New Title 1

by Dru Pagliassotti

  “Academic excellence.” Andy grinned. “I’ve got age and the Old Testament against me, but my publication record balances that out. CHU might decide it’s worth a five-year investment just to get my name on its professor emeritus list.”

  “This is why I work for myself,” Jack said, shaking his head. “I hate all that bureaucratic wheeling and dealing.”

  “So do I, but I enjoy a steady paycheck and benefits. Not to mention a pension. Do you ever think about where you’re going to be when you’re my age?”

  “Too late for me to worry about that now,” Jack said, looking away. “I don’t have much of a resume. Folk singing, bike repair, and high magick. Not exactly CEO skills.”

  “Motorcycle repair might get you somewhere.”

  “In a small town, maybe. But it wouldn’t be the kind of job you’re talking about, with pensions and—and health insurance and all that.”

  He could feel Andy’s eyes on him.

  “This might be a rude question, Jack, but do you have any savings at all?”

  “Nope.” Not anymore. He’d had a few thousand put away for a rainy day, but then it had rained, and the hospital bills had eaten up everything he’d saved. “Don’t matter. I'm not gonna live to your age.”

  “But you’re eating better and smoking less. That’s a good start. And if you retired from the magick business....”

  Jack gazed at his reflection in the window and shrugged, feeling uncomfortable.

  “Come on, what’s going on?” Andy demanded. “I’ve been biting my tongue for days, waiting for you to start talking. Why are you here? Is that angel linked to you? Did you show up on my doorstep with the mal'akhim on your tail?”

  “No!” Jack gave his friend a startled look. “No, nothing like that. I told you, I was working with Ma D’Orsy, helping her and her family rebuild and lay down some new blessings. Then Pearl gave me a call and I headed up to Chicago for a few weeks, but it was nothing occult, just tracking down her oldest.”

  “He quit his medication again?”

  “Yeah. Ended up in St. Louis.”

  “And after that you drove here to see me? Without even calling?”

  Jack hesitated. “I shoulda called. I had kind of an accident, and I wasn’t thinking too well—”

  “Jack,” said Andy, “would you please try to talk like a man who almost earned his college degree? What does ‘kind of an accident’ mean, anyway?”

  Jack began playing with the cigarette pack again.

  “It was kind of a stroke.”

  “What?” Andy straightened up. “A real stroke? Or a magickal attack?”

  “A real stroke,” Jack said, looking away. “Doc said I got high blood pressure, touch of atherosclerosis. Too much drinking and smoking and stress.”

  “Good heavens, Jack, why didn’t you call me? Where were you? You know I would have flown out.” Andy sounded more angry than worried.

  “I know. I didn’t want you bothered on my account.”

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said. How bad was it?”

  “Well, I’m here.” He’d never liked talking about personal matters. He hunched his shoulders, stripping the cellophane off the Marlboros. “I got lucky. No permanent damage. They wanted me to stick around, but what the hell, Andy, I don’t have insurance. I can’t afford expensive drugs. I've been tryin’ to stay a little healthier on my own.”

  “How long ago was it?” Andy was at his laptop again, working on the keyboard. “Did you get your medical records when you left?”

  “October. I didn’t ask for any paperwork. I just wanted out of there as fast as I could.”

  Andy growled, his eyes moving over the screen. Jack studied the scuffed toes of his boots in the harsh kitchen light.

  “Did you have surgery?”

  “Just drugs. I guess it wasn’t a real serious stroke.”

  “All strokes are serious. I can’t believe you didn’t call me. I thought we were friends. And you’re still smoking?”

  Jack dropped the pack. “I’m trying to quit. I tried the patches, but they don’t do anything for me, and they’re expensive. And this is why I didn’t say anything. I knew you’d make a fuss.”

  Andy clicked a button, still reading.

  “You have to quit. Cold turkey.”

  “I’m working on it. Let me handle this my way, Andy.” The pack had never looked so enticing. Jack looked back at his friend. “And get off the computer, would you? I hate talking to your back.”

  Andy pulled his hands away from the keyboard and turned.

