Excerpts from Fisher of Devils

 by Steve Redwood

1. (A soul is being judged. All the members of the Court of the Last Judgement have been bribed to stop any more souls reaching heaven.)

“I want my own lawyer! It’s my right!”

“Oh dear, what a fuss you’re making just because things haven’t gone all your own way! Still, just to show you the lengths I’m willing to go to give you every opportunity... Wilberforce! We have a guilty client here for you to defend.”

A nervous-looking young man, with a thrush-egg complexion, and so many freckles they seemed to be playing leapfrog over each other, shuffled forward, biting his nails and staring at the ground.

“This,” announced Tobias, “is Defending Counsel. I trust you realise you’ve vastly increased the work of this Court by insisting on this ridiculous formality. Right. We’ll hear what Hector has to say again, then Wilberforce can answer in vain on your behalf. Hector?”

“I demand the Hell penalty!” boomed Hector again.

Tobias gazed at him admiringly, then turned to the trembling Wilberforce. “Well, Prosecuting Counsel has put forward, I think you have to agree, a cogent, compelling, indeed irrefutable case against the defendant. Perhaps, Wilberforce, you’d like to try to deal with the points he has raised one by one, bearing in mind that the lease on the apartment you’re renting from me will shortly be up for renewal.”

Wilberforce coughed obsequiously, showering the floor with bits of undigested nails, and continued to gaze fearfully at his feet, as if seeking inspiration from these twitching extremities. His voice, when he eventually spoke, had all the force of a strand of overcooked spaghetti.

“I cannot argue with the evidence my learned colleague has put forward...”

“I should think not!” muttered Tobias.

“...or even with the evidence he has not put forward...”

“I assume you’re referring to...”

“I am indeed, my lord.”

“Yes, that on top of everything else.”

“But I would respectfully suggest, my lord, that my client’s very tender age might...”

At this point, a cluster of freckles broke free and floated to the ground like confetti, inducing a sneeze which caused a few of them to lodge like spring blossom in Tobias’ wild hair.

“...might, though only if it pleased you, my lord, so to regard it, be considered an extenuating factor.”

His own boldness at this stage so shocked him that he gulped into silence, glared accusingly at the soul as if holding it responsible for his discomfiture, and then fled the room, leaving a cloud of freckles homeless behind him.

There was a small silence while Tobias ascertained that Defending Counsel was not in fact lurking behind or within the floating orphans.

“Well,” he breathed, turning to the tadpole, “you’re a lucky lad, a very lucky lad indeed! I’ve never known Wilberforce make such a moving plea for mercy in all my life. A tour de force, if ever I’ve heard one! It’s true he wasn’t able to refute a single one of the points Hector made so tellingly, but what is justice if not tempered by mercy? You are indeed, as Wilberforce reminded us, very young – sixteen days, wasn’t it? – and many of your crimes may perhaps be ascribed to the folly and hot-headedness of youth. It therefore gives me pleasure to commute your sentence to Purgatory. Now off you go, my lad, and reflect on your good fortune.”

This soul, though, was a fighter. “I demand the right to appeal!”

“What!” Tobias’ whiskers sprang to shocked attention. Then, “On what grounds do you wish to lodge an appeal?”

“On the grounds that I’m innocent.”

“Innocent of what?”

“How do I know? There hasn’t been any charge yet!”

“How,” expostulated Tobias, “can you claim to be innocent when, on your own admission, you don’t even know what you’re innocent of?”

“Everything!”

“Everything? Look here, my lad, this is a Court of law, you must be more specific.”

“I’m innocent of whatever you’re charging me with.”

“Do I have your word of honour on that?”

“My word of honour.”

Tobias pondered, then seemed to come to a decision.

“After due deliberation, the Court is prepared - just this once, mind you - to accept your word of honour alone, without placing on you the onus of proof.”

“Thank you, my lord.” 

