People :
Author : Alan Moore
Text :
The devil couldn’t call to mind the last time he’d enjoyed himself as much as this. This was a great laugh in the greatest sense of the word great: great like a war, a white shark or the Wall of China. Oh, my sweethearts in damnation, this was priceless.
There he’d been, just leaning on somebody’s old dream of a balcony and puffing on his favorite pipe. This was the one he’d whittled from the spicy, madness-seasoned spirit of an eighteenth-century French diabolist. He fancied that it made his best tobacco taste of Paris, sexual intercourse and murder, somewhere between meat and licorice.
Anyway, there he’d been, loafing around above the Attics of the Breath, close to the crux of Angle-land, when up had come this builder, Master Builder mind you, with a split lip and a shiner like he’d just been in a fight. I mean, the devil thought, how often do you get an opportunity to take the piss on such a sewer-draining scale as that?
“My dear boy! Have we walked into a pearly gate?” Not too bad for an opening remark, all things considered, dripping as it was with obviously false concern, as if inquiring on the health of an obnoxious nephew you transparently despised. The thing with builders, Master Builders in this instance, was that while they were quite capable of leveling a city or a dynasty, they hated being patronized.
The Master Builder – the white-haired one who’d made something of a name for himself playing billiards; held his cue in one hand at that very moment, for that matter – stopped and turned to see who was addressing him. Scowled like a fondled choirboy when he found out, naturally; that thing the builders did to make their eyes flash a split second before they incinerated you. My word, he was in a bad mood, was Mighty Whitey.
To be honest, this made a refreshing change from the unasked-for pity and the bottomless forgiveness that was usually in their gaze. Builders would order you at snooker cue-point to inhabit depths that were unspeakable, lower than those endured by syphilitic tyrants, and then add insult to injury by forgiving you. It was a treat to come across one in the throes of a demeaning temper tantrum. The rich possibilities for some inflammatory satire made the devil’s ball-sack creep.
The builder, sorry, Master Builder, sounded entertainingly slow-witted, with his speech slurred by the swollen lip as he replied.
“Murck naught mye shamfall strate, thyou dungcurst thorng …”
It was the same profound, exploded rubbish all the builders talked, the strangely resonant and blazing words reverberating off to whisper in the extra set of corners that there were up here. Delightfully, however, even phrases of world-ending awesome fury, spoken through a split lip, were quite funny.
Unaware that everything he said sounded hilariously punch-drunk, the indignant Master Builder had gone on to justify his woebegone condition by explaining that he’d just been in a fight with one of his best mates over a game of snooker. It seemed that this chum had willfully endangered a specific ball that everyone had known the white-haired Master Builder had his sights on. Technically this was permitted, but was thought of as appalling form. As was invariably the case this ball had got a human name attached to it, but it was somebody the devil hadn’t heard of. Not at that point, anyway.
It turned out that the builders had got into an unseemly row across the billiard table, and that the white-haired one had eventually called his colleague something dreadful and suggested that they step outside to settle it. They’d left the shot unplayed, gone out and had their brawl, and were now skulking back towards the game-hall to continue with their uncompleted competition. Talk about showing yourself up. All the scrounging Boroughs ghosts had stood round in a ring shouting encouragements, like boot-faced school-kids at a playground punch-up. “Goo on! Give ’im one right up the ’alo!” Talk about ruffling your feathers. It was all so wonderfully wretched that the devil had to laugh.
“It’s not your fault, old boy. It’s just competitive sports, in a neighborhood like this. Brings out the hooligan in everybody. I’ve seen people have their throats cut over games of hopscotch. What you ought to do is drop the snooker and go back to organizing dances on the heads of pins. Not half so violent, and you’d have a good excuse for wearing ball gowns all the time.”
The devil nudged the builder in the ribs good-naturedly, then laughed and clapped him on his back. The one thing that they hated more than being patronized was people being over-intimate, especially if that went as far as someone touching them. All of those pictures that depicted builders holding hands with wounded grenadiers or sickly tots, in the opinion of the devil, were just mockups for the purpose of publicity.
Slow as the builders generally were in understanding jokes, the white-haired chap had finally caught on to the fact that he was being made fun of, which they hated almost as much as they hated being condescended to or touched. He’d spouted some blood-curdling holy gibberish which more or less boiled down to “Leave it out, Tosh, or I’ll ’ave yer”, but with extra nuances involving being bound in chests of brass and thrown into the lowest depths of a volcano for a thousand years. Whips, scorpions, rivers of fire, the usual rigmarole. The devil raised his thorny eyebrows in a look of hurt surprise.
“Oh dear, I’ve made you cross again. I should have known this was your ladies’ special time, but I barged in making insensitive remarks. And right when you were no doubt trying to calm down in order to take this important shot. I should be inconsolable if just as you were lining up your cue you thought of me and ripped the baize or broke your stick in half. Or anything.”
The Master Builder reared up with a sudden sunburst of St. Elmo’s Fire around his snowy head and bellowed something multi-faceted and biblical, essentially refuting that this was his ladies’ special time. The second part of what the devil had just said then seemed to sink in, about ruining his game by being in the throes of rage. He checked himself and took a deep breath, then exhaled. There followed a celestial burst of nonsense-poetry where a gruff, unadorned apology would have sufficed. The devil thought about a further goading, but decided not to push his famous luck.
