Sleeping Late on Judgement Day

forty: devil you know

I HADN’T BEEN inside Five Page Mill since my first meeting with its owner, which had ended badly (with me being dragged out by the police) but much less badly than it could have, since only a few minutes earlier I had been dangling in the neck-grip of a very, very angry archdemon, Eligor the Horseman. And now I was going back. It would have been questionable strategy even if I hadn’t had several encounters with Eligor since, including a long stint in Hell as his prisoner, during which he tortured me continuously for what felt like months, burning me, shredding me, feeding me to things I couldn’t even describe, and resurrecting me each time to start over again with something new. So now I was going to visit him again. See what I mean? Would you like yours Regular Stupid, sir, or Extra Stupid? But beggars, choosers, blah blah blah.

I’d gone in stealthy the first time, and it had turned out very badly. Today I was going to try something different. In fact, the only thing I did by the normal Bobby book was leave my hideous yellow ex-taxicab out on the Camino Real, since I didn’t want my current ride to be known to every creature in San Judas with a picture of Satan on its office wall. But once I’d reached the front walkway I just moseyed inside and went straight to the main reception desk. It was now behind bulletproof glass, which was probably because of me, but that didn’t keep the young man behind it from giving me a pleasant smile.

“How may I help you?”

“I’m here to see Mr. Vald.”

He gave the smallest hint of a surprised look, but for frontline office cannon-fodder, he coped pretty well. “Let me just check. Do you have an appointment, sir?”

“No, I don’t think so. But he’ll want to see me.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to arrange it through Mr. Vald’s executive assistant.”

“No, you’ll do that for me.” I put one of my cards through the slot, the kind that only has a name and a phone number on it. I don’t think that number even works any more. “Tell them it’s Bobby Dollar to see Ken Vald. I’ll wait right here.”

And I did. The receptionist’s phone conversation, which I observed from a discreet distance, looked a bit heated. My guess was that the person on the other end had started out, “Who?” and then quickly got to, “What the fuck is he doing here?”

When the kid hung up, I strolled forward again. “Shall I go up?”

His smile was sickly, but he was still doing his best, bless him. I hoped he was a regular human and didn’t know who his boss really was. He seemed like a go-getter. “If you’ll just wait a moment, Mr. Dollar, someone will be out to see you.”

“I’m sure,” I said, returning his smile with more confidence than I actually felt. But that’s how it works when you’re on Hell’s home ground, even if it’s just an embassy on Earth. You have to stay confident, or at least seem that way. You cannot flinch. You definitely do not want to panic, because they really do smell fear.

It was a minute at the longest before a dark-haired female security agent appeared out of one of the lobby’s interior doors. She was attractive, if you liked faces hard as stone temple carvings, and wore the same black suit as the male agents, but with a buttoned collar and no tie. Her nametag said “Kilburn.”

“Mr. Dollar?” she asked. “Bobby Dollar?” You’d have thought from the way she said it that I’d announced myself as something filthy. “I think you’d better come with me.”

“I think first you’d better tell me where, Officer Kilburn.” I gave her my best array of charm-teeth, my friendliest grin. “The last time I was here, I had a bit of a misunderstanding with security. I’d hate that to happen again.”

Zero amusement. Less than that, actually. If a cold fog could reach out from someone and suck the enjoyment out of others, that’s what she was emanating. “I’m sure you would, Mr. Dollar. I’m taking you to my supervisor. Come along.”

She turned and walked back toward the door. She didn’t look to see if I was coming, and didn’t seem to care if I did. I followed her anyway, since that was why I was there.

A whole complex of narrow halls and rooms lay hidden behind the lobby wall, almost a second building inside Five Page Mill, like a piece of pipe shoved inside a larger pipe. She led me down a corridor that must have run more or less parallel to the lobby’s inner walls, then stopped outside a door no different than the half dozen others we’d passed. She opened it and indicated I should go inside. “Mr. Felderscarp will be with you in a moment.”

