The Machine (An Ethan Stone Thriller) (44 page)

“Earth is lovely,” said Michael. “It is His perfect creation.”

“Have you looked at it recently?”

Michael smiled sympathetically.

“It’s going to be your home.”

“Balls it is!”

“It was all clearly laid out in the terms of the final agreement.”

“I’m not staying.”

Michael shook his head gently, his beautiful blond curls shining like gold in the cell’s strip lighting, and produced a wallet from his pocket.

“Your documents.”

He handed them over and watched as each plastic card was inspected and discarded.

“Who is Nicholas Clovenhoof?”

“You,” said Michael. “It’s your nom de voyage. I think people might raise eyebrows at someone signing his name Satan or the Angel of the Bottomless Pit.”

“Nicholas Clovenhoof.”

“That’s right.”

“Nicholas Clovenhoof?”

“Yes.”

“Nicholas... Clovenhoof?”

“Yes? Something wrong with that?”

“Are you kidding me? Isn’t this a blatant giveaway? You might as well call me Lou Cyphre or Mr DeVille. Nicholas Clovenhoof?”

“You want to change it?” said Michael.

“Yes, please.”

“What to?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Bernard or Jeremy or Colin or something, a bit more, you know...”

“Very well,” sighed the archangel and waved his hand as though driving a fly away.

The words on a dozen cards writhed and shifted.

The former Angel of the Bottomless Pit tried out his new name.

“Jeremy Clovenhoof.”

“Yes. Are you happy now?” asked Michael.

“Of course I’m sodding not. Look at this.”

Clovenhoof held up his driving licence.

“What about it?” asked Michael.

“The picture!”

“I think it’s a good likeness.”

“Exactly! Look at the horns. The red skin. No one’s said anything!”

“They’re English. They’re probably just too polite.”

Clovenhoof kicked at the police boots on the floor with his goaty hooves.

“Look!” he squeaked. “Are they all morons?”

“Would you rather they saw you as you really are?”

“It might get me a bit of respect.”

Michael sighed kindly and sat down on the bench, the plate of cold beans between them.

“You are not here as conqueror, my friend. You are now a resident.”

“No way.”

Michael gathered Clovenhoof’s cards and paper and tucked them back into the wallet.

“We’ve given you an identity. We will provide you a modest but favourable pension. This is an opportunity, Jeremy.”

Clovenhoof sneered in wilful ignorance and disgust at the items in his hands. All little plastic rectangles and strings of numbers.

“But what is this stuff? It’s all crap. I don’t know the first thing about life on Earth.”

“Then learn,” said Michael. “And live.”

The unusualness factor eased off through the afternoon. No more naked men appeared outside the shop and the peculiar pre-storm atmosphere had dissipated. Ben went home to a Pot Noodle for tea and an evening of wargaming miniature painting to look forward to with an option on polishing his replica Seleucid shield and a documentary about gladiators on the History Channel.

And the parcel on his kitchen table.

In all the nakedness-related excitement earlier he had completely forgotten about it. As he forked sweet and sour chicken noodles into his mouth, he opened the package with his free hand. It was a book, or at least a manuscript, printed on A4 but professionally bound.

YOU
Can Be My Perfect Man

By

Nerys Thomas

A nugget of rehydrated chicken suddenly went down the wrong way and Ben coughed noodles across the table. He fetched a dishcloth and mopped up the mess before re-reading the title and discovering to his horror that he had read it correctly the first time.

He reeled in panic.

Him? The perfect man? He liked to think he was a little bit mysterious and definitely underrated, but he wasn’t comfortable with other people thinking the same.

He tried to reflect on it rationally. He had many things going for him. He was young, single and disease-free. He had all his own teeth, his own flat and his own second hand bookshop.

And, thought Ben, wading purposefully into the matter rather than panicking at its edges, Nerys was not an unattractive woman. She was young. At least he assumed so. She wore make-up as though it was war paint and that made proper age analysis difficult. But she was attractive. Well, more striking than beautiful. And she certainly wore clothing that showed off the best of her... attributes.

She was quite clearly interested in men. He had heard her in company, giggling and stumbling past his door on more than one Saturday night. And she must have quite high standards because it was rare for her to invite the same man back more than once even though it was true that Ben was often woken on Sunday mornings by the words, “Call me!” shouted down the stairs or, less frequently, yelled out of an upstairs window.

Yes, he decided, she was a fine specimen of a woman and, although he hadn’t even thought about her in those terms before, if she thought he could be her perfect man then he was willing to give it a go. It wasn’t as though he wasn’t interested in that world of romance, of intimacy, of sex. Of course he was. It was just that, in his reckoning, sex was a bit like skiing. It was something other people did, something that, in a perfect world, he would like to try but he hadn’t had the training and wasn’t even sure he had the correct equipment.

Well, perhaps now was the time to hit the piste, metaphorically speaking.

He opened the book and began to read.

Clovenhoof woke up cold, damp and miserable.

He had stormed away from Michael the moment they had stepped outside the police station and spent the afternoon and evening constantly walking, constantly fuming at his situation. He walked nowhere in particular. There was nowhere he wanted to go that could be reached by walking. He wanted to go up and punch the smug smiles off a few faces. He wanted to go down and do pretty much the same thing. But the signposts in this dump pointed to Lichfield and Birmingham and Kingstanding. The Celestial City and Pandemonium didn’t figure.