“Think nothing of it, old sport. It was my fault, always taking jokes too far and spoiling things for everybody else. You know, I worry privately that deep inside I’m not a terribly nice person. Why am I aggressive all the while, even when I’m pretending to be jovial? Why do I have all these unpleasant defects in my personality? Sometimes I convince myself it’s work-related, as if having been condemned to the unending torments of the sensory inferno was an adequate excuse for my regrettable behavior. Good luck with the snooker tournament. I’ve every confidence in you. I’m sure that you can put this unimportant fit of murderous rage behind you, and that you won’t irrevocably mess up somebody’s only mortal life by having acted like a petulant buffoon.”
The fellow seemed uncertain how to take this, narrowing his sole functioning eye suspiciously. Eventually he gave up trying to work out who, precisely, was at fault here and just grimaced as though indicating that their conversation had been satisfactorily concluded. With a curt nod to the devil, who had gallantly tilted his leather hat-brim in reply, the Master Builder carried on along the walkway, lifting up one hand occasionally to tenderly explore the purple flesh around his pummeled brow.
You could tell from the stiff way that he held himself as he was flouncing off that the white-robed chap was still fuming. Anger, as with handicrafts and mathematics, was among the devil’s fields of expertize. All three things were exquisitely involved and intricate, which sat well with the devil’s admiration for complexity. He could have hours of fun with any of them. Oh, and idle hands. He liked those too. And good intentions.
He’d relit his pipe, striking a spark off of a thumbnail like a beetle carapace, and watched the builder as he stalked off grumpily towards the vanishing point of the lengthy balcony. Poor loves. Walking around all day looking Romantic, feeling like the very spinning clockwork of the fourfold Universe with everybody singing songs about them. All those Christmas cards they were expected to live up to and the work that it must be to keep those robes clean all the time. How did they cope, the precious poppets?
He’d been leaning on the pitch-stained balustrade and wondering what he should do next to amuse himself when suddenly, as if in answer to his seldom-answered prayers, a door creaked open in the long wall of accumulated dreams that was behind him and a little boy clad in pajamas, dressing gown and slippers padded hesitantly out onto the bare boards of the balcony. He was adorable, and secretly the devil had a weakness for small children. They were scared of absolutely everything.
With blond curls and with eyes song-lyric blue, the little sleepwalker had not at first appeared to realize that he was in the presence of the devil, with the door that he’d emerged from being some yards off from where the fiend was standing. Looking apprehensive and with eyebrows lifted in perpetual startlement, the youngster slippered over to the blackened railings of the walkway and gazed out between them at the stretching Attics of the Breath. He’d kept this up for a few moments, looking puzzled and disoriented, then had turned his head and glanced off down the landing to where you could just make out the battered builder vanishing into the distance, dabbing at his eye.
The kid still hadn’t noticed that the devil was behind him, but then people never did. The devil wondered if the boy were dead or merely sleeping, dressed up in his night-clothes as he was. Conceivably, it might not even be a human child at all. It could have been a figment wandered off from someone else’s dream or possibly a character out of a bedtime storybook, a fiction given substance here by the built-up imaginings accreted over many readings, many readers.
In the devil’s judgment, though, this lad seemed to be real. Dreams and the characters from stories had a tidy quality to their construction, as if they’d been simplified, whereas this present nipper had a poorly-thought-through messiness about his personality that smacked of authenticity. You could tell from the way he stood there, rooted to the spot and gazing after the retreating builder, that he didn’t have the first clue where he was or what he should do next. People in dreams or stories, to the contrary, were always full of purpose. So, this little man was definitely mortal, although whether he was dead or dreaming was a matter harder to determine. The pajamas indicated that he was a dreamer, but of course small children generally died in hospital or in their sickbeds, so infant mortality was still a possibility. The devil thought he’d inquire further.
“Well, now. It’s a ghostly little fidget-midget.”
There. That hadn’t been an over-terrifying opening remark in his opinion. While he might from time to time enjoy a bit of fun with helpless humans, even to the point of driving them insane or killing them, that didn’t mean that he was undiscriminating. Children, as he’d noted, were already frightened as a natural consequence of being children. Burst a crisp-bag and they’d jump. Where was the sport or the finesse in that?
The small boy turned around to face him, wearing a ridiculous expression on his elfin face, eyes goggling and his mouth stretched at both sides into a rubber letterbox. It looked like he was trying to conceal his real expression, which was probably pure dread, in order not to give offense. His mom had more than likely taught him it was rude to scream at the deformed or monstrous. Quite frankly, the child’s blend of paralyzing fear and genuine concern for other people’s feelings struck the devil as being both comical and rather sweet. He thought he’d try another pleasant conversational remark, now that he had the lad’s attention, so to speak.
“You look lost, little boy. Oh dear, oh dear. We can’t have that, now, can we?”
Even though the devil’s tone was clearly that of an avuncular child-murderer, the tousled moppet seemed to take it at face value, visibly relaxing and assuming he was out of danger at the first sound of a sympathetic voice. This trusting little dickens was a find, and no mistake. The devil wondered how he’d lasted for five minutes in the unforgiving mechanisms of the living world, and then reflected that most probably he hadn’t. Actually, the longer that he spent in the tyke’s company, the likelier it seemed that this was someone dead rather than someone dreaming, someone who’d been lured into a stranger’s car or an abandoned fridge dumped on an out-of-earshot wasteland.
Watching the boy’s features you could almost see what he was thinking, almost see the cogs turn in his as-yet undeveloped mind. He looked as though he thought that he was trespassing, but that if he kept up an act the devil wouldn’t realize this was the case. He looked like he was trying to come up with an excuse for being here, but, being young, had not yet had a great deal of experience in telling lies. As a result of trying to construct an alibi, when he eventually piped up he sounded tremulously guilty, even though his flimsy story was most probably the truth.
“That’s right. I’m lost. Can you see in that window for me so that I’ll know where I am?”