I stepped inside. She closed the door. It was a small, unremarkable office—a desk, chairs on either side of it, no pictures. Just as I’d figured out that Felderscarp must be Fiddlescrape, Eligor’s latest demon bodyguard, replacement for the very much unlamented Howlingfell, the door opened again behind me. I turned in time to get hit so hard in the stomach that I thought someone had fired a rocket launcher right into my gut. I slammed back against the wall and for a second everything went black. Then the little sparkle-lights appeared, and I could hear well enough again to detect the sound of someone strangling to death trying to swallow a porcupine. That was me, I realized a couple of seconds later, trying to get some air into my body.

Something very large stood over me, flexing giant claws. It seemed to tower yards and yards above me—not possible in that small office. Only as the first of the new oxygen got into my cells, and my brain coughed back into more or less working condition, did I realize it was only tall Fiddlescrape, with his huge fists and his small head, which made my perspective from the floor even stranger.

Of course, sheer reflex already had me planning how to bring him down—a kick in the knee, hard as I could, to be followed by crumpling his cantaloupe-sized head with the chair I’d knocked over on my way down—but I reminded myself I wasn’t going to let things get out of hand the way I had last time.

I did my best to fill my lungs. I wasn’t ready to get up yet. “Hello, Fiddlesticks. Nice to see you again. How are the wife and kids?”

He just stared at me.

“What’s with the sour expression? Seems to me if I hadn’t got Howlingfell killed, you wouldn’t have this nice white-collar job. Is it really worse than being back in Hell hacking pieces of petrified shit into smaller pieces, or whatever you used to do?”

“Why are you here?”

“Duh. To see your boss, as I already explained at the front desk. Of my own free will. No socking people in the breadbasket required.”

His head was certainly strange, almost normal in profile, but too narrow across the front, and about eighty percent of the proper size, although with the right haircut and clothing he could just pass for a normal human. He didn’t really have the right haircut, though. The small span of his face and the slightly outturned eyes made him look more like a horse or a fish than a person. Still, he at least knew how to tie a double Windsor knot. That’s kind of a dying art.

“Why shouldn’t I just beat you to a bloody, dead mess right here?” he asked.

“First, because it wouldn’t be as easy as you think it would. Second, because I’m an angel, so I wouldn’t be dead anyway, just waiting briefly for a new body so I could come back and gut you like a largemouth bass.” I should have stopped there. “Oh, sorry. Smallmouth bass, in your case.” I was lucky that he didn’t seem that sensitive about his appearance, but I’d almost sent the whole thing off the rails. “And third,” I said quickly, in case he just hadn’t figured it out yet, “because I have an offer for your boss that I know he’ll want to hear.”

He looked angry and bewildered—not a good combination on anyone, much worse on him. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“It’s not hard, Fiddle-me-this. I want to offer the Grand Duke something. He’ll want to know about it. So if you and I get to ripping pieces off each other, and he never finds out what it was until it’s too late . . . well, he’ll probably send you to Doctor Teddy.”

This hit home. Doctor Teddy was a hideous little thing that worked for Eligor in his house in Hell, inflicting inventive kinds of pain on the grand duke’s enemies. Fiddlescrape gave me a worried look and stood there for a moment, rubbing his huge hands together. I took the opportunity to lift myself slowly from the floor until I was standing. Whatever else happened, he wasn’t getting another free shot at me like the first one.

He growled at me to stay put, then stepped out of the room again. I heard the door lock with a very definitive click, then heard his steps moving away at the same time as I heard him speak to someone, presumably on a phone. I righted the chair I’d knocked over, sat in it, and calmed my breathing, trying to slow my heart. I can’t tell you how badly I’d wanted to put my foot up Fiddlescrape’s too-tall ass. It’s a lot harder being smart than it is being stupid.

A minute or two later he came back. He beckoned and led me out into the hall, then nudged me along it, past another half-dozen unmarked doors and into what looked like a freight elevator at the end of the corridor. We went up. The stories ticked over until we’d reached the forty-fourth, then the door opened.

“Office is at the end,” said Fiddlescrape.

“You’re not coming with me? What if I start to litter or unreel the fire hose or something?”

“Office is at the end,” he said, louder this time.

“Well, it’s been fun,” I said as I stepped out. I’d been in this corridor before, knew the dark green carpets and expensive wainscoting. The entrance to Vald’s office was at the far end. The door of the elevator hissed shut behind me. Then the lights went out.