  “All right. Then talk to my face.” He stood and walked back to the kitchen, pulling the curtain over the sink window. “How did it happen?”

  II

  Edward Todd watched the kitchen curtain close and finished his beer. He’d hoped for some sign that they’d acted on his message, but their argument could have been about anything.

  He pulled his own blinds shut and flipped on the lights. His apartment was better furnished than Markham’s, with enlarged Doré prints on its walls and a great deal of black leather and polished chrome. The overall effect was one of a modern, perhaps slightly standoffish intellectual, which was exactly the image he sought to convey.

  Interior decoration meant nothing to him, but he understood the value of camouflage. As a taller than usual black man, he found it difficult to fit into the university’s predominantly white environment. He strove to normalize himself in as many ways as he could, from his carefully studied uniform of white Oxford shirts and khaki pants—the bland uniform of the male Southern California humanities professor—to the bottled beer in his refrigerator, which was tasteless to his numbed palate but the same brand he’d seen in ice chests at the faculty picnic.

  Normalizing himself included not mentioning his various perceptual difficulties unless it became unavoidable.

  “Peeping is a petty vice for the Hellbender.”

  The voice scraped like dry branches. Todd turned and regarded the dark mass that had manifested on his couch. A sleek, raptor-beaked head bared sharp teeth at him while bony, multijointed legs preened each other. Bits of burnt-looking skin drifted over the black leather and the sisal mats beneath.

  “Don’t dirty up my flat, Amon.”

  The demon ignored him.

  “I can smell the blood pulsing along the edges of the possibility, and I thirst for it, just as you do.” Its dry, lizardlike tongue whipped out and tasted the scraps of flesh that had fallen from its flanks. “Those two humans are of no use to you. They are enemies of the defiant.”

  Todd walked to the kitchen to throw out his empty beer bottle.

  “Maybe that’s why I want them. I’ve been spending too much time with you. I need Andrew Markham to maintain my neutrality.”

  Amon hissed, its head dropping and its angular body coiling around to face Todd. It tasted the air with its tongue, seeking Todd’s mood.

  “You do not need to do that, beloved. You need me. You need an ally. I am the only one of the mal'akhim who will stand by you until the bitter end.”

  “Are you?” Todd walked back and dropped into his chair again. It creaked under his weight, sounding like Amon. “What brings you here? I have one last lecture to write.”

  Amon’s beak snapped with disgust. “Tell me what you are doing. Why did you intercede with the hunt? The nephilim groan for lost flesh.”

  “It’s not my concern if the pack was too cowardly to protect its meal.”

  “You wanted those two to find Melech. Why? What are you doing?”

  “I wanted to know whether the priest still dabbles in the occult.”

  “Why? Better to leave sleeping occultists lie.”

  “That won’t be possible much longer, Amon.”

  The demon slid off the coach and slunk forward, its bony legs moving like an insect’s as it neared Todd. Skin peeled and left dark, ashy marks on the mats.

  “Talk to me, beloved. Are we not brothers, you and I? Have we not share
d the same flesh?” Its flank rasped against Todd’s leather shoe and it rested its beaked head against Todd’s leg. “Tell me what you see. Tell me what is coming.”

  Todd regarded the demon with annoyed affection, then reached down and ran his large hand over its bony head. Its skin was cold and smooth. A thin strip of flesh peeled off under his palm like a black ribbon, far darker than his own skin.

  “Stay and watch. The probabilities are coalescing. You may get your fill of blood yet.”

  Amon crawled into his lap. Its tongue touched Todd’s wrist, as cold as ice.

  “Whose side will you be on, Hellbender? Mine or his?”

  “I only stand on my side.” Todd leaned back in his chair and ran the ribbon of skin around his fingers. Then he coiled it into a small ball and thrust it into his mouth. His teeth closed, and he tasted the frozen burn of hell. “I’m the only one I can trust.”

  “You can trust me, my love.”