The boy was nodding to the glinting memories of windows set into the dream-wall he’d emerged out of. He clearly couldn’t care less what was on the other side but, once told, would pretend to have his bearings and then thank the devil nicely before running off as fast as his short legs would carry him, getting as far away as he could manage, the direction unimportant. He was obviously frightened but was trying not to show he was afraid, as if the devil were no more than an uncomfortably big dog.
Frowning in mild bemusement, the arch-enemy of mankind shot a casual glance through the glass panes the child had indicated. Nothing of much interest lay beyond, just an exaggerated phantom of a local schoolroom plucked from someone’s night-thoughts. It was a location that the devil knew, that much went without saying: there were no locations that the devil didn’t know. The world of space and history was big, no doubt about it, but then so was War & Peace, yet both were finite. Given enough time – or, if you liked, given no time at all – then you could easily attain a detailed grasp of either of them. There was no great trick about omniscience, the devil thought. Just read the story through enough times at your near-infinite leisure and you’ll be an expert. He looked back towards the apprehensive toddler.
“Looks like it’s the needlework-room that’s upstairs at Spring Lane School, only a fair bit bigger. I hang out round here because I’m very fond of handicraft. It’s one of my great specialties. I’m also rather good at sums.”
This was all true, of course. One of the ways in which people continually misunderstood the devil, woundingly so in his own opinion, was that they thought he was always telling lies. In fact, though, nothing could be further from the case. He couldn’t tell a lie if he was paid to, not that anybody ever paid him to do anything. Besides, the truth was a far subtler tool. Just tell people the truth and then let them mislead themselves, that was his motto.
What the truth was with regard to this small boy, however, wasn’t really clear. Assuming that the child was dead and not just dreaming, he did not appear to have been dead for long. He looked like someone who had only just that moment found themselves here in the Second Borough, in Mansoul, somebody who had yet to get their bearings. If that was the case, what was he doing scuttling round here in the dream-sediments? Why hadn’t he just automatically dived back into his short life at the point of birth, for one more go-round on his little individual carousel? Or if, after a million turns on the same ride, he felt he’d finally absorbed all that it had to offer and elected to instead come up to the unfolded town, why was he unaccompanied? Where were the beery crowds of celebrating ancestors? Even if there were some unprecedented circumstance in play here, you’d still think that management would have arranged an escort. In fact, management was so efficient that an oversight was quite unthinkable. Actually, the devil thought, that was a good point. It suggested more was going on here than immediately met the eye.
The devil puffed his pipe and contemplated the intriguing half-pint specimen that shuffled nervously before him, who was visibly attempting to compose an exit-line and end their conversation. That would never do, and so the devil plucked the pipe-stem from his smoldering maw and made sure he got his two penn’orth in before the infant did.
“But you don’t quite add up to anything that I’m familiar with. Come, little chap. Tell me your name.”
That was the point at which the foundling child made his astounding revelation.
“My name’s Michael Warren.”
Oh, my dears, my cousins in the sulfur, can you possibly imagine? It was better than the time when he tricked self-important, brooding Uriel into revealing where the secret garden was located (it was in a fizzy puddle in Pangea). It surpassed, in terms of comedy, the look on his ex-girlfriend’s perfect features when her seventh husband in a year died on their wedding night, the devil having stopped his heart a second prior to the intended consummation. Why, it even beat that moment of hilarity during the Fall, when one of the low-ranking devils, Sabnock or some other marquis, who’d been consequently pushed down further into the excruciating quagmire of material awareness than the others, had called out “Truly this sensate world is one beyond endurance, though I am delighted to report my genitals have started working”, whereupon the builders and the devils they were using as a form of psychic landfill all put down their flaming snooker cues for a few minutes until they’d stopped laughing. This dazed baby trumped all that though, knocked it into a cocked hat: his name was Michael Warren. He’d just said so. He’d just come straight out with it as if it was of no significance, the modest little beggar.
Michael Warren was the name attached to the precariously-balanced billiard ball that had kicked off the fight between the builders.
And they hadn’t had a fight since, what, Gomorrah? Egypt?
The events that were in orbit around this unwitting child had an intoxicating whiff of intricacy to them, complex as a clockwork anthill, complex as the mathematics of a hurricane. The possibilities for convoluted entertainment that this clueless little soul presented to the fiend were such an unexpected gift that he took an involuntary step backwards. All the dragon frills that edged the image he was wearing rippled in anticipation, flaring up in a display of his heraldic colors, red and green, bloodshed and jealousy.
“You’re Michael Warren? You’re the one to blame for all this trouble?”
Oh, the way his little jaw dropped, so that you could tell it was the first he’d heard about his sudden notoriety. This whole thing was becoming more delicious by the moment, and the devil laughed until he thought he’d burst a testicle. Wiping the hydrochloric tears of mirth from his peculiar eyes, he focused them once more upon the boy.
“Wait till I tell the lads. They’ll be in fits. Oh, this is good. This is extremely good.”
That set him off again, the thought of how his fellow devils would respond when he informed them of his latest stroke of undeserved good fortune. Belial, the toad in diamond, would just blink his ring of seven eyes and try to make out that he hadn’t heard. Beelzebub, that glaring wall of porcine hatred, would most likely cook in his own rage. And as for Astaroth, he’d simply purse the lipstick-plastered mouth upon his human head into a vicious pout and would be looking daggers for the next three hundred years. The devil really had the giggles now. He laughed so hard his broad-brimmed hat fell back around his neck, at which point the already nervous child abandoned all the manners that his mother had instilled in him and screamed like an electrocuted aviary. The infant’s eyes began to well with frightened tears.
