Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

by Michael Marshall Smith

  By now Hannah was stumbling with tiredness but Granddad insisted they go downstairs to get dinner, on the grounds that this would help her get over the jetlag more quickly. The Devil and the imp did not come with them.

  They sat alone in a cavernous room and ate something that was halfway between a soup and a stew. It had beetroot and other less identifiable things in it but was surprisingly tasty.

  ‘Why does this town look so tired and broken?’

  ‘It was an experiment,’ her grandfather said. ‘It didn’t work out. But it was a brave idea.’

  Hannah caught a note of wistfulness in his voice. ‘You’ve been here before, haven’t you?’

  ‘Places like it. Long time ago. Some people tried to do an interesting thing. But …’ He tailed off.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wherever there are good people,’ he said, ‘there are also bad. The world is heavy. If it doesn’t want to follow where you’re leading, then in the end the dream will die. What replaces a dream is often thin and dry for a time. People do not show their best sides in such circumstances.’

  ‘And is that his fault?’

  He looked at her. ‘Who?’

  ‘Him. Upstairs. That man who says he’s the Devil.’

  ‘We are who we are, and so there are ways we cannot help but behave. Balance is all you can hope for, which comes from making the right choices. There’s an old Native American tale you may have heard. Cherokee, I believe. About two wolves?’

  Hannah shook her head.

  ‘In the story, an old man tells his grandson that he has a fight going on inside him, and has done his whole life. Between two wolves. One is a bad wolf – a wolf consumed with anger, regret, resentment and sorrow. The other wolf is good, with a heart filled with kindness, compassion and hope. Even joy. The boy asks which wolf will win in the end. The old man looks at him very seriously and says: “The one you feed.”’

  Hannah thought for a moment. ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘No,’ Granddad said, sadly. ‘In my experience, most people don’t.’

  ‘Are you really two hundred and fifty years old?’

  ‘Older, actually,’ he said, suddenly cheerful again, as if glad of the change of subject. ‘I was nearly seventy when I started building the machine. Though I flatter myself I don’t look much over three hundred, on a good day.’

  ‘What’s it like? Being old?’

  ‘Not dying is nice, but it might have been better if he’d come to my workshop when I was, say, thirty. But I wouldn’t have had the skills to build the machine for him then, I suppose.’

  ‘Why are we here?’

  ‘He needs me to try to work out why it isn’t working properly.’

  ‘What’s the machine even supposed to do?’

  Granddad chose his words carefully. ‘It might more accurately be termed a “device”. Something that divides. When people behave in certain ways, their deeds have a dark sort of power, which is something he needs. The machine selects and harvests those deeds and transports their power to … another realm, for his use. But it seems to have stopped working.’

  ‘But we had to leave the Sacrifice Machine in the car, in the parking lot back in Seattle.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter where it is. Bad deeds are everywhere.’

  ‘But if it’s to do with bad things, why did you agree to build it?’

  Granddad sighed. ‘At first, I’m ashamed to admit, because of the challenge. But then I realized its true importance. The machine absorbs the dreadful energy of evil deeds and transports it out of harm’s way. Without it, the world would … well, it would be an even more difficult place than it already is.’

  ‘So why isn’t it working properly?’

  ‘The device itself is working. As a piece of engineering. But for some reason it’s not achieving what it’s supposed to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Hannah didn’t understand any of this, and was having increasing trouble staying awake. ‘If he’s the Devil then why can’t he work it out for himself?’

  ‘Nobody knows everything. Not even him. Not even God.’

  ‘So … is God real then, too?’

  ‘So I’m told. We’ve never met.’

  ‘Couldn’t the Devil just have magicked himself here? Instead of going on the plane?’

  ‘Not while he has physical form. Fighting the laws of the mundus takes a vast amount of energy, which is precisely what he doesn’t presently have. And you and I couldn’t have travelled that way, even if he did. He is the only being who can be both here, and there, at the same time.’

  ‘And he needs you here with him, to check why the machine isn’t doing what it should?’

