by T. A. Pratt
The Atheist in the Garden
Marla’s friend, occasional assistant, and former butler, Pelham, died, as all people do, but Marla offered him the chance to serve her in the underworld rather than retiring to his own personal afterlife. Because Pelham likes being useful, he agreed, and in this story, he’s watching things in Hell while Marla deals with some business in the world above.
Pelham strolled through the formal garden behind the palace of the god of death, hands clasped behind his back. He was attempting to enjoy the peace and quiet, but the peace was diminished somewhat by the presence of a three-foot-tall demon with the head of a goat and a monkey-like body covered in reddish fur. The demon followed Pelham around, levitating and smoking a cheap cigar, the pungent odor of which overwhelmed the admittedly astringent scent of the white-and-silver blossoms that bobbed on all sides. Pelham coughed, pointedly. “Given our capabilities here, I find it curious that you choose to smoke something so vile. You could conjure a fine cigar just as easily.”
The demon, who’d named himself Muscles Malone for reasons never divulged, shrugged. “I like this kind is all. It’s just how my god made me. Is this what we’re doing today? Walking in circles?” He bobbed along like a hairy balloon, apelike toes hanging about two feet off the ground.
Pelham sighed. “The flowers represent various aspects of the state of the underworld, Muscles, and I am looking for signs of rot, or wilt, or worm. All seems healthy, though. You need not accompany me if more pressing matters demand your attention.” Their mutual employer—who was also their god—had tasked Muscles to assist Pelham, but Pelham had little need for assistance, as his duties had not proven particularly onerous. Perhaps it was simply destiny, he thought, that put him in the company of people like Muscles. Pelham valued courtesy, discretion, and propriety, and the universe seemed to delight in pairing him with flamboyant, vulgar, and crass individuals. The classic odd-couple combination, an almost archetypal dyad—
An old man wearing a brown checked overcoat burst through a row of flowers, laying about with a black walking stick, scattering silvery blossoms in all directions. His round-rimmed spectacles and neat beard did little to make his furious, red-faced visage more pleasant, and he muttered to himself constantly, casting occasional glances at what passed for the sky in this place.
Pelham looked up himself. A steady stream of falling souls, many accompanied by the shadowy and vaguely animal shapes of pyschopomp guides, streaked through the blackness, arriving from the mortal world and arcing down to the great sea of primordial chaos where they would find their own afterlives waiting.
The man didn’t seem to notice Pelham at all, so he cleared his throat and said, “Pardon me, sir. Are you in need of assistance?”
The figure spun, then leveled the butt of his cane at Pelham’s face. “What is this place? Who are you?” His voice was booming, British, demanding, and aggrieved.
“This is the underworld, sir. My name is Pelham. I am confidential secretary to the god of death, also known as the dread queen, and in her temporary absence I am overseeing matters here—”
“He’s the boss.” Muscles drifted into the man’s line of sight. “So the question is, who are you?”
The man staggered backward at the sight of Muscles—Pelham could sympathize—and then gritted his teeth for a moment. “Delusion!” he shouted. He swung his cane at Muscles, making the demon dodge away. “Dementia!” He turned and stalked away across the garden, vanishing behind a hedge, presumably moving toward the greater darkness of the plains around the palace, which were gray and barren because no one had imagined any details for them today. His voice floated back to Pelham: “Bad potato!”
“I wonder who that was,” Pelham said.
“I’m on it, boss.” Muscles floated upward, reaching out with one hand and plucking a thick book from nothingness. Today the Book had a binding of puckered leather broken up by stitches made of thick black thread. How overdramatic. When Pelham summoned the Book of Dead Names (no relation to the Necronomicon; it was closer to a phone book or a biographical dictionary than a book of forbidden lore), it generally appeared as something more like a slim address book than a grimoire.
Muscles opened the Book on a stone bench and flipped rapidly through the pages, then shook his horned head. “Nothing here, boss. That guy never checked in.”
Pelham clucked his tongue. “No? I thought he was someone who’d wandered away from his afterlife.” That happened, on rare occasions: stray sheep to be herded back to the proper fields.