Ah, yes. The horns. The devil had forgotten he had horns in this particular ensemble. Horns, for some unfathomable reason, always made them jump when actually they should consider themselves lucky. Horns were nothing. Horns were just his work-clothes. They should see him when he was in fancy dress, for state occasions and the like, wearing one of his more finely-tailored robes of imagery. The coruscating spider/lizard combination, for example, or the gem of infinite regress. By Jingo, then they’d have something to cry about.
Blubbing profusely now the lad looked up with that expression of mixed accusation and outraged betrayal with which people generally seemed to greet him. He had seen it on the faces of Renaissance alchemists and Nazi dabblers alike. The message it conveyed, in essence, was ‘This isn’t fair. You’re not meant to be real.’ That was the main thrust of what the aggrieved and weeping cherub was now saying to him.
“You’re the devil.”
Children. They’re so wonderfully perceptive, aren’t they? Probably the horns were what had given him away. He felt a flicker of mild irritation at the fact that while people continually identified him as a devil, nobody was ever sure which one he was. It would be like somebody greeting Charlie Chaplin in the street by shouting “You’re that bloke out of that film”. It was insulting, but he didn’t let it get him down. He was in much too fine a mood for that. He’d broken off his laughing-jag and glanced down at the tot, goodhumoredly.
“Well … yes. Yes, I suppose I am.”
Poor mite. He looked like he was getting a stiff neck from craning up to keep his brimming gaze upon the demon regent. Out of pure consideration and concern, the devil squatted down upon his haunches and leaned forward so that he and the small boy were eye to eye, the child’s blue puddles staring earnestly into the devil’s traffic-lights. He thought he’d tease the kid, just for a bit of mischief. What could be the harm in that? He spoke in puzzled tones of the most innocent inquiry.
“Why? Where did you think you were?”
That, thinking back, would seem to have been the remark that finally undid the little scamp. He’d shrieked something that sounded like “But they were only ants” and then had taken off along the endless landing, going nineteen to the dozen, holding his pajama bottoms up with one hand as he ran to stop them falling down around his ankles.
Oh dear. Him and his big mouth. Despite the wholly innocent intent behind the devil’s harmless query, it appeared that Michael Warren had inferred from it that he’d been sent to Hell, possibly for a crime involving ants. Wherever did these jumped-up monkeys get all their ideas from? Not that he was saying that this wasn’t Hell, mind you. More that the actual situation was far less simplistic than that word implied, and where this devil was concerned one over-simplified at one’s own risk.
So there he was, watching the famous Michael Warren running full tilt down the walkway, trying to hold his pants up, squeaking like a fresh-hatched banshee. Was it any wonder that the devil couldn’t call to mind the last time that he’d had such fun?
He straightened up out of his crouch and flexed his two-tone rags to straighten them. The fleeing boy was some way off along the monstrously extended balcony, slippers flapping comically against the floorboards underfoot. The devil wondered where the child thought he was going.
Leisurely, he knocked his screaming, man-faced pipe against the balustrade to empty it, and then put it away into a pocket of himself. His smoke-break was now evidently over, and he couldn’t stand round here all day. He eyed the by-now tiny figure of the child as it continued its disorganized retreat into the distance of the elevated boardwalk. It was time to get on with some work.
The devil took a short unhurried step, putting his boot down on the boards, heel first and then the ball of his foot in a soft, percussive double thump a little like the beating of a heart: bump-bump. He took another step, this time a longer one that swallowed up more ground, so that it seemed like a protracted pause before the double footfall came again: bump-bump. He took a further pace. This time the pause went on and on. The twin thud that would signify the step’s end never came.
The devil floated a few feet above the floor, still carried slowly forward by the slight momentum of the step or two he’d taken when he launched himself. He narrowed his mismatched eyes, like malefic 3D spectacles, fixed on the dwindling form of the escaping child along the balcony’s far end. He grinned and let his scarlet and viridian pinions snap like stormy flags behind as he began to gather speed. He crackled and he burned. He did his trademark chuckle.
Comet-assed and showering colored embers like a Roman candle in his wake, the devil sizzled down the walkway, screeching after the small fugitive, closing the gap between them effortlessly. In a way, the boy’s intuitive attempt to treat the fiend as an uncomfortably big dog had not been so far off the mark. Certainly, you should never run from devils. Your retreating back will simply lend you the appearance of absconding prey, which, when it comes to dogs and demons, only tends to get them going.
Hearing from behind him the approaching firework rush, mixed as the sound was with that of the devil’s escalating cackle, the boy glanced back once across his shoulder and then looked as if he wished he hadn’t.
Whoosh. The devil reached down with both scorched and blistered hands to grab the squealing escapee beneath his armpits from the rear, snatching him fast into the whistling air, across the balustrade and up into the glass and ironwork altitudes above the Attics of the Breath. The child’s scream rose as they did, spiraling aloft with them to ring among the giant painted girders, startling the pigeons nested there into a brief ash-flurry of activity. With his slipper-clad feet pedaling frantically, the kid first pleaded for the fiend to let him go, then realized how high up he was and begged instead not to be dropped.
“Well, make your mind up,” said the devil, and considered dropping Michael Warren a few times then catching him before he hit the floor, though on reflection he thought better of it. It would over-egg the lily. It would gild the pudding.
They were hovering there, treading air, a thousand feet or more between them and the vast checked tablecloth of square holes spread below. Having considered all the aspects and the angles of this novel circumstance, the devil opted for a gentler approach in his communications with the boy. You caught more flies with honey than you did with vinegar, and you caught more with bullshit than you did with either. Tipping forward his horned head he whispered in the lad’s ear to be heard above the flap and flutter of his banners, red and green, hot coals and absinthe.