  ‘Yes. And I wasn’t going anywhere without you. Your father entrusted you to me.’

  Hannah nodded quickly. Grandfather knew what she meant, as always. As soon as they’d reached the hotel, Hannah had tracked down some Wi-Fi. She’d tried Skyping her father, but again, he’d been too busy to pick up.

  ‘We’ll try again tomorrow,’ Granddad said.

  There was a loud smashing sound. They turned to see that a waiter carrying a large tray of plates and cups and saucers had somehow lost control of it, and dropped the entire thing.

  Three seconds later, Vaneclaw entered the room. He walked carefully around approximately six thousand tiny pieces of shattered crockery to their table. He had returned to his normal unwholesome colour – the hotel, though not warm, was at least not utterly freezing – and looked very self-important.

  ‘Boss says you have to go to sleep now,’ he declared. ‘We’re leaving at sparrow fart tomorrow. By which I mean very early. So chop chop. Upstairs with you.’

  Granddad smiled at Hannah, and reached for the menu in a leisurely fashion. ‘Something for dessert, dear?’

  Nonetheless they were on the road by five o’clock the following morning. It was still dark. The Devil drove. He drove much, much faster than Hannah’s grandfather, and she spent most of the time with her eyes firmly closed.

  Soon they were out into the countryside.

  For an hour or two it was bleak and empty. Then the road took them into a forest that seemed to go on forever, hour after hour, tree after tree after tree. If these trees were able to talk, Hannah felt, their conversation wouldn’t sound like Bach. It would be a cold, papery whispering, a muttering just below the threshold of hearing, and would mainly be about how cold they were, and the loves they’d lost, and whether it was worth the effort of killing themselves.

  Then they were back out in open country again for a while, before plunging back into forest once more.

  And still the Devil drove.

  Finally, just after three in the afternoon, the Devil turned off what had passed for a highway – increasingly broken-up and ragged though it had become – and on to a smaller and even less well-kept road. It was icier, too, with wisps of snow blowing across it, and the Devil was forced to slow down. After an hour of this (by which point Hannah thought she was actually going to lose her mind with boredom) he stopped the car.

  ‘We there, boss?’

  The Devil didn’t answer. He turned his head, like a dog trying to catch a scent. Then he started driving again.

  Fifteen minutes later, by the side of a small hill, he finally pulled the car over to the side of the road and turned the engine off.

  Hannah looked out of the window. She couldn’t imagine anywhere more desolate. Half of what she could see was covered in lonely-looking fir trees. The rest was snow, with grass poking up through it. The grass was short and stubby and more blue than green, as if frozen. There were cracks in the ground. The sky was leaden grey, and getting darker by the moment.

  ‘Where is this place?’ she asked.

  ‘Nowhere,’ the Devil said. ‘The very heart of it.’

  Chapter 16

  At first the Devil said she had to stay in the car. Hannah said that wasn’t going to happen. She wasn’t going to be left quite l
iterally in the middle of nowhere, by herself, in the dark. Grandfather backed her up on this until the Devil pointed out that night would indeed fall soon, at which point the temperature – already well below freezing – would plummet further. Even though the humans were wearing several layers of clothing, it would be dangerously cold. Possibly fatally so.

  Hannah could see her grandfather weighing the risks. In the end he said that unless they left the engine running it would be no better in the car than outside, and walking might help keep Hannah warm, and if she didn’t come, he wouldn’t either.

  The Devil stared at him for a long time. Granddad raised an eyebrow, and waited.

  They all left the car together, setting off into the wilderness.

  After a while, Hannah noticed that the ground they were walking over was boggy. The water on the surface had frozen, but the ice was thin and brittle, unlike the rock-like hardness they’d been seeing all day. She asked her grandfather about it.

  ‘The permafrost is melting,’ he said.

  ‘I know about permafrost,’ she said. Her face was so cold it was hard to move her mouth. ‘We did it in the fourth grade. It’s where it’s been so cold for so long that the earth freezes for thousands of years. It’s where they find woolly mammoths. But why is it melting? It’s so cold.’