“Hector,” said Tobias, restraining some whiskers which were trying to explore his ear, “you have heard the Court’s decision. It is magnanimously accepting this gentlesoul’s word of honour. Have you anything to say?”

“Yes, my lord.

“Well?”

“The Prosecution withdraws the charge to which the defendant has just pleaded innocent. However, we have no option but to demand the Hell penalty on the second charge.”

Tobias swung round on the astonished soul, his bulbous nose now tumescent with indignation, his eyebrows contracting together into a bristling palisade of irate hairs.

“Ah ha, what do you say to that, you grubby little urchin! Right nasty piece of work you turned out to be! No sooner do we free you on one very serious charge than you’re back here before us on another even more serious charge! I take it this charge is more serious, Hector?”

“It certainly is, my lord.”

“Well, in all my years as a judge I’ve never come across such gross ingratitude, such lack of all common decency, such turpitude! I shudder when I think I was about to quash your previous ridiculously mild sentence.”

He donned the black cap. 

“The prisoner, having been found guilty on all charges made, and even more guilty on all charges not made, is hereby sentenced to eternity in Hell on the first group of charges, and to a second eternity in Hell on the second group, the two sentences, for technical reasons, to run concurrently. In short, to put a long sentence in a short one, you’re damned! Oh my gosh, did you hear that? ‘A long sentence in a short one’? Well, off you go, ha, ha, to eternal torment! Next prisoner, please!”

“But I’m innocent!” yelled the soul again.

Tobias, the ripples of his rich Christmas-pudding chuckles gradually receding towards the back of his neck, admonished him with a plump forefinger.

*****

2. (God has started to make another man to help Adam in the Garden of Eden.)

“Well,” said the serpent, with some degree of embarrassment, “this may appear presumptuous, but...well, does this man have to look exactly the same as the first one? I mean, he’s already a dangly short. Does he need to have hair all over him, for example? I think I may say in all modesty that my own person shows how attractive a smooth skin can be. And perhaps if you altered the face – just a little – so he wouldn’t remind everyone so much of Adam...”

“Serpent,” exclaimed God, ripping off the beard he’d just stuck on his new man, “you’re absolutely right! Sometimes I overlook the most elementary things, I don’t know why. By the Great Crab, I’ll show you whether I can make a worthwhile man or not!”

He worked with Cloudlight throughout the whole night, softening, curving, rounding, refining. The breasts he reShaped a thousand times until they seemed less like additions to the basic Adam-body than the very essence of the new being. They swelled in a warm-cool pledge of joy and peace and excitement all at once; offering so much, the unknown with the known, assured yet strangely vulnerable, the mischievous triumphant thrust of the nipple suggesting, too, the hesitant bud of the unborn flower. They promised a world of dreams while pleading to be clasped lest they fade into dreams themselves. They swept forward with sensual defiance, yet swayed to the gentlest touch like unopened Andromedan wraith-bells bobbing in their silver pools.

The snuggery, too, became so much more than the mere absence of a dangly. God MindShaped the Clay with such intensity that the flesh itself became subtly different, moist and resilient, strange potencies wound within, deceptively cloaked with delicate folds of skin that beckoned and siren-smiled, and urgently whispered of fire and sanctuary, puissance and surrender. If the dangly lay poised to flare in a quick, impetuous conflagration, this new wonder simmered and smouldered and hinted at a peace that passeth all understanding.

But these were just the more superficial differences. There were a myriad other minute changes, a perceptible softening of the whole body – softening, not weakening, for the brash physical strength of Adam’s muscles had been squeezed out and distilled into the poignant power of beauty: the slope of the neck; slender arms with just a trace of fine down and an undercurrent of timid veins; the sweeping andante of waist and hips, curling arpeggios of hair stroking the belly, cool languid cadences of thigh and calf. A new kind of beauty. A new kind of harmony. A new kind of power.