“Something tells me that we’ve got off to a bad start, haven’t we? I’m sensing, from the screaming and the running off, that I’ve said something to upset you without meaning to. What do you say we put it all behind us and begin afresh?”
With frightened, pin-prick eyes still fixed upon the hideous drop beneath his kicking slippers, Michael Warren answered in a wavering falsetto, managing to sound scared witless and indignant at the same time.
“You said this wiz Hell! You said you wiz the devil!”
Hmm. Good point. The devil had at least implied both of those things, but took care to sound pained and woefully misunderstood in his response to the boy’s accusation.
“Come now, that’s unfair. I didn’t claim that this was Hell. I merely asked you where you thought you were and you jumped to your own conclusions. As for me being a devil, well, I am. There’s no escaping it. I’m not the Devil though, or at least, not the one that you were probably expecting. I’m not Satan, and besides, he doesn’t look like this. You’d be surprised what Satan looks like, and I promise you you’d never recognize him in, ooh, what, nine billion years?”
By now more confident that his small body would not be allowed to fall, the dangling darling tried to twist his head around, to face the fiend across his shoulder as he spoke.
“Well, if you’re not him, who are you, then? What’s your name?”
That was a tricky one. The rules that governed what he was – essentially, a field of living information – meant that he was more or less compelled to answer any direct question and to do so truthfully. It didn’t mean, of course, that he was under any obligation to make matters easy for the questioner. Given that devils were reluctant to reveal their names, which could be used to bind them, he would generally employ some form of code, or else engage human interrogators in a guessing game. With Michael Warren, he decided to provide his answer in the manner of a crossword clue.
“Oh, I’ve been given dozens of old nicknames, but in truth I’m just plain, mixed-up Sam O’Day. Why don’t you call me Sam? Think of me as a roguish uncle who can fly.”
Oblivious to the anagram, the child seemed to accept this, albeit grudgingly. Young as he was, he was already obviously acquainted with the concept of the roguish uncle, and yet was still of an age where he was probably uncertain as to whether they could fly or not. He ceased his futile struggling at any rate, and simply hung there acquiescently. When the boy spoke again, the devil noticed that he had his eyes shut to block out the horrid plunge beneath his tingling toes.
“Why did you tell me that I wiz in trouble?”
All these bloody questions. What had happened to the days when people either exorcized you or else haggled with you for a good price on their souls? The devil sighed and once again took on the same slightly offended tone he’d used before.
“I didn’t say you were in trouble. I said that you’d caused some trouble. Quite unwittingly, of course, and nothing anybody’s blaming you for. I just thought you’d like to know, that’s all.”
The kid persisted. That was a big problem these days: everybody knew their rights.
“Well, if I’m not in trouble, wizzle you please put me down? You’ll make my arms fall off holding me up like this.”
The fiend clucked reassuringly.
“Of course I won’t. Why, I’ll bet they’re not even aching. I don’t know how you could possibly mistake this place for Hell. Bodily pain’s unheard of up here.”
Agonizing torments of the heart and spirit, though, were well known everywhere, but naturally the devil didn’t think to mention this. Instead, the fiend glossed smoothly on with his persuasive patter.
“As for me putting you down, are you quite sure that’s what you want? I mean, your arms aren’t really hurting, are they? And you didn’t look as if you knew where you were going when you were down on the ground. Putting you back and leaving you alone would just mean you were lost again. Besides, I’m quite a famous devil. I can do all sorts of things. Dismiss me, and you’re passing up a deathtime’s opportunity.”
The lad’s eyes opened, just a crack.
“What do you mean?”
The devil glanced down idly at the Attics of the Breath below. Some of the wandering ghosts and phantasms down there were looking up at Michael and the devil, hovering just beneath the green glass ceiling of the grand arcade. The fiend could see a group of urchins, dead or dreaming, who seemed to be paying him particular attention. No doubt they could see he’d caught a child and wondered if they might be next. Have no fear, little children. For today, at least, you’re safe. Perhaps another time. Returning his gaze to the back of the suspended boy’s blond head and breathing hot upon the nape the devil answered his last query.
“I mean there are things that I can tell you. There are things that I can show you. It’s well known. I’m practically proverbial. I get a mention in the Bible … well, in the Apocrypha, but that’s fairly impressive, don’t you think? And I was Adam’s first wife’s second husband, though that got left out of Genesis. It’s like with any adaptation, really. Minor characters omitted to speed up the story, complex situations simplified and so forth. You can’t blame them, I suppose. And I was very close to Solomon at one point, though again, you wouldn’t guess that from the Book of Kings. Shakespeare, however, bless him, Shakespeare gives me credit where it’s due. He talks about a kind of trip I can take people on. It’s called ‘Sam O’Day’s Flight’, and it’s more wonderful and thrilling than the biggest fairground ride you ever dreamed of. Do you fancy one?”
Dangling limply in the devil’s arms, the Warren kid seemed unenthusiastic.
“How do I know if I’d like it? I might not. And if I didn’t, how do I know you’d stop when I wanted to?”
The Fifth Infernal Duke, noting that this was not quite a refusal, bent his head close to the lad’s pink ear as he moved in to make the sale.
“If I hear you ask me to stop, I’ll stop at once. How’s that? And as for payment for the ride, well, I can see that you’re an offspring of the Boroughs, so I don’t expect that you get pocket money, do you? Doesn’t matter. Tell you what, because I’ve taken quite a shine to you, young man, I’ll do this as a favor. Then, at some remote point in the future, if there’s ever something useful you can do for me, we’ll call it quits. Does that sound fair to you?”