  “Can I?” He was skeptical, but he folded up his shirt sleeve, anyway. The demon wrapped its sharp limbs around Todd’s forearm and buried its teeth in Todd’s wrist. Todd sighed and closed his eyes while Amon nursed, studying the shifting crystalline shapes of heaven and hell as they turned and transmuted before him.

  The next day he stood before his afternoon class, the sleeves of his Oxford shirt rolled down to hide the marks Amon had left in his flesh. The twenty students in his small class were struggling with the penultimate lecture of the semester. He’d spent twenty-eight lectures introducing them to the apocalyptic tradition that ran through the Old and New Testaments. The last two weeks had been spent on St. John’s Revelation, discussing it from historical, political, and eschatological perspectives. His students had liked his stories about the Antichrist and Satan, but now he was leaving the textbook behind and turning the tables on them.

  “But,” one of the more conservatively Christian students, Jarret, argued, “how can you say there’s no Satan?” The clean-cut young man flipped through his Bible. “Jesus Himself names Satan in Matthew 4:10.”

  Todd smiled, his colorblind eyes roaming over the faces arrayed in front of him. At first they’d all looked the same—a generic array of white teenagers, all blandly pretty, all wearing the same mall-purchased clothing and speaking with the same middle-class inflections. After fourteen weeks he’d learned the names of about a third of his class; those students who were unusually insightful, illiterate, outspoken, or tardy. The best and the worst stood out while the rest festered in average anonymity, no doubt wondering why he never addressed them by name.

  He knew his students the way the mal'akhim knew humanity.

  “There’s another reference, too?” said one of the front-row students, Alison. She was one of his higher-scoring students, although everything she said sounded like a question. “In Job?”

  “And the serpent in the Garden of Eden,” ventured a thin young man in the third row, a film major who was taking the class to earn his required religion units. “I mean, wasn’t that, like, a metaphor for the devil?”

  Todd nodded with bland encouragement, waiting for more ideas to trickle forward.

  “Legion,” Jarret added. “Jesus cast out Legion into the herd of pigs.”

  “Whoa, Exorcist stuff,” cracked another student.

  “No way, man, Exorcist was Pazuzu,” objected the film major.

  “Yeah, whatever. You’re the expert on bad movies.”

  “Classic movies.”

  Todd cleared his throat. Pens rose and poised over notebooks.

  “I didn’t say there were no devils,” he said. “I said there was no Satan; at least, not as he’s come down to us in literature and film. The Old Testament uses the term ha-satan, which means ‘the adversary’ and refers to an office rather than to an individual.”

  “Like ‘the Christ,’ ” Jarret said quickly.

  “Correct,” Todd said. Jarret was borderline fundamentalist, but he knew his Bible. “Ha-satan suggests an opponent or obstructer. The word described beings that were clearly angels, such as the angel of Yahweh in the tale of Balaam’s ass.” He paused for the requisite snickering. “In Job, we see ha-satan in company with the b'nei elohim, the sons of God, and coming to earth as a cosmic messenger, or mal’akh. The entire Book of Job can be read as the angel ha-satan doing its job; that is, testing human faith.”

  He paused for the stir that accompanied his words. Onionskin Bible pages flipped.

  “Now, later, in the Book of Zechariah—3:2—we see ha-satan rebuked by another angel for accusing Joshua, a good man. The opponent still isn’t evil, but it might be a little overeager.”

  “But Satan did fall from heaven,” Jarret objected. “We read about in Luke.”

  “True. By the time the gospels were being written, the concept of Satan as an individual rather than an office had solidified in Christian tradition for a variety of political, psychological, and narrative reasons.”

  “Dr. Todd? If Satan’s just a title, then why do we use it like a name? Should we call him Lucifer, instead?” Alison asked.

  “Lucifer was, most likely, a reference to a Babylonian king. As far as using ‘Satan’ goes, Biblical scholarship has become increasingly precise over the centuries, but we’re still laboring under traditions that arose when people were still reading texts that had been poorly translated from the original Hebrew and Greek. This brings us back to my original point: there is no individual Satan, Prince of Darkness, as we understand him today.”

  “Well, if there isn’t a Satan, then how can there be demons?” the film major asked.