Power. For as dawn broke, other animals came to join the serpent, who had curled himself round a branch overhanging the crucible of creation and gazed, transfixed by the great thaumaturge, throughout the hours of darkness. Even though they could not yet see the face, hidden by a gleaming mass of dark hair, they already felt the power, and croaked and quacked, squeaked and clucked, and barked and bleated, bayed, brayed, and buzzed, their awed delight.

And finally God looked up, seeming to shimmer and waver before them, for the effort had drained him, and only with difficulty could he retain the thousands of shapes whereby he appeared to each in his own image. 

“Behold,” he said, “Woman!”

And he breathed gently into the mouth, and for a second an eerie blue glow hung over the body – was the Zindor Clay itself paying final homage to him? – and then the breasts rose in the first breath of life.

And when the Woman sat up and swept back her hair from her face, all the animals fell quiet; and the breeze, though the tree-tops still swayed and the leaves still fluttered, seemed to hover in silence; and the serpent’s eyes glazed over and, murmuring “My Queen!”, he slipped from his bough and thudded to the ground. 

And even God gazed at her wonderingly, before he said, “At last.”

It was not just the beauty of the Woman that brought this sudden hush over Eden. There was something else...

**********

A long, long time later, as Eve sat by her pool in Heaven, staring unmoving into the depths, Raphael murmured to St. Peter, who was gazing at her, troubled and fascinated:

“Yes, Peter, it’s as if God trapped himself, a part of himself, in his creation, and it is weeping to escape.”

And St. Paul once called her, enigmatically, ‘the unfinished one’, and it wasn’t until much, much later, as she leaned sobbing over a broken Archangel, that Peter realised he meant she was greater than them, not lesser.

**********

No such thoughts as these occurred to the animals as they clustered round the new creation. They were conscious only of the beauty, and did not ask themselves why, or how, the Woman could appear so beautiful, when each had such differing conceptions of what beauty was. Yes, her hair was rich and midnight-gleaming and rainbowed out slivers of light and sparkled and crackled, and her cheeks were smooth and petal-clear, and her nose nestled delicately above lips of dawn promise and sunset fulfilment. But what was the tenderness of her skin to the crocodile, the roundness of her lip to the pelican, the suppleness and grace of her body to the barnacle? Would moonlight-smooth skin impress the eel, would the wasp wonder at the narrowness of her waist?

Only the serpent had understood what the other animals had seen and responded to without understanding why, for he had felt the blazing power and love of God. It had been the eyes, the eyes, ocean-green with purple-blue depths, deep, deep, some other reality rocking behind them...

And then they were just the puzzled but calm eyes of a being facing life for the first time.

“Hello,” said Eve, “who are you?”

God smiled, for Adam, as Lucifer so long before him, had said, “Who am I?”

*****

3. (St Peter and Satan are in Limbo, visiting the Vats where the souls are kept)

The Guardian went to a nearby shelf, yanked down two bodies, and checked the name tags before freeing the heads from the clingfoil, which was already torn in places, as if it had been put hurriedly around the bodies. The heads were of an exceedingly plain woman and an exceedingly spotty man.

He then opened the Vat again, and shouted “Algernon! Ethel!”

There was a sudden hush in the Vat. Then a lot of squelching and ouching as two souls squirmed their way to the top. The Guardian grabbed these, and slammed the lid shut.

Usually, souls reminded Peter of tadpoles. Now they brought to mind rugby-playing spermatozoa. Perhaps I’m spending too much time in unsavoury company!

“Just like tadpoles, aren’t they?” remarked Satan.

“Are you... let’s see again... Algernon and Ethel?” demanded the Guardian, and interpreting gargling sounds as an affirmative, he forced open the mouths of the two bodies, and dropped a soul into each.

• A voice came from one of the bodies.

Satan winced, but held his peace.

“Ugh! What’s all this?”

There followed a flurry of curses, and then things started hurtling out of Algernon’s mouth – spiders, worms, bugs, a bit of surgical gauze.

