Butcher Bird

FORTY-NINE The Garden of Earthly Delights

“So, are you any particular kind of demon?” asked Spyder.

“Why do you care?”

“Just making conversation. You’re a horny little bastard. I thought maybe you were some kind of incubus or succubus or something.”

“Lust is just my hobby. I’m simply a demon.”

“Before you fell, were you any special kind of angel? Seraphim, cherubim, throne, archangel?”

Spyder and Ashbliss were stepping over the remains of demons and damned souls as they crossed the carnage-strewn alkali plain. The place stank, a combination of rotting flowers and scorched engine oil. Ashbliss was leading Spyder by the chain wrapped around his neck.

“I was simply an angel,” said Ashbliss.

Spyder made a wounded sound. “Huh. That’s sort of bottom of the barrel, isn’t it? What are there, like nine ranks of angels? And you’re all the way down in the basement. Janitor of the universe.”

“We had to keep watch over the Earth. That’s how I learned what beasts you talking meat really are.”

“Is that how you ended up like this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your demon form. Looks like you were dragged behind the ugly truck over rocky roads all the way down from Heaven. They wouldn’t have pulled that on one of the heavy angel ranks, a seraphim or a throne, would they?”

“I like my form.”

“Course. I mean, you’d have to. Not having any choice and all.”

“Hush,” said Ashbliss, and yanked the chain hard.

They came to a rough highway that curved gently into the distance toward the city. Along both sides of the road were hundreds of crucifixes, stretching as far as the eye could see in both directions. Men and women, their skins stripped off, were secured to the crosses with nails through their wrists and wire around their chests. Their legs, which were free, high-kicked in unison, like some zombie movie chorus line. As he got closer, Spyder could see umbilicals running into their empty skulls. All their mouths were propped open with pockmarked mesh screens and tinny music flowed out. Polkas. African tribal dances. New Orleans jazz. Techno, and a dozen other styles Spyder couldn’t identify.

“You opening a theme park or something?”

“You looking for a job for eternity?”

“Seriously, what’s with all the urban renewal? Why’d you fill in the razor pits back there? And what the hell are you building over there?”

Spyder pointed into the distance at what looked like the boarded-up mine shaft in the distance, but it was not like any earthly mine. The entrance went up for miles, and each wooden plank across its face could have represented a whole forest. The metal beams that buttressed the planks could each have been melted down and have provided enough steel for a battleship.

“That was like that when we got here. They didn’t even bother finishing Hell before they cast us down here. It’s very rude, I think,” said Ashbliss. “As for the razor pits, they were fun, but never necessary. We had to clear the land for the project.”

“Which project would that be?”

“The only project. The only one Lucifer and the other master demons care about, at least.”

“And that is…?”

“Heaven,” said Ashbliss. “We’re building Heaven.”

“Interesting. I kind of thought there already was a Heaven. And they kicked your sorry asses out.”

“That’s God’s Heaven. This one is for us.”

“I get it. God looks down and sees your new and improved Heaven and slaps his forehead, realizing you fallen angels were right all along. Then—bang!—you win the argument.”

“You’re not as stupid as most of your kind. But you make up for it by talking to much.”

“Is that what that city is, beyond Pandemonium? Part of the new Heaven? Is that what Hell really is, one big hardhat zone?”

“You tell me,” Ashbliss said. “Behold.”

When he was still a child, Spyder had found a book of his mother’s. It was an art history text, left over from her brief attempt at community college. She’d lasted less than a semester and bad-mouthed the curriculum, the teachers and the other students nonstop whenever the subject came up. But even as a child it puzzled Spyder why she’d kept her school books if they brought back such painful memories. It wasn’t until years later that he realized that it was probably his father’s nagging that had propelled his mother out of school. Spyder’s father considered all forms of self-improvement, short of studying innovations in Detroit horsepower and chasing strip-club tail, useless and, in all likelihood, un-Christian. Spyder never understood why his mother had said that he was so much like his father. He knew that they were nothing alike, and he’d hated her for saying that. He hated his father just because.

The picture in his mother’s art history text that had captivated him as a child was the Hell panel from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights. It wasn’t the clever and artful ways the demons tortured the damned souls that had fascinated Spyder. He’d studied the top, the far background of the painting, where none of the sexy tortures were happening. That section of the painting depicted a ruined, burned-out city, or a city that had been built along very different aesthetic lines from a human city. The buildings and the sky above were black, as if grimed under a permanent layer of soot. Shafts of lemon-colored light shone from the windows of each building and sliced through the smoky darkness, which only added to the feeling that this was ground zero for some unknown holocaust.

All those memories and images came back to Spyder as Ashbliss led him down the chorus-line road and into the enormous construction site for Heaven 2.0.

The scale of the project was so vast, Spyder’s mind couldn’t take it all in. Looking at the place was like being in a car accident—it came to him as a series of still images flashing into his brain, but the whole of it was beyond his comprehension. In the far distance entire mountain ranges were being blasted away or gobbled up by machines whose steel jaws were almost as large as the tops of the mountains themselves. A white sea of activity surged around the giant machines and Spyder realized that this ebbing and flowing tide was made up of millions of souls moving the ore mined by the machines to the horrible open-pit foundry nearby. Flames, miles high, rose from the foundry and molten steel flowed into molds down dozens of chutes, each as wide and as deep as the biggest river Spyder had ever seen.

There were workshops nearby where demons supervised souls in some of the more delicate work needed for the structures: the polishing and cutting of precious stones, the stripping of huge sheets of mother-of-pearl from enormous shells, the goldleafing of delicate statuary. Outside the workshops fortunes in diamonds, rubies and sapphires were piled, along with amber boulders the size of a man.

Millions of tons of concrete sluiced into giant foundation holes from thousands of storage tanks. At the bottom of the holes, souls were directing the lines that spewed the wet concrete evenly across the floor. Souls too slow to move or too clumsy to escape slipped under the gray, oozing mess like they were drowning in quicksand, and disappeared. The skeletons of a thousand new buildings were being lifted into place by massive claws and welded together by souls linked to other machines through yet more umbilicals. The one constant Spyder could make out in all the chaos was that the demons were the supervisors, while the damned souls were the work-gang slaves. This knowledge was nailed down when Spyder looked to the far side of the site and watched demons feed the bodies of injured and unruly souls into huge presses that squeezed all the fluids from them. The liquid was drained into tanks to be used as lubricant for the construction machines.

Spyder’s heart was beating fast. His brain was on overload. This was not the Hell in the books. A demon grabbed a soul sporting a mohawk, kneeless black jeans and a safety-pinned T-shirt, some squirming, hard-luck punk, and tossed him into the fluid press. A stray thought popped into Spyder’s mind: Jenny, you would love this.