The child’s eyes were wide open now, at least in the most literal sense. Still trying not to look directly downward, he was tilting back his curly head to stare up through the arcade roof at the unfurling geometeorology. The devil could see an enchantingly baroque arrangement of some several dozen tesseracts that were engaged in folding up to form something resembling a ten- or twenty-sphere. No wonder the small boy looked mesmerized and sounded far away when he eventually replied.
“Well … yes. Yes, I suppose so.”
That was all that the fiend needed. True, a minor’s spoken affirmation couldn’t technically be called a binding compact, nothing written down, nothing in red and white, and yet the devil felt that it could be interpreted as an agreement to proceed.
He dived.
Dived like a crippled bomber, the descending engine drone, dropped like a stone or like an owl that’s sighted supper, plunged like the astounding cleavage of his ex-wife, fell out of the vaulted heights above the Attics of the Breath as only he could fall, his colored streamers rustling in a deafening cacophony. The child was screaming something, but above the wind of their descent you couldn’t make it out. As a result of this the devil could say, in all honesty, that he had not yet heard the infant ask to stop.
At the last moment, barely fifty feet above the boarded floor with its enormous vats, the devil pulled out of his plummet in a sharp, right-angled swerve that took them soaring off along the length of the immense emporium. The scruffy little Herberts who’d been rubbernecking at the devil and his captive only a few moments back were now running for cover, probably convinced that he’d been swooping down to gather them up in his claws as well. He seared down the gigantic corridor, a dangerous gobbet of ball-lightning shedding sparks and keening with the process of its own combustion, scattering those few scant souls who were about the Attics at that precise juncture of the century, the year, the afternoon, holding a baby in his sweltering arms. The toddler’s howl was stretched into the Doppler wail of an approaching train by the velocity of his blurred transit, streaking yards above the pale pine boards which were lit briefly by the demon’s passage, red and green, poppies and putrefaction.
They were heading west towards the blood-burst of that day’s specific sunset, where the light poured in like smelted ore through the glass panels of the arcade roof. The devil knew the nipper’s eyes would be wide open during all of this. At speeds like these, with all the spare flesh on one’s face rippling towards the rear side of the skull, it was impossible to close them. Saying anything, even a single syllable like ‘stop’, was quite out of the question.
The boy’s head was angled down, watching the huge square vats flash by beneath them. The experience, the devil knew, was very much like viewing a surprisingly engrossing abstract film. The files of apertures that ran along the length of the great attic each allowed a view into a single room at different stages of its progress in the fourth direction. Living beings in those rooms appeared as static tentacles of gemstone, inner lit and still as statues as they wound among each other, only the elusive darting lights that were their consciousnesses lending the illusion of mobility and motion. Zooming down a row of tanks from just above them, though, the vats became like single frames on an unreeling spool of celluloid. The winding, frozen shapes appeared to move in the unchanging confines of the endlessly repeated room containing them, sometimes withdrawing altogether for brief stretches when the space was empty, flickering into view again a moment later to resume their strange, fluorescent dance. The fluctuations of the colored forms mapped random mortal movement through these worldly chambers in a way that was hypnotic and, at times, hauntingly beautiful. The little boy, at least, appeared to be absorbed, in that his high-pitched shriek had sunk to a low moan. This probably meant it was time to step on the accelerator, since the devil didn’t want his passenger to nod off out of boredom. He’d his reputation to consider.
A reverberating peal of layered thunder marked the point where they surpassed the speed of sound, and then a little after that there was a pocket of unearthly stone-deaf hush when they exceeded even the velocity of silence. The resplendent devil and the scamp that he was baby-sitting roared down the unending throat of the arcade, the sky beyond the hall’s glass roof changing its colors every other moment as they dashed through days and days. The sunset red became first violet and then purple, deepening to a profound black in which the construction lines of the unfolding hyper-weather were picked out in silver. This was followed by more purple and then the cerise and peach of dawn. Blue mornings and gray afternoons smeared past in stroboscopic washes. Long and sleepless nights were gone in seconds, swallowed in the brief flare of another molten sunrise. Faster still they hurtled until neither of them could distinguish the exact point at which one hue turned into another. Everything became a tunnel of prismatic shimmer.
Swerving on a sixpence and without reducing speed, the devil veered all of a sudden so that they were locked on a collision course with one of the enormous trees that thrust up through its fifty-foot-square hole on the far side of the emporium: an elm expanded to an ancient redwood by the variation that there was between dimensions. The ear-piercing screech that came from Michael Warren indicated to the devil that at least his charge had shrugged off the ennui from which he’d earlier seemed to be suffering.
The stretch of corridor that had the giant elm erupting through its floor was in the night-miles that provided punctuation along the vast Attics’ length at measured intervals. The firmament seen through the darkened glass above was lustrous ebony. Chrome traceries of snail-slime were delineating the evolving contours of the supra-geometric cumuli outside, the radiance from those huge bodies lending these benighted reaches of the never-ending hall a moonlit and crepuscular appearance. Mixed-up Sam O’Day, the King of Wrath, the groom-slayer, the devil, he scorched through the shadows and the cloudlight, heading for the leafy wooden tower that swelled up terrifyingly out of the silvered murk before them.