“Oh dear!” wailed the Guardian. “I cleaned all those bodies when they arrived. It must have been your repairmen when they did the alterations.”

“How do I get this thing started?” said a voice from Algernon’s body.

“Thump the heart!”

“Speak up, I can’t hear you!”

The Guardian yelled down Algernon’s throat. “Thump the bloody heart, you gormless ectoplasm!”

A few moments later, the body convulsed, and then the eyes opened.

“Hey, I can’t see a thing!”

“Oh dear!” said the Guardian again, extracting from a pocket the grubbiest handkerchief Peter had ever seen. “Mildew, I expect.” He wiped Algernon’s eyes vigorously, leaving the handkerchief slightly cleaner than before. “Better?”

The eyes blinked. “I can see a bit... Ethel!”

Just then the other body came to life. “Algernon! Is that you?”

On the hard, cold ground in the middle of a tenebrous underground chamber in the Wastes of Limbo, two beings clambered uncertainly to their feet, two living souls once again given form and substance, two bodies infused with spirit and life, the forerunners of a new race that would survive eternity.

It was a moving moment. Peter felt a lump in his throat: could it, he wondered morosely, be glandular fever? Satan, too, had a lump in his throat: a particularly tenacious hellroach was following Dylan Thomas’ advice not to go gentle into that good night.

“Yes, yes,” said Algernon, “it’s me! Your Bulgy Algy, as you used to call me. Have we been in the same Vat all this time without knowing it?”

“I didn’t know you were dead!”

“I was hit by the hearse after your funeral.”

“Oh, Algy, my poor darling!”

The clingfoil was beginning to slip off their bodies, but they hardly noticed.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m with my little tweedle-de-pom again, and...”

“Eek! What’s that behind you?”

Algernon turned, and saw the others for the first time. The saint and the Guardian he took in his stride, but the sight of Satan induced a second ‘Eek!’

Satan looked pleased with himself.

“EEK!”

“My creme caramel,” said Algernon, “don’t worry about the monster.” (Satan’s smile disappeared.) “We’re safe in the Afterlife, and...”

“ALGY!”

“What’s the matter, my sweet jelly baby?”

“You’re not bulgy anymore!”

“Give me time, my peach blossom! I’ve only just...”

“Algy, you’re not bulgy AT ALL!”

Algernon looked down, gave a horrified gasp, and frenziedly ripped away the rest of the clingfoil. There came a howl of despair worse than King Lear’s on finding Cordelia dead.

“NOOO...!”

The refrain was taken up by Ethel, who had been making her own investigations.

“NOOO...!”

“Quiet!” shouted the Guardian. “You’re making enough row to wake the dead!”

“Ethel, I haven’t got a ...!”

“Algy, nor have I!”

And indeed they hadn’t, as Peter and Satan could now quite clearly see. They both stared at the Guardian in horror.

“It wasn’t my idea, sir!” he said to Peter. “You know I tried to stop you! You had the ornaments removed!”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Your workmen last month. Slice, plop, in the bucket, slice, plop, in the bucket! The women did take a bit longer...”

Ethel screamed, and would have fallen to the ground, but Algernon just managed to catch her. “You fiend!” he gasped.

Satan started, then realised the compliment was directed at the Guardian.

The Guardian waved an admonishing finger at Algernon. “Don’t call me names! It wasn’t me who did it. I just had to clear up the mess afterwards!”

“I’ll kill the little bastard1” yelled Peter. “I’ll twist his bloody neck into spaghetti!”

“Peter, please, we’re in company!” Satan was shocked.

“Peter?” said the Guardian. “But I thought you said...”

“Yes, Peter, damn it, Saint Peter! How dare you think I was that little shit Darren! And if you tell a single soul – or body – you’ll end up like these!”

Satan gazed at him with something akin to admiration.

“Oh dear!” This was all too much for the Guardian.

“But this is impossible!” exclaimed Algernon, “I can’t go round without a ...bulge!”