But I hadn’t been hit this time, or if I had, I hadn’t noticed it. I was still standing, though, could still feel my body, could still hear the elevator murmuring down toward the lower stories, but I couldn’t see a damn thing. Until the fire came. Whoosh! Flames all around me, blossoming from the walls, ceiling and floor like huge wavering flowers. It had to be gas jets—that was all I could figure, but I could already feel the fire licking at my clothes, shriveling my lashes and eyebrows to ash, so I jumped forward into the dark space before me.

Whoosh! More flames. What had at first seemed like a built-in crematory just outside the elevator on the executive floor expanded into a cascade of flames that stretched away in front of me, as if the oven had just become a long fiery tunnel. I couldn’t find the elevator now, let alone get back into it, and the skin on my hands and face was beginning to burn. Eligor, I had just enough time to think, you are such a shit.

Then I began to run, telling myself that it couldn’t last any longer than the twenty yards or so down the hall to Eligor’s office door. I could barely see the narrowing of the flames ahead of me, but I put my head down and did my best not to bump into any walls, or—God forbid—to fall down, because then I’d be roasted like a chicken dinner. The pain had already gone past the point I can describe. Fire had engulfed my clothes and was burning the skin right off my body. The only thing that had kept me alive this long was the fact that my body was from the heavenly warehouses. I could feel my eyes glazing, cracking, my lungs smoking as they shriveled into chipotle peppers. Every nerve in my body was giving its death cry, a shrill, continuous screech of pain that felt like it would kill me long before the actual damage did.

I ran for what must have been a hundred yards without finding anything but more fire. The burning corridor went on and on forever. Which meant I wasn’t in Five Page Mill anymore, or even in San Judas. Which meant I was in . . . no, not Hell. Not that fast. If Eligor could have managed it so quickly and easily the first time, I never would have survived to be here now. I wasn’t in Hell, I was stuck in my own mind.

Not that it did me any good to know that. It took everything I had to ease my crazy, dying sprint, because every second that passed meant I could feel the skin and muscles blackening right on my bones. But running wasn’t going to do it—I had to find my way out. Physically, I felt pretty sure I was still in the corridor on the forty-fourth floor.

I slowed to a walk. It really was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do—it went against the desperate, dying alarms of every nerve ending I had, against pain like nothing you could understand unless you’ve been through it. But I had to do it that way. I reached out my hands, putting them right into the jets of flame as I groped along. I was feeling actual walls beneath my touch while simultaneously feeling the bones of my fingers char and turn into ash and flake away. I don’t know why I wasn’t screaming like a madman. Maybe I was.

At last I felt a bump as I trailed my fingers over a doorframe—fingers that my howling senses told me had already been burned away. It felt like my actual brain was exposed in a scorched skull, and that everything they always said about no nerves in the brain was a horrible fucking lie. I found the doorknob then and turned it before I had time to think about what I was going to do if it wouldn’t open.

It opened. Into nothing. Then I was falling through blackness—tumbling, waving my arms and kicking my legs as I plummeted down into depths I couldn’t see, couldn’t even imagine. For half a second the air sawing across my exposed bones and meat actually felt like a cooling relief, but then it began to feel like all that raw Bobby-area was being sandblasted. This wasn’t lost-in-emptiness blackness, this wasn’t floating-in-nothing blackness, this was a hole that went down so far that I was plummeting like a meteor out of space. I’d plunge forever, burn up, or hit the bottom and burst into a million pieces.

I opened my mouth against the shrieking winds of my fall, but almost couldn’t make a noise because the breath had been blasted out of me. When I did, it was little more than a squeak, the noise of a mouse dropped out of the space shuttle.

“Cute,” I said, the words suck-snatched by the uprushing air as they came out of my mouth. “This is cute, Horseman. And so mature.”

I hit bottom. It wasn’t like hitting bottom from high orbit, though, it was more like I did an ordinary pratfall thump onto an expensive office carpet, then lay there gasping. I had fallen out of darkness into cool fluorescent light. Kenneth Vald, six feet and something of handsome, tanned, blond billionaire, watched me from his office chair. He held up a small object I couldn’t quite make out, because my brain was still rattling in my skull.