Pigeons, rendered almost microscopic in comparison with the huge boughs that sheltered them, awoke from their slow-motion dreams and flapped up in alarm at the loud, spitting pyrotechnics of the fiend’s approach. The devil knew that this most special family of birds were more or less unique in their ability to pass between the Upstairs and the Downstairs world, and often would take refuge in a tree’s higher dimensions where they knew that they’d be fairly safe from cats. Cats, it was true, could sometimes scrabble through an aperture into the Attics of the Breath – the fiend assumed they’d learned this trick originally by climbing after pigeons – but the higher realm was petrifying for a living feline. Usually, they’d noisily evacuate their bowels and leap straight down the nearest window back into the world. The whole maneuver was so stressful for them that they seemed to only use it when they needed to move straight from one room to another without passing through the intervening space. The talent wasn’t any use, though, when it came to hunting, so the roosting birds were safe. Not from the devil, obviously, but from practically every other predator that they might reasonably expect to whiz out of the dark towards them, coughing fire. The flock had just been woken unexpectedly from sleep and taken by surprise. There isn’t much, the devil thought, which takes a pigeon by surprise. That was no doubt the reason for their agitation.
A split second before he and Michael Warren would have smashed into the thirty-foot-wide trunk the devil executed one of his most showy moves, a sudden spiral swoop that cleverly combined the Golden Section and the Fibonacci sequence, blazing in a corkscrew-tight trajectory that took them down around the tree, just inches from the elephant-hide of its enlarged bark. The zip and zing of it, the helter-skelter swish, was wickedly exhilarating. They looped five times round the wood Goliath, and somewhere in the hair-raising rip of their descent the devil felt his inner compass flip into the new orientation that attended the inferior, three-sided world. He and his passenger were now immersed in the tenebrous gelatin of Time, careening on a left-hand thread around an elm that now appeared to be of normal scale. They came out of their circling nosedive only feet above the tufted knuckles of its roots, then shot up and away into the intermittent twinkle of the overcast night sky above. Swimming as they now were in the sequential soup of minutes, hours and days, they left a Technicolor mess behind, an afterburn procession of spent images trailing flamboyant in their wake. Predominantly these were in the devil’s signature array of reds and greens, a wild rose-garden stripe bursting from nowhere that wound down around the tree and then fired itself up into the dark and starlight
Thirty feet above the ground the devil slammed the brakes on and stopped dead, hanging there in the brisk night breeze and summer-scented shadows with his rag-flags spread around him in a rattling carnation cluster. Still clutched in the demon’s sooty grip, the bug-eyed little boy sucked in his first breath of the last half-minute and yelled “Stop”, rather unnecessarily, as they just had. On realizing this, the child twisted his head around as far as it would go, so that he could look up across his shoulder at the devil. It was one of those looks kids put on when they’re pretending to be traumatized, the wobbling lower lip, the haunted eyes and obvious affectation of a shell-shocked twitch.
“I never said! I never said I wanted to go on your Flight. I only wanted to go home.”
The devil did his best to sound surprised.
“What, that? That little jaunt that we’ve just been on? That wasn’t my Flight. That was a warm-up lap. Give me some credit, my dear fellow. That was only fast, it wasn’t fabulous. The real ride is much slower and much more mysterious. I promise you you’ll like it. As for wanting to go home, perhaps you ought to take a look around and find out where we are before you start complaining.”
There. That shut the little blighter up.
They were suspended in the night air up above the intersection formed where Spencer Bridge and Crane Hill crossed St. Andrew’s Road. Beneath them as they hung there facing roughly south there was the meadow where the old Victorian slipper-baths had been converted to a public toilet. A broad tarmac pathway stretched diagonally across the swathe of grass below, from Spencer Bridge to Wiggins’s coal yard further up the road. Among the trees that fringed the patch of ground there stood the inconspicuous elm down which the fiend and his reluctant cargo had swirled recently from the superior to the lower realm. Upon their left a scattering of headlights crawled up Grafton Street, mounting the valley slope between the factories and pubs on one side and the wasteland sprawl of earth and bricks that had ten years before been people’s homes upon the other.
Up ahead and to their right was the illuminated cobweb knot of Castle Station, strings of light running towards it and away through the surrounding blackness. This site was perhaps the devil’s favorite of the many ruined vistas that the Boroughs had to offer. He recalled the castle that the railway station had deposed with an abiding fondness. Several hundred years back down the line the devil had obtained a ringside seat for King Henry the Second’s spiritually ruinous betrayal of his old chum Tommy Becket, summoning the fledgling saint here to Northampton Castle only to surprise him with a hanging jury of intemperate barons bellowing for the Archbishop’s head (and also for his land, although the fiend could not remember any of them saying this out loud upon the actual occasion).
Sideways Sam O’Day – a name he was becoming gradually more pleased with – also had warm recollections of the castle from the time when he’d stood unseen at the elbow of Richard the Lionheart and tried to keep from sniggering as the King set off on his crusade, the third crusade and thus one of the Christian world’s first major contacts with the world of Islam, which would set the tone for some side-splitting high jinks further up the road. Oh my word, wouldn’t it just, though? It had been at the castle, too, where the fiend had the opportunity to sit in on the western world’s first parliament, the National Parliament raised in 1131, and smirk at how much difficulty that was going to cause. And please, don’t even get him started on the poll tax that had so upset Walter the Tyler and his peasant army back in 1381. The convoluted nature of the troubles that had blossomed here, close to the country’s crux, made it one of the devil’s favorite picnic spots, not just in Angle-land but in the wider 3D world.