“And I certainly wouldn’t be seen dead without a pussy!” added Ethel, the shock clearly having temporarily undermined her good breeding. “Whatever would the neighbours think!”

The Guardian tried to be placatory. “Come, come,” he said. (“How?” hissed Algernon.) “You’ll soon get used to it. Much cleaner. Just wait and see.”

“You can go stuff these so-called bodies up your arse!” yelled Algernon. If his beloved Ethel could say ‘pussy’, then he could say ‘arse’. He’d always wanted to.

“If you’re lucky enough to have one!” added Ethel venomously.

“I can see why they didn’t get to Heaven!” murmured Satan.

“Ethel?”

“My love?”

“It will be all right somehow, my little marshmallow.”

“There’s still us, isn’t there? I mean, the real us.”

*****

4. (Satan has been trying in vain to impress Eve in the Garden)

Satan wasn’t to know that Eve was partly thinking about Adam and his resentments, seeking to interpret the war in Heaven in the only terms she knew. She had stripped away his layers of illusion with every word she uttered, then casually stamped on the real being lurking behind them. A long-submerged pain inside him screamed “It isn’t true, it isn’t true!”, as the embers of the real Lucifer stirred. He hit back at the pain.

He spoke of those early days in Heaven, when he and Raphael and Beelzebub had been of one heart, if not of one mind. He yanked memories from the bowels of his being, reckless of the grief that came with them, memories of days of light and joy, the three of them almost never apart, plucking life, drawing the juice from it, letting it dribble wantonly over their lips. Beelzebub, dark eyes, and arms of steel touching the dulcimer like a whisper; Raphael, sturdy as the ground he trod but airy as the currents he flew, compassion and preternatural knowledge compacted within him; and Lucifer, truly the brightest of the three, Lucifer the restless one, the daring one, the proud one, the questioner and the quester...

Like barnacles wrenched loose from the rocks of his delusion and despair, their undersides vulnerable and soft, the memories came; and as he recalled what he had been, he forgot what he had become, sheltered from his own bitter reality by the warmth and wonder now at last shining in the Woman’s eyes. The young Lucifer crept back into his scarred and blackened body, his scarred and blackened mind, given tenuous existence by the magic of moonlight in Eden and the Woman’s gaze. Still he boasted, but now it was of comradeship and trust, and the thirst to test their powers.

When at last he stopped, Eve waited quietly for a minute, and then asked:

“And so, after the war, when Lucifer left Heaven, Beelzebub and Raphael, they left with him, of course?”

With this innocent question, the ghost of Lucifer fled with a cry of desolation, and Satan crawled back into his own hideous corpse.

“They ... they weren’t ... great enough to share his vision...”

And as if the ghost of Lucifer had struck her in its passing, Eve winced in sudden comprehension.

“They didn’t fight with him in the war!”

“They weren’t great enough to share his vision,” Satan repeated tonelessly, as if he were but an echo in his own skull.

Eve turned her gaze away from him and stared into the water that lapped delicately against the bank. “Thousands of angels, you said, fought with Lucifer, and thousands travelled with him to find a better life. It seems to me that they were his real friends, not Raphael and Beelze...”

“They were!” Denial, defence, anguish. “Beelzebub came to Hell afterwards, he gave up everything to join ... Lucifer.”

“Hell?”

“Where Lucifer went. A place of pain and unspeakable hardship...”

“Why did Lucifer choose to go there if it was so bad?”

Automatic Lie was no longer working. Satan ignored the question. Instead, he said:

“Even though Beelzebub didn’t ... see everything the way Lucifer did, he still followed him to Hell.”

“So they are still together!” Eve touched his arm impulsively.

The final thrust. The Woman was destroying him.

“Beelzebub ... left. But he said he would always love the Dark Lord.” Well, he had said it once, hadn’t he? Maybe not right at the end; at the end, it had been fury and scorn and ... Satan snapped off the memory before it could choke him. Beelzebub had loved him, he had!