The night was cold and lit by yellow sodium streetlights that merely made him homesick for the fiery orange glow of the Old Place. He found a real fire in a derelict warehouse behind the train station and two figures hunched over it. He approached and they didn’t turn him away and he warmed his hand by the fire. One of them offered him swigs from a bottle of something called Scrumpy Thunder and in that fizzy chemical concoction found his first pleasurable experience since his arrival.

When Dan and Quentin had curled up amongst their sleeping bags and blankets to sleep, Clovenhoof sat close to the fire and stared into its heart. When the fire began to die down he looked around for something to burn. There wasn’t much to be found although there was a fat sheaf of papers in his wallet, red and purple portraits of some woman in a crown, and he burned most of those to keep the flames alive.

The fire was a tiny thing. Pitiful. Nothing like the great roaring furnaces of the Old Place.

He sighed as he remembered how his favourite vantage point high above the fires of Hell. When exactly was it that he began to see his kingdom slide away from him?

Satan shook his head at the carnage on the Plains of Hell below him. Carnage was supposed to be part of the package in Hell, there was beauty in chaos, but this was just a mess.

The entrance gate was clogged again. Built centuries ago for a more modest rate of influx, the constant press of humans coming through in the twenty first century was greater than anyone had ever anticipated. It was now the norm to see crushed bodies oozing through, like meat from a mincer. Other times, like now, the weight of traffic was just too much and blockages occurred. Demons wielded pitchforks and gouged at the writhing mass to try and dislodge the bodies.

“Mulciber,” Satan sighed, “how did this ever get so bad?”

“Who could have anticipated the numbers, my lord?” replied his chief architect defensively. “The number of deaths each day is higher than ever, nearly a hundred and fifty thousand. We could maybe cope with that if so many of them weren’t coming our way. Two thirds of them by my reckoning.”

Satan nodded. “People are turning their backs on religion.”

“It’s not so much that,” Mulciber said, “but it seems more acceptable than ever now to be religious and to treat people badly. You’ve got crazy fundamentalists in every religion. They hate gays, foreigners, women. You name it, they’ll find you a reason in the bible or whatever to hate it.”

“Hmmm,” said Satan, indicating the wailing, gnashing wall of bodies, tangled in the agonising crush. “What worries me is that we might have a whole load of low-grade sinners being pulled apart by those pitchforks. We’d normally reserve that for the more serious offenders.”

“There have been some complaints, sir.”

“Yeah, I bet there have. How are things at the Lake of Fire?”

“Same as before, I’m afraid,” said Mulciber. “It’s full, completely full. A mild scorching is all we can achieve in a lot of cases. I’ve seen people walk across it, barely noticing that they’re not on solid ground.”

Satan paused for a moment to remember the lake as it was. A wild and glorious place where a body could flail and roast in blissful isolation. Now he couldn’t even paddle in the shallows. If he tried, it was likely that some hand would claw at his ankle, accompanied by whining about the overcrowding.

“I’m going to take a look up at the end of the line, Mulciber,” said Satan. “In the meantime, draft in some more demons.”

“To help with their pitchforks, sir?”

“No, to whip the ones that are working there now. Make them go faster.”

“Very good sir.”

Satan walked towards the gates. In ordinary times, the sound of so many souls in torment would please him greatly, but this just angered him. The torment was all wrong. Some of these souls had been sent to him for minor transgressions like bigamy or getting babies’ ears pierced. They were only supposed to experience eternal dullness, and maybe the kind of minor discomfort one would get from a mildly disappointing camping holiday.

The smell was all wrong too. Instead of the overpowering sulphurous reek of brimstone, there was something else. He paused for a moment to sniff the air. It was human sweat.

He went through the side entrance, emerged onto the road before the gate, and saw a different kind of horror. The road was long and all he could see was bodies packed impossibly together, seething forwards. No wonder the demons were having trouble clearing the blockage, there was no way to reduce the pressure from the other side, even for a moment.

And how was he, master of this domain, going to get through against the flow of the traffic?

“You and you, come here.” A pair of demons leapt to attention.“I want you to clear me a way through this.”

“Er, how?” rasped one of them.

“You’ve got a pitchfork, haven’t you? Well use it. Pile them on top of each other if you need to, but I want to go that way.”

The two demons soon formed an efficient tag team. They bullied and prodded the crowd so that people tried to press away, and hefted the bodies over the heads of the others if they couldn’t move fast enough. Progress was still agonisingly slow, and Satan had to endure the incessant grumbling from all he passed.

“What are you all in such a hurry for?” he yelled irritably, “’Are we there yet?’ Do you people not know what eternity means?”

“But we’ve been waiting for hours!” moaned one of the yet-to-be-damned.

“Waiting for what?” Satan asked her.

“Well, you know,” she said. “To get in.”

“Don’t you know where it is you’re going? You must have seen enough clues by now, hmmm?”

He indicated his horns and hooves. One of the demons stabbed her arm with his pitchfork for good measure.

“Course I know,” she said. “I just think it’s disgusting that you make people queue like this.”

Satan rolled his eyes and pressed on, tuning out the mutterings of the crowd. At the Styx, Satan had them find Charon’s old boat and they made a private crossing, avoiding the overcrowded ferries. On the other side, they plunged back into the impossible crush and then, after several hours, the demons broke through the back of the queue and Satan staggered out into open space.

As Satan walked on, he waved the demons to stay behind.

“I’ll need you to get me back through when I’m done here, boys.”

They scowled at each other and settled to wait, poking passing humans with their pitchforks, competing to see who was quickest on the draw.