  ‘Not as cold as it used to be.’ His breath puffed up in clouds around his face. ‘Global warming, they say.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ the Devil snapped. ‘It comes and goes. Twenty thousand years ago this was a meadow.’

  Hannah sniffed. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘How do you think?’

  He strode ahead. Granddad put his arm around Hannah’s shoulders, and they kept walking.

  Half an hour later, Hannah could tell something had changed, or was changing. It was almost fully dark by then but that wasn’t it, and her head had nearly frozen into a block of ice, but she didn’t think it was that either. There was something different about the atmosphere. The terrain had altered, too. What had started out as cracks in the earth had been getting bigger. Some were now wide enough that you had to jump over them.

  The Devil stopped walking.

  ‘Are we lost?’ Vaneclaw asked, the words barely audible above the chattering of his teeth. The imp had turned a colour so extremely vile that it was impossible to name. Just looking at it made your eyes want to swivel completely round in your head, even if that meant you had to look at your own brains.

  ‘No,’ the Devil said, irritably. ‘Imp – show yourself.’

  Hannah was confused, as he obviously didn’t mean Vaneclaw, who was right beside her.

  The Devil started walking in the direction of a particularly large crack in the ground. As they got closer, Hannah saw something standing all by itself at the edge.

  ‘Eurgh,’ she said.

  You would have too. It was about three feet high, and squat. It was like the kind of thing you see sometimes by the side of the road, an animal that’s been hit by a car and subsequently run over by another, and then left for several days in hot sun. It looked as though something like that had somehow survived, and managed to stand itself upright again, though in a mangled, lop-sided way. It was covered in short black bristles. On what was presumably its head were two eyes, one the size of a fist, the other of a tiny marble. Both were bloodshot. Its mouth looked like it had been cut into its head with a rusty axe.

  ‘Soulfang!’ Vaneclaw said in wonder. ‘Well I never. Haven’t seen you in ages, mate.’

  ‘Well, I been here, haven’t I?’ The creature’s voice was mournful and cracked and very deep.

  ‘That explains it! How long?’

  The squat imp turned its head to look up at the Devil. ‘How long, boss?’

  ‘Eight hundred years,’ the Devil said. ‘And?’

  Soulfang shook his head. ‘Ain’t seen no one. At all.’

  ‘What is that … thing?’ Hannah asked, keeping well out of its way.

  ‘They call them stop imps,’ her grandfather said. ‘Their job is to bar the way.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘It depends. They’re invisible to most people. Have you ever been walking somewhere, in a field, or forest, or the middle of town, and seen a path or road and started to walk down it, but then decided … no, I’ll go another way? Without knowing why? That’ll be because of something like Soulfang, stationed to keep it private. Sometimes they’ll be put in houses, too, in closets or drawers or the garage, to stop you finding something you’ve lost. They’re particularly drawn to car keys and photographs of people who have died. And homework, of course. Then later you’ll open the door or drawer and wonder how you missed it when you looked before.’

  ‘Eight hundred years,’ Vaneclaw said with some admiration. ‘You must be freezing.’

  ‘Not really,’ the imp intoned. ‘I feel no cold.’

  ‘No, me neither,’ Vaneclaw said hurriedly. ‘Balmy, isn’t it, eh? Lovely temperature. Bit warm, maybe. In fact, I wish I was wearing a coat, so I could take it off.’

  ‘Come,’ said the Devil.

  He led them towards the edge of the crack, which was even bigger than it had first appeared. Big enough, in fact, that it was more like a canyon. The Devil started climbing down into it.

  ‘I’m not going down there,’ Hannah muttered.

  ‘I couldn’t care less what you do,’ the Devil said as his head disappeared. ‘But the Engineer will follow me.’

  Hannah glanced at her grandfather and saw from his face that he had no choice, and so she lowered herself carefully over the edge and started clambering down the side.