“And Raphael?” Eve prompted softly, as he had known, and feared, she would.

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

The old image welled up, the silent horde implacably barring his path, and as he came near he prayed that his scouts had reported falsely, that they had mistaken the leader of that army, surely it was Michael, or Gabriel, or ...

Sacrificed, all sacrificed, and for what? The innocence of this Woman had scraped away the patina of lies and illusions, and then raked cruel nails over the quivering creature within. Belial for Beelzebub, Mammon for Raphael, adulation of inferiors for respect of his peers. And not even that, for the Saragash chieftain Mephistopheles had never bowed the head and never would – but what peers? Fair outsides without the courage to defy God, false friends, false memories, chimeras projected by the proximity of the Woman ... no, not false friends, that never, only perhaps the memory was false, perhaps it really had been Gabriel leading that golden army that shimmered like a million stars ... and Beelzebub had come to Hell, he really had...

He looked up at the Woman wildly, seeking he knew not what, but without it he must explode, be rent apart by his own grief. She nodded in that strange way she had, tracing a deep scar down his cheek with her fingertips, and gave him the release he craved.

“You’re Lucifer, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m not Lucifer!” Sudden knowledge. “I am ... the ruins of Lucifer.”

Later, when the Woman was not there to give the hurt meaning, he saw this only as a moment of utter humiliation, a weakness brought on by exhaustion and pain. Later, he did not understand, because he did not dare to understand, that the unique purity of the Woman, the love that spun out almost palpable threads over all who came near, had plucked out his own heart and thrust it before his eyes, forcing him to behold the agony and the glory of it. 

He swayed towards her, and she cradled his head against her breast, and gently rocked him, while the serpent, too far away to hear, waited and watched and wrestled with the doubts that were creeping in.

Moonlight in Eden.

*****

5. (Travelling through Hell)

When Peter saw Satan suddenly stiffen, he followed the direction of his eyes. What initially appeared to be yet another whirlsand proved to be something other, for it soon became clear that it was approaching them. Satan stopped and stared, his claws flexed like animated anchors. When he spoke to Lazara, however, his voice was calm.

 “Would you just check, please?”

She nodded, and slipped off her tunic, under which she was completely naked. Peter marvelled anew at the weird grace and poise of her body. Then strange things began to happen. She flattened out: there was no other word for it. Her dark-tipped breasts disappeared like a pubescent girl stretching backwards, her whole torso streamlined, while what had been her shoulder blades opened to release, in a strange, fluid motion, a uniquely peaceful metamorphosis, two wings so fairy light that they billowed with the rising air currents. Then she was aloft, skimming like a skate towards the dust cloud.

George gave a puzzled frown, sat on a rock, and began to polish his mace.

This was not just the first time Peter had ever seen anyone change shape, it was also the first time he had seen anyone fly in Hell. He knew that most of the rebel angels’ wings had been burned off by the Flame Cannon during the battle in Heaven. He also knew that a few of the native demons, those who occasionally operated on Earth, were obviously able to fly. Was Lazara one of these? Did she work for Mephistopheles? Why had she really wanted to be one of the party? Was it only George who interested her?

Within a few minutes, she was back. She glided down and alighted with the gentleness of a snowflake – well, something like that, a heat-resistant snowflake? – and flowed back into her former shape. To Peter’s disappointment, and possibly, he thought, her own, Satan at once handed her back her tunic.

“It’s Yomyael, me lord, an’ some mates of ‘is. Been duffed up real proper, they ‘as. Bits an’ pieces all over the shop.”

Satan seemed both relieved and concerned. “We’ll meet them. Peter, if you don’t mind, could you and George hide somewhere? – there are some rocks over there. I’d rather my subjects didn’t know I was entertaining saints.”

“I ain’t hiding from no damn devils!” growled George, who had picked up the words ‘George’ and ‘hide’, and found them incompatible headfellows.