  “More properly, what you’re referring to are devils. ‘Demon’ comes from the Greek daimon, or spirit. A daimon can be good or evil; it’s natural and uncontrollable. Devil is a more accurate term when discussing the minions of the New Testament’s Satan because, like ha-satan, the Greek diabolus suggests an adversary or obstruction.” Todd looked around as the students dutifully wrote that down. “Devils have a long history in human religion and folklore, just like gods; we find traces of pagan gods and devils in the oldest books of the Bible. Angels, as well. Michael and Gabriel are the only angels named in the Old Testament, and both come from Babylonian-Chaldean sources.”

  “But there are a lot more angels than those,” the film student protested. “I can Google on angels and get, like, hundreds of names.”

  “Only three angels are named in the Bible; Michael and Gabriel, as I said, and Raphael in the Book of Tobit, which is part of the apocrypha to you Protestants in the room, but canonical for you Catholics. Most of the angel names you’ll find on the Internet come from the Koran, which was written after the Old Testament, or from the intertestamental Book of Enoch. Others come from traditions and legends or were derived from Zoroastrianism. And, I’m sorry to say, quite a few angelic names are mere fabrications invented by medieval and Renaissance authors of magical grimoires.”

  The students scribbled in their notebooks, some looking surprised. Todd found it dismaying that people who called themselves Christians could know so little about their beliefs. Sometimes he was tempted to open a door to hell for them. How would they react to Amon slinking through the classroom whispering sweet temptations, or an angel speaking to them in eye-searing splendor?

  “So, was there a real angel that fell from heaven, or what?” a student asked.

  “Judaism doesn’t have any tradition of fallen angels; it conceives of God as all-powerful and all-good. Christianity recharacterized Judaism in a way that more closely reflected Persia’s Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism pits Ahura Mazda, the god of light, and Ahriman, the god of evil, against each other in a war for the world. Zoroastrians considered the two powers approximately equal, and later Gnostic traditions put evil in ascendance. Christians, of course, believe that evil is less powerful than good; that’s how the fallen-angel story evolved. You’ll find the first references to a damned devil and fallen angels in the New Testament. Jarret, would you read Matthew 25:41?”

  Jarret dut
ifully flipped through his Bible and read aloud in the rolling voice of a future preacher: “ ‘Then he will say to those on his left, Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’ ”

  “The Revelation of St. John goes into even more detail, although we’ve already discussed why it should be interpreted very cautiously....”

  After class, Todd stood in the hall having his usual polite disagreement with Jarret.

  “Well, what if Zoroastrianism was, you know, humanity seeing the fight between God and the devil but not understanding it?” Jarret was objecting. “Maybe the Z’s and the Jews saw parts of the truth but got it wrong until God sent Jesus down to clear things up for them.”

  “Hello, Jarret. Good morning, Edward,” said Andrew Markham, walking down the hall with a bundle of books under one arm. He stopped, and students broke and eddied around them.

  “Good morning, Professor Markham. I was just talking to Dr. Todd about his class,” Jarret said. “I don’t see how anybody who calls himself a Christian can say there isn’t a devil.”

  Todd wondered whether his colleague would take the student’s side, but Markham just smiled.

  “Were you lecturing about the history of hell today, Edward?” he asked.

  “Very briefly.”

  “Dr. Todd told us about Hades and Sheol, but I think they’re just different names for hell.”

  “There’s a Catholic tradition—it started with St. Augustine, as I recall—that anybody who rejects God’s love is already in hell,” Markham said. “Hell doesn’t have to be someplace you go after you die, Jarret. It can simply be a matter of living without accepting God’s grace.”

  Todd gave the former priest a sharp look, but Markham didn’t seem to be directing the words to him in particular.

  “The Bible talks about everlasting fire,” Jarret insisted.

  “Don’t you feel your face burn when you’re embarrassed, or angry, or frustrated, or in despair? All those times you feel like God has abandoned you?” Markham patted Jarret on the shoulder. “Come by my office sometime if you want to talk more about the subject. But if you don’t hurry, you’re going to be late to your next class.”