Indeed.” He bowed formally to them, and turned to walk away, mud squelching out of his sandals.
“Would you like to use my shower?” Michelle called out to the man.
After a long moment’s hesitation, he nodded his acquiescence. “But perhaps it would be best for all if I followed behind.”
Valerie had to agree, as even pinching her nose closed did nothing to cut the cloying odor that clung about him.
Michelle led off and noted to Valerie with a grin of relief, “At least part of the system still works.”
This didn’t restore Valerie’s confidence in the slightest.
Once they started off again Peter and Eric hustled past her. Peter started harassing Michelle with questions she clearly didn’t like. Eric was listening intently, leaving her to bring up the rear but for the man trailing behind.
Valerie glanced back at him a few times. His dignity was the only decent thing he remained clothed in, his slimed toga suggested he’d be better off not wearing anything at all. It was as if everything else about him had been stripped away in thin layers like a cheese grater of the soul until nothing else remained.
They finally arrived at the base of the hill and entered the cool shade of the small grove of fruit trees. As they made their way to the house, Valerie realized she’d been thinking of only one thing. What she would have to do in order not to come here when she died.
She’d need a good solution, because somehow, she feared that sainthood wasn’t in the cards.
# # #
Eric followed Michelle to her house. Despite believing in the existence of Hell, for at least the last dozen hours, experiencing it ranked as quite a different matter. He’d expected dark caverns filled with tortured souls, brimstone-laden fire, and demons with mighty whips. Too much Milton and Hollywood. Except for the cruel mountains, now hidden by the foothills, it looked, almost normal. Maybe the tortured souls were kept somewhere else.
He had chatted with Peter as they started down, apparently Michelle had built a self-regulating Hell of the mind. He had wanted to try a sample until he’d seen the man attempting to appear casual while slime dripped from his very pores.
Even up close, Michelle’s house looked friendly and comfortably substantial, without crossing over into ostentatious. No great hall of flame for this Devil. A nice cedar-shake finish and a simple sloping roof. There were few windows on the land side of the house. No gardens leavened the landscape, just sandy soil and a pleasant grove of palm and orange trees. The sagebrush on the higher slopes, far too convinced of its own wisdom in commanding the arid ecological niche, hadn’t dared to come down here.
As they went around the corner Eric admired the long wooden verandah and an equally long wall of glass windows. He could see walls dividing up some of the interior, but there was nothing between floor and ceiling to block the view of the white sand beach and the ocean.
The ocean. Shit! Okay, that was definitely also weird. The waves were far taller than they looked from up on the hillside. They were tall, all out proportion. They climbed up until they were as tall as the house, then crashed down onto the hard-packed sand with a crash about as loud as a mouse jumping off a footstool.
Valerie’s eyes were glazed when he stopped her.
He pointed at the waves.
She followed the direction of the waves, cricking her neck upward to see the top of the wave as it built. Then she followed it down to shatter against the beach. She shrugged and turned inside as if it were the least surprising thing to happen today. Maybe she was right.
The porch sported no floats or old crab pots to clutter it up like a bad rental cabin along the coast. A few wicker chairs, a wooden bench, and a porch swing were the sum total of the outdoor furniture. A wide rail ran between the posts holding up the verandah’s overhang. A dozen different types of lavender bloomed copiously in the beds fronting the porch.
Michelle turned in at the first sliding glass door and waved the dripping man toward a bathroom.
The rest of them trooped down a narrow hallway of old oak floors and cedar-planked walls. The wood had so much character.
“Where’d you get this lumber?” Eric ran his hand along the beautiful surface.
“Why?” Valerie nudged him in the ribs. “You planning to hit Hell’s Home Depot before we leave?”
Okay, he hadn’t thought it would sound quite that stupid, but it did.
“Galleons,” Michelle explained over her shoulder as she turned in at a doorway with a glass portal in the middle. “A lot of sailing ships fall through the Bermuda Triangle. Most of them wash up on Hell’s shores. I salvage the good bits. Demons and sinners clean up the rest to keep my beach clean.�
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“Bermuda Triangle?” The room was filled with seagoing-type miscellany.
“I’ve tried half a dozen times to close that gateway to Hell’s Ocean. But that would require the authority to create a door across the trans-dimensional portal.” She mumbled something else beneath her breath that sounded like, “and there’s no fucking way I’m going to ask god to create one.” But he must have misheard.
Eric tried to focus on the office room, because the desk and computer terminal indicated that’s what it must be. But he couldn’t. There were too many impressions. A wash of northern light from high small windows. As if Hell had a north and south… Eric felt a sudden desperate need to sit down, it was the most foreign thought yet.
The New World lumber from wreckage of an old Spanish fleet had made for fine furnishings. But for the rest of the room, wreckage was definitely the primary theme.
Six centuries of assorted memorabilia adorned the walls. Carved ship’s figureheads stood along one wall, some reaching a dozen feet toward the pitched ceiling—bare-chested Greek goddesses and impossible sea serpents worked in wood. The wall shelves were packed with collections that would make any modern museum curator collapse in a faint. Carved bronze shields, golden chalices, fist-sized jewels. All the fabled riches of the deep were displayed as casually as if they were junk novels and dime-store knick-knacks. She even had an old airplane propeller from the loss of the fabeled Flight 19 on the wall, framed by a veritable field of gold escudos coins.
“The money is from the loss of the Spanish Treasure Fleet of 1715,” she remarked when she noticed his attention. The stern section of the cabin cruiser Witchcraft was the most recent, and perhaps most appropriate addition to the room’s décor.
“Whenever a demon gets out of line, I make him come in and dust everything,” Michelle moved toward a computer terminal that looked as if it predated, well, computers. He guessed that it did.
Peter fiddled with the terminal for several minutes before he threw up his hands and sat back looking sad. It was quite some time before Michelle ceased cursing. By the time she’d finally wound down to mere four-letter words, they had all returned to one of the front rooms, a large rustic kitchen with absolutely no signs that food was ever prepared there.
Cookbook from Hell Reheated Page 12