Muscles shrugged. “He’s not in the book, which means he didn’t enter the sea of primordial chaos when he got here. Otherwise he’d be checked in.”
“Was he alive?” On vanishingly rare occasions, living people could bodily visit the underworld—Pelham himself had been alive when he’d arrived here, though that state of affairs had not persisted, alas—but they were usually sorcerers or visionaries, and the old man hadn’t seemed like either.
Muscles shut the Book and shelved it in thin air. “Nah, living people have a sorta something, an aura or whatever, I can see it. That guy was dead, all right. He just didn’t get escorted to the ocean like he was supposed too.”
“Hmm.” Pelham began walking back to the palace—which looked like a castle made of ice, today—and pondered. His queen’s underworld had run smoothly since her departure for the land of the living a few days earlier, and it was actually somewhat pleasant to have a problem to solve. “See if you can track down the man’s psychopomp, so we can find out what went wrong on his journey. We can’t have lost souls wandering unattended around the garden.”
“We could conjure one of those big three-headed dog monsters to keep the guy out,” Muscles said.
“I prefer to treat root causes rather than symptoms, Muscles, but I’ll give your idea all the consideration it deserves.”
They had to make several inquiries, since they didn’t know the old man’s name, but eventually they found the psychopomp who’d escorted him from the mortal world to the eternal one. This psychopomp appeared in the form of a hart—a red deer stag—but he was bipedal, and had the faint suggestion of shadowy wings. He arrived promptly when summoned, seemingly awestruck at being in the palace. Psychopomps didn’t usually enter the home of the gods of death, any more than taxi drivers bringing tourists to Buckingham Palace stopped in to have tea with the queen.
Muscles led the psychopomp to a small but elegant office, paneled in black wood worked with thorn-and-rose designs, with furnishings made of marble and ice and obsidian and shadows.
“Is the queen here?” the psychopomp asked, looking around as if he expected her to pop out of a filing cabinet.
Pelham, seated behind the desk, shook his head. “She has business in the mortal world just now. I am overseeing matters here in her stead. You recognize my authority?”
“You have the right glow.” The psychopomp bowed his head. “What can I do for you?”
“Please, sit.” Pelham gestured. “Muscles, get our guest some refreshment?”
“What do flying deer even drink?” the demon said. “Egg nog? I’ll get egg nog.” He drifted away, floating a foot off the floor.
“We encountered a lost soul in the garden today,” Pelham said. “I understand you ferried him from the world above? An old man, a brown overcoat, a walking stick?”
The hart’s eyes widened. “I—oh, no. That guy? I brought him in just like I do everyone, and guided him toward the sea of chaos. But instead of plunging down into the sea like everyone else does, he hit the surface and sort of... skipped, like a stone across a pond. I’ve never seen that before. I thought he’d sink when he stopped bouncing, but... maybe he bounced all the way out?”
“Something certainly went wrong, though I ascribe no blame to you.” That was true, but only because it wasn’t Pelham’s place to blame anyone. If necessary, he’d make a report to the dread queen, and she could assign blame as she saw fit. “What can you tell me about this man?”
>
The psychopomp’s soft brown eyes softened further as he accessed deeper reserves of knowledge. “Reginald Hawkes, 78 years old, degrees in philosophy and biology, brilliant thinker, powerful speaker, taught at Cambridge, married five times and divorced five times, estranged from his ex-wives and his stepchildren, most famous for his involvement in the ‘Modern Materialists’ movement—a bunch of prominent outspoken atheists, basically.” The hart’s eyes focused on Pelham. “Ha. I bet he was surprised to end up in the underworld.”
“That would explain his agitation in the garden.” Pelham fiddled with a dagger-shaped letter opener on the desk. Odd, since they never got letters, but the furnishings were mostly for psychological convenience anyway. (Everything here was. It wasn’t as if the psychopomp really looked like a bipedal deer with wings, nor did Pelham inhabit his original body, though he felt the same.) “Don’t atheists usually... well... disappear when they arrive here?”