“You’ll do what you’re told!” snarled Satan. Whatever was making him nervous was also making him forgetful.

Peter just managed to interpose himself between them before blood flowed, and by the time he had also managed to persuade George to sit – not ‘hide’ – with him behind a rock, the cloud of dust had resolved itself into a cart being pulled by two more doodlebug-tarantulas.

The cart was piled high with broken bodies. Peter, peering from behind the rock, judged that with all the bits and pieces in the right places, there might well have been twenty original bodies. As the cart drew level with Satan, the demon guiding it, his face badly mauled, reined in the steeds, jumped out of the cart, and bowed – an act which roused Peter’s admiration, since he had only half a leg to sustain him during this manoeuvre.

“Speak, Yomyael!” commanded Satan sternly.

Yomyael opened his mouth to obey, and managed to gasp out the single word ‘Bugrot’ before his tongue dropped out. He looked extremely apologetic, hopped back to the cart, and rummaged around until he managed to extract a torso complete with uninjured head. Clutching this, he began to hop back, but lost his balance, and his grip, so that the torso crashed to the ground, uttering a volley of expletives as it did so.

“Amazyarak! We do not allow bad language in Hell! How dare you!”

“Sorry, my lord!” gasped the torso. “It’s that stupid Yomyael! First he gets us smashed to smithereens, and then he drops me!”

“What happened?”

“We came across Bugrot an hour ago, sound asleep. But that stupid Yomyael got so excited he gave a bloodcurdling yell as the nineteen of us leapt upon him...”

Only one out! thought Peter proudly.

“Standard strategy when the opponent is awake,” murmured Satan, “but sheer folly when he’s asleep.”

“And... this is what happened.”

There was a short silence, disturbed only by the scrabbling of the half-legged Yomyael as he attempted to gain what would normally have been his feet, but here was only his knee.

“It seems,” said Satan, “that I shall have to deal with this Bugrot personally. Well, go and get yourselves patched up, and report to Belial.”

Lazara put Amazyarak’s torso back in the wagon, and then bent down to help Yomyael to his knee. Finding his face up against her breast, he essayed a playful bite. He obtained, instead, a playful slap.

“I got a feller now, see,” glancing towards the rock, “so ‘ands off is wot it’s gotta be in future,” she explained, somewhat apologetically.

A pity George doesn’t know that.

The wagon set off again in the direction of Dis, Lazara remembering at the last moment to pick up Yomyael’s tongue, and throw it after the wagon. One of the doodlebug-tarantulas spotted it, however, lunged, and swallowed it.

Peter and George emerged from their hiding-place, and once again the travellers set off.

The desert stretched away endlessly, though far in the distance Peter thought he could make out something breaking the horizon. Mountains, perhaps? Or was it merely a particularly large globule of sweat on the end of his nose? Distance seemed to be meaningless, just a shimmer of heat, a haze of nothingness. When he licked his lips, his tongue burned; when he blinked, his eyelashes smouldered; when he breathed, his throat scorched. The only consolation was that his beard still hadn’t burst into flame. On, on, marching through the furnace – and for what? To provide high tea for the Beast of the Apocalypse?

*****

6. (Satan takes Peter and George to the Ice Palace)

Peter looked out over a valley of grisly eldritch hue, where twisted bushes snarled and crackled, boulders heaved and hissed before spitting out smouldering fragments. And, lit by these fires, in the very midst of this cauldron, like a broken insect on the flattened corpse of this dead land, the ribs and bones of a huge edifice that must once have thrown an awesome shadow over the desolation. A few gaunt pillars still stood, etched black against the fires, stretching painfully up as if to escape the torment beneath them. And between them, massive blocks of stone still rasping of some eviscerated splendour, silently shrieking of a vast conception torn apart by its own audacity, and here petrified for eternity. Lying in Hell, it yet seemed not of Hell; but nor could it ever have been of Heaven, for there was an infernal vehemence, a pulsation of eternal violence in these stones.