  The earth was rocky and slippery, and freezing cold on the fingers. What made it worse was that each step lower into the ground made you feel more afraid. Of what, you didn’t know. It just felt like you should be going the other way instead, as quickly as possible, or maybe faster.

  Granddad was doggedly scrambling down beside her, however, and Hannah decided that if he could do this, she would too. She saw the way he winced each time he had to move his shoulders, or knees, and how blotchy his face had become with the cold. Whatever working for the Devil had done for him, he was still an old man. He looked after her.

  She could look after him too.

  It was totally dark at the bottom of the canyon, only a sliver of almost-dark still visible up above.

  And it felt … dead. Hannah no longer felt what she’d felt on the way down. She felt nothing at all.

  The Devil tapped Vaneclaw on the head, quite hard, and the imp started to glow, gently, like a huge nightlight, shedding sufficient illumination that you could see where you were. At the bottom of a huge, freezing, wet, nasty crack in the ground, a million miles from anywhere.

  The Devil went to the canyon wall and brushed his big, pale hands over it. Dust and clods of frozen earth fell down, eventually revealing …

  ‘Is that a gate?’ Hannah peered at it. Yes, there was a gate stuck in the earth – a huge, ominous, iron gate. It didn’t lead anywhere, of course, because it was bedded in the earth. It looked like a big metal gate had somehow fallen down a crack ten thousand years ago and got swallowed up.

  ‘The only remaining physical access,’ the Devil said. ‘There were two others, but one is now far beneath a major city and the other wound up at the bottom of the sea after the geological upheaval that caused the Flood.’

  Granddad looked as if he was preparing himself for something he didn’t want to do. Vaneclaw seemed excited. The Devil looked as he always did, like a cross between the stern man in the library who would be the first to tell you not to whisper so loud, and the kind of person Mom or Dad warned you not to talk to even if he offered unusually interesting candy, and a kitten.

  The Devil kept brushing with his hands, getting the earth off this side of the gate, ultimately revealing a narrow slit in one of the upright bars, about an inch wide and four inches tall. He raised his left hand and put his fingers out straight, held together, like a karate-chopping hand. He moved it
forwards and into the slit in the gate.

  He turned it to the left. There was a clunking sound, low and somehow awful. It was like that feeling you get when you realize you’ve done something wrong, and deeply terrible, and won’t ever be able to take it back.

  The gate swung slowly open, and when it did, she saw there wasn’t earth on the other side of it after all.

  There was an opening, a tunnel.

  Or a mouth.

  Chapter 17

  Hannah stuck close to her grandfather as they stepped through the gate and into the area beyond. It was less dark than the canyon – like the end of a cloudy afternoon, near twilight, the remnant glow of today fighting a losing battle against the oncoming of inky night. The ground was covered in short grass. A dusty path led across it into shadow. It was the kind of shadow you’d see in a forest, though there were no trees to cast it. There were a few low bushes dotted around. Nothing else. The shadows had come by themselves, bringing dust and silence.

  After they’d gone ten yards along the path, Hannah glanced back. It was the same in that direction now too, stretching endlessly. The gate had disappeared.

  Once you were here, you were here.

  For a moment then she heard something – a clattering of plates, a low hubbub of conversation. Like a restaurant during a busy lunchtime. It faded, leaving the silence even more silent.

  The Devil pressed onwards, head held high. He led the way along the path towards and across an old wooden bridge over a sluggish river, in which the water ran thick and black. Vaneclaw scurried after him, extinguishing his light. Though Hannah tried to keep up with her grandfather she soon found herself falling behind. ‘Wait,’ she said.

  He didn’t seem to hear.

  Then she was alone.

  Some things were the same. The low, featureless sky dimly warmed by a tobacco-ochre glow. Quietness. Not quite a silence, now, but as if all sound had been turned down or was being heard from several rooms away, through thick walls. Other people’s sounds, eavesdropped. Sounds that said you stood outside, a stranger, listening to stories that had nothing to do with you. Sounds that said you were alone, and always would be.