The psychopomp went hmm. “Sometimes. The ones with true faith in their beliefs do, anyway. Atheists get what everyone else does when they arrive here: whatever afterlife they expected. If they truly believe in oblivion, they get oblivion. But if they’re the sort of atheist in active rebellion against a fundamentalist upbringing, and they still secretly fear damnation for going astray... then they get the fire and brimstone of their choice.” The psychopomp shrugged. “It is what it is.”
Muscles returned with the eggnog and put it on a table beside the psychopomp, who sampled it and made an unpleasant face, recognizable even on a deer.
“I got you one, too, boss, hold the eggnog.” The demon placed a small brandy before Pelham and then withdrew to a discreet distance.
Pelham took a sip. Imaginary vintages were most delicious. He returned his attention to the psychopomp. “The Modern Materialists... aren’t they quite controversial?”
The psychopomp reflected again. “Yeah, some of the old guys are, anyway. A few of them have been accused of misogyny in general, and sexual harassment at conventions in particular, offering to ‘mentor’ young women alone in their hotel rooms, stuff like that. The word was, you didn’t want to be young, female, and alone in an elevator with Hawkes. Some people in the movement go beyond just saying religion can be harmful, too, and show open contempt for religious people. They aren’t super popular either.” He cocked his head. “Hawkes said, more than once, that every Muslim nation should be bombed into rubble, to forever end the influence of radical Islam, and usher in a new age of enlightenment. That wasn’t his only weird idea. In a speech just before he died, he said we were probably all just code running in a computer simulation created by historians in the far future. Then he said that was an even better reason to bomb ‘the Islams’ into dust, since they aren’t real anyway, and it would impress the researchers controlling our simulation to see us take charge of saving our civilization.
“The... Islams, did you say?”
The hart rolled his eyes. “Hawkes called them that just to be an asshole, as far as I can tell.”
“His vile views and habits aside, Hawkes seems truly devoted to his atheism and convinced regarding the rightness of his views,” Pelham said. “What could make his personality persist after death?”
“Ha,” Muscles said from the corner. “That’s easy. What kind of people become ghosts? I don’t mean the vestigial ones who are just echoes of old trauma, I mean the really coherent ones, the ghosts who keep their minds and memories?”
Pelham considered. “Sorcerers, often. Or at least individuals with incredibly strong wills, which is a pre-requisite for sorcery.”
Muscles nodded. “Self-centered bastards so convinced of their own importance they can’t believe the world could go on without them, right? Control freaks so freaky they can’t even let themselves lose to death. Look at this guy, Hawkes—he’s totally convinced there are no gods and no afterlife, sure, but I bet at heart he’s a solipsist: he only really believes in himself. This is a guy so narcissistic he didn’t really believe, deep down, that he could ever die—how could someone as important as him just cease to exist? So when he got down here, and felt the urge to dissolve... he just didn’t. He held on like grim, uh, death, and convinced himself this was all a hallucination. Be glad he wasn’t a sorcerer. He could’ve given Marla Mason or Elsie Jarrow stiff competition if he’d been in their business.”
Pelham nodded slowly. “That does seem plausible. At least, it fits the available facts. But what’s to be done about him?”
Muscles grinned. “Three-headed dogs. Let them gnaw on Hawkes for a while and he’ll become a true believer quick.”
Pelham shook his head. “That solution lacks elegance, and our queen doesn’t favor a punitive afterlife, unless the soul itself insists on it. She always says, they’re already dead, it’s not as if they’re going to cause anyone else any trouble.”
Suddenly the lights turned red, sirens wailed, and unseen bells jangled wildly. Pelham waved a hand to silence the noise. A cold dread formed in the depths of his notional belly. “Oh, dear.” He looked at a wall covered in bookshelves, and it became blank white, and then turned into something like a view-screen, but with a depth that suggested the scene was happening right outside the room.
Hawkes strode through a forest of towering trees with dark-blue bark, scattering the glowing fairies that flittered in the strangely luminous twilight. He swung his stick at a tree, and a whole swathe of forest flashed out of existence when it struck. Fairies burned and shriveled in his presence, and somewhere nearby, a human voice wept piteously—the denizen and creator of whatever twilight forest afterlife Hawkes had blundered into, presumably.