“I built it for her, and she did not come.” The voice so old. So empty.

“The Forbidden Zone!” breathed Lazara. 

Satan looked at her, touched her cheek with a hand still covered with his own blood.

“Yes, Lazara, your grandfather helped me to build it. Of all those who laboured here, only he still lives. Two to share the secret: Mephistopheles and I. And now there are five, including two saints!”

Laughter made of ashes. He began to walk towards the ruins. Peter held back: they would be burnt to death in there! Satan said, without turning, “I tell you, there is shelter there.”

Reluctantly, Peter followed, Lazara helping him to support George. Mephistopheles! High Chieftain of the Saragashim, Christ’s Tempter – and Lazara’s grandfather! So her bringing us breakfast was no caprice: Mephistopheles, through her, is watching me!

And now, as they passed through the murderous heat to reach the broken pillars and stones, came one more shock.

Can a fantasy undo the very laws of nature?

The stones were cool! Even the air between them was cool! The heat hissed and shimmered around them, lunged and darted forward, but fell back as if before an invisible wall. Peter ran his hands over the stones, pressed his forehead against them, sank down beside them in weariness, with George almost collapsing on top of him. 

Satan stalked like a black ghost among the ruins, spectral, phantasmal. He communed with his memories, head down.

Peter’s eyes were beginning to close. So cool. So comfortable. ‘Tell her I built her palace.’ So he really did expect Eve to come to Hell! The poor deluded fool really expected her to come! Yes, everyone in Heaven knew Eve had eaten the apple, but how could Satan have known that then? 

Was that George already snoring? He would recover, George was strong. At last, he could sleep...

He jerked himself awake. Fool! You have a new weapon! Use it! 

********** 

“What do you see?”

“A ruined building in a valley, surrounded by fire and desolation,” said God.

“Ah, the Ice Palace! So Lucifer has let your Peter see the Ice Palace.”

“Not my Peter!” God corrected him crossly. “He’s an utter scoundrel!”

“But isn’t that exactly what you’re relying on?”

“Don’t remind me! And that doesn’t make him any the less an utter scoundrel!” He stopped and glared. “And what do you think you’re smiling at?”

“Oh, nothing,” said Raphael.

**********

It was the place. The impossible coolness, the eerie silence, the memories trapped in stone. Gazing up at Hell’s moon white and stark above him, seeing its light butchered into ghostly forms by the jutting stones, St. Peter felt a sense of desolation, of uncomprehended grief so long suppressed. A few yards away, George was sleeping soundly, his massive body hardly obscured by the slight Saragash girl lying with her head on his chest. Ah, George, you have no questions, you seek no answers; yet are you really more empty than me? And that fool Satan. Could I ever have done what he has done, held a ridiculous, pathetic dream since almost the beginning of time? Why do I feel so hollow?

It was the place. It was that figure, now bleached by moonlight, now swallowed by blackness, now pacing up and down furiously, now motionless with the head sunk on the chest. Peter tried to replace the sensation of desolation by anger. So maybe the angels lied to us. Maybe he really did meet Eve in Eden. Maybe he did love her. So what? Who did not love her? Who did not feel an ache, an unsatisfied longing, whenever they came near her? What was it Raphael had said such a long time ago? As if she had a bit of God trapped in her? Eve, and her sea-green eyes, and her midnight hair, the unreachable fantasy that mocked the dreamer with his own inadequacy. So maybe Satan too had heard the call: So what?

As if to test Peter’s determination, as if he could bear no longer to be alone with his memories, Satan at last ceased his phantasmal vigil, and came to sit beside him, the harsh moonlight striking the scarred face, the jutting nose, the full, disdainful lips that no longer seemed disdainful. 

It’s only the place. Peter reminded himself of what was at stake, forced himself to probe at once with the unexpected new weapon. He’ll never be so receptive again!

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