“Want a Pez?” he asked.

I struggled up onto my knees. The little plastic tower in his hand had the face of Jesus in his death agonies. Eligor thumbed the head back and a red lozenge of hard candy slid out of the neck like Christ’s throat had been slit.

I shook my head.

The grand duke took out the little candy and waved it at me. “You sure?” When I didn’t reply, he flicked it with his fingers. It shot at me like a bullet, hissed past so close I could feel the wind, then ricocheted off four walls (there may have been a ceiling-bounce in there somewhere) and back toward him. Eligor didn’t move, just opened his mouth a tiny bit and the Pez flew in. He crunched it up with gusto.

“Yum,” he said, “Tastes like Daddy Issues.”

I staggered erect, found a chair and sat down. I didn’t speak because I didn’t trust myself not to squeal like a wounded pig or simply burst into tears. Eligor hadn’t needed to remind me that he could fold me up like human origami and throw me away if he wanted to, but that’s the thing about Hell’s high rollers: they really enjoy their job.

“So, what brings you here, Doloriel? I can’t say I’m pleased to see you. You weren’t thinking of revenge, were you?” The Kenneth Vald face, famous from many newspapers, magazines, and websites about What Rich People Do, looked almost ordinary. Only the spark of scarlet gleaming deep in his eyes, a tiny reflection of the fiery passage I’d just escaped, made it clear that what was looking out from in there was a lot uglier than the shape it was wearing.

I sat slumped in my chair. You probably think I was acting beaten to disarm him, but I wasn’t acting. I’d been beaten by Eligor a long time ago. “I’ve got an offer for you,” I said at last. “Are you a gambling man?”

He laughed. I mean, he sounded genuinely tickled. “Oh, dearie me. A ‘gambling man’? Do you really think the house is going to stake you for another try, Doloriel? What’s your idea? Double or nothing to get the Countess back? I thought you’d learned your lesson by now. Since I have everything I wanted from you, I was actually going to leave you alone—at least for a while.”

“But you don’t have everything you need,” I said. “Anaita’s got your horn. She can still blow the whistle on you any time.”

He didn’t speak for a moment, but the embers in his eyes flared. “Why would you annoy me by reminding me?”

“Because I want to make a bargain with you—or rather, kind of a wager. Demons love to bet, right?”

“Not interested, little angel,” he said. “And getting bored now, too. Would you like another swim in the eternal fires?”

I took a breath. I couldn’t let him hurry me. I had nothing on my side but whatever calm I could muster, as well as a smidge of stubbornness. And I thought I might know one thing he didn’t. “No thanks,” I told him. “Not that it wasn’t interesting. It reminded me of when I visited you at Flesh Horse.”

“Ah,” he said with a faux-wistful smile. “Yes. Good times, good times.” His face went flat again. “But I just really enjoy burning the shit out of you. So why shouldn’t I start again?”

“Because you haven’t even found out what my bargain is. And that you’re not the only person interested in getting hold of that horn.”

Now his eyes narrowed. I felt myself falling toward him, falling into those fires that blazed at the center of each pupil. The falling wasn’t real, I told myself, but it was still very, very dangerous. I forced myself back into the present reality.

“What do you mean?” he asked at last.

“Sitri,” I said. “Remember him? Fat guy, prince of Hell, hates you as much as a ham hates Christmas? He’s looking for the horn. In fact, he’s gone to some impressive lengths to try to obtain it.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? Sitri? That crude, miserable slug wouldn’t dare—”

“I suggest you watch this,” I said as I took my phone out of my pocket. I clicked on the video of the Black Sun’s little seance and set it in front of him.

He watched it through to the end, his face getting stonier and stonier. When it was finished, he didn’t say a word as I picked up the phone and pocketed it again.

“Well?” I said at last. “You going to put me back in the oven? Or do we talk?”

Now the handsome Ken Vald face looked like something stretched over a rack, an uncomfortable fit and a poor disguise for the beast beneath. “You have five minutes to pitch your so-called bargain, Doloriel,” the grand duke said. “Five minutes to arouse my interest, or you’ll never see sunlight again.”