Something like a forest fire made of blackness suddenly raged, until only Hawkes remained, glaring around and grumbling in the ashes. When he slashed out with his cane again, a tear appeared in the darkness, and he stepped out of that afterlife and onto the featureless gray plain of the underworld’s unspecified spaces.
“What was that about Hawkes being dead, and not causing trouble any more?” Muscles said.
“He destroyed that poor woman’s afterlife!” Pelham couldn’t contain his horror. “His disbelief in the supernatural is so vast he overwrote her reality!” The dread queen had placed the underworld in Pelham’s hands, and now someone was stomping around poking holes in it.
“So, I should go.” The psychopomp put his almost untouched eggnog down carefully. “Souls to guide to the afterlife, and all that.” As he turned leave, Pelham heard him mutter, “Assuming there’s any afterlife left to come back to.”
“What do we do about Hawkes?” Muscles said.
“We intervene.” Pelham stepped toward the wall, and through it, and there he was, standing just a few yards away from Hawkes. They seemed to be down at the bottom of the sea of primordial chaos, the reservoir of the raw stuff of reality the dead used to create their afterlives. Thousands of bubbles, ranging in size from tennis balls to houses, bobbed around them in an incomprehensible array of colors. Every one a miniature world created by imagination and expectation.
Hawkes was vigorously prodding a bubble the color of a dragonfly’s wing with his cane. “You there, stop that!” Pelham demanded.
The old atheist glared at him from beneath bushy, unkempt eyebrows. “Silence, you hallucination! Someone drugged me, or I suffered a head trauma, or this is some horrible dream.”
“You are in the afterlife, sir, and you are disturbing the rest of the other souls.”
Hawkes poked harder, and the bubble popped, vanishing.
Pelham shouted “Stop!” and asserted his will. At first, he created a cage of iron bars around Hawkes, but at the last moment changed his mind and instead conjured something more like an anonymous hotel room, complete with a bad painting of flowers on the wall. No reason to antagonize the man any further by putting him in something so like a jail cell.
Hawkes looked around, more in annoyance than alarm.
“You have to come to terms with your new reality,” Pelham said.
The atheist struck the bed with his cane, and when the bed vanished, he cackled with undisguised glee.
Pelham gritted his teeth. This man did have a powerful will, and he’d instinctively learned how to shape the stuff of chaos to his own liking... or at least return it to its undifferentiated state. “I need you to listen to me,” Pelham said.
“Why would I?” The atheist’s voice dripped scorn. “You’re no one of any consequence.”
Pelham had a sudden flash of insight. Those were rare, and to be treasured. “Quite right. Just a moment.” He conjured a door out of the room, stepped through, and shut it behind him.
Muscles drifted over to join Pelham behind the desk, where he sat watching the scene on the wall, which showed Hawkes’s hotel room. “Who’s Old Man Beardface in there with our atheist?”
“Charles Darwin.” Pelham allowed a bit of smugness to enter his voice. “I summoned Darwin out of his own afterlife—which is quite pleasant, incidentally, very pastoral. Darwin is practically a secular saint, an inspiration to scientists and thinkers everywhere, and he was also a man who struggled with reconciling his belief in science with the possibility of the divine and the supernatural.”
“Huh. I thought Darwin became an atheist eventually?”
Pelham shook his head “He ceased to believe in Christianity, yes, but he called himself an agnostic rather than an atheist, and didn’t entirely reject the possibility of divinities. Once he arrived in the underworld, he accepted that the universe had layers of mystery he had not yet solved. Surely he can convince—”
Pelham didn’t have the sound on, because it seemed unsporting to eavesdrop, but he saw Hawkes open his mouth to shout and raise his cane. The atheist proceeded to beat Darwin about the head and shoulders, and the father of evolutionary theory fled to the door and through it. Pelham waved his hand to return the man to his afterlife, and made arrangements for the unpleasant experience to disappear from Darwin’s mind.