Cradled there in the devil’s tender arms above the crossroads, Michael Warren stared down at the streets that he had known in life with an expression of astonishment and longing. For the infant’s benefit the devil executed a slow aerial pirouette, rotating counter-clockwise to show off the glittering nocturnal panorama that surrounded them. By moving slowly, the distracting trail of after-images they left behind them was reduced. Their gaze crawled lovingly across the Boroughs, past the southeast corner that the builders signified upon their gaming-table with a cross of gold. Progressing, Grafton Street climbed east towards the squinting cafeteria- and shop-lights set like a tiara at its top on Regent Square. Then, as the demon monarch turned, the parallel tarmac toboggan-runs of Semilong came into view, slate rooftops with a graphite sheen crowning the rank of terraces as they descended to the valley’s bottom, to St. Andrew’s Road and to the river winding by on its far side. Continuing their lazy swivel, Michael Warren and the fiend next overlooked the dark grass sprawl of Paddy’s Meadow with the Nene a nickel ribbon that unraveled through it, the reflected trees like black and tangled salvage in the river’s cloudy depths.
It was along here to the north, if scrambled Sam O’Day remembered rightly, that the wall of the St. Andrew’s Priory had once extended. Back upstream in the 1260s, King Henry the Third sent out a punitive platoon of mounted troops to quash unrest and insurrection here in this pugnacious little town, the army let in through a breach in the old priory wall by a French Cluniac prior who sympathized with the French monarchy. They’d pretty much destroyed the place, raped it and robbed it and set fire to it, marking this northwest corner of the Boroughs as the point of penetration. On the builder’s billiard table – or their trilliard table as it was more accurately called – this spot was represented by the pocket with the golden penis etched into the wood beside it. Regent’s Square in the northeast, conversely, that was the death corner where the severed heads of traitors were displayed once, and its corresponding snooker pocket was emblazoned with a golden skull.
They twirled above the traffic junction, looking out across the business premises just over Spencer Bridge, the new estates of Spencer and King’s Heath beyond. Spencer. Another local name, the devil noted, that had interesting repercussions up and down the track. Like figures circling on top of a dilapidated music-box, the devil and his passenger revolved unhurriedly to take in Jimmy’s End and then Victoria Park, pretty and melancholy as a jilted bride, arriving finally at the far lights of Castle Station where their orbit reached its end. Clanking and shunting in the dark, the railway terminus was at the Boroughs’ southwest corner, with a gilded turret scratched into the grain of the appropriate pocket on the builder’s table, representing stern authority. Fidgeting in the devil’s grip, the small boy at last found his voice.
“That’s it. That’s where I wiz. That’s where I live.”
One midget hand protruded from his dressing gown’s capacious sleeve to point towards the part-lit terrace on their left, a little further south along St. Andrew’s Road. The devil chuckled and corrected him.
“Not quite. That’s where you lived. Until you died, of course.”
The child considered this, and nodded.
“Oh. Yes. I’d forgotten that. Why has it all got dark so quick? It wiz all sunny earlier, and I’ve not been away for very long. It can’t be night already.”
Obviously, the fiend observed, his young friend needed setting straight on that one, too.
“Well, actually, it can. In fact, this isn’t even the same day as that of your departure. When we flew along the Attics of the Breath just now we must have passed three or four sunsets, which means that we’re presently at some point later on in that same week. From all the cars in Grafton Street, I’d say it looks like Friday night. Your family are probably right in the middle of their teatime about now. How would you like to see them?”
You could tell from the protracted silence that the kid was thinking about this before he answered. Naturally, he’d want to see his loved ones one more time, but seeing them in mourning for him must have been a daunting prospect. Finally, he piped up.
“Can you show them to me? And will they be shapes with lights in, like they were when we wiz back Upstairs?”
The devil issued a good-natured snort, so that wisps of blue smoke like car-exhaust leaked from his flaring nostrils.
“Well, of course I’ll show them to you. That’s the main part of Sam O’Day’s Flight, in fact. It’s what I’m famous for. And as for what they’ll look like, it won’t be the same as how they seemed from up above. Do you know what the word ‘dimension’ means?”
The infant shook his tousled head. This would, the devil thought, be a long night.
“Well, basically, it’s just another word for plane, as in the different planes a solid object has. If something has length, breadth and depth we say that it has three dimensions, that it’s three-dimensional. Now, in truth, all things in this universe have more than three dimensions, but there’s only three that human beings seem to notice. To be honest, there are ten, or at a pinch eleven, but there are just four of them that need concern you at the moment. These are the three planes that I just mentioned plus a fourth that is as solid as the others, but which mortal men perceive as passing time. This fourth dimension, viewed in its true light, is how we see it from Mansoul, the realm Upstairs, which is a higher-up dimension still. Looked down on from up there, there is no time. All change and movement are just represented by the snaking crystal forms with lights inside that you saw earlier, winding along their predetermined paths. That’s when you’re looking from up there, remember.”
“As for where we are now, we’re not up there anymore. We’re down in the three-sided world where time exists, but we’re still seeing it with higher eyes. That minor detail, by and large, is the whole basis of my fabled Flight, which, if you’ll now permit me, I shall demonstrate.”
The babe in arms, who’d listened to the devil’s monologue uncomprehendingly for the most part, made an ambiguous whining sound that had a slight upward inflection and could thus be taken as conditional assent. Taking his time so as not to alarm the child unnecessarily, and also to restrict their streaming image-trail, the fiend began to float towards the short and semi-darkened row of houses that the boy had indicated, opposite the coal-yard further up St. Andrew’s Road. They drifted over the converted slipper-baths, the devil’s emerald and ruby tatters crackling like a radio of evil, and across the unmowed triangle of meadow, moving south. Upon their left as they approached the corner of Spring Lane they passed the looming tannery, its tall brick chimney and its gated yards with dyed skin-shavings heaped in turquoise treasure-mounds, the bald white stumps of tails left on the cobbles and dissolving into soap and gristle. From this height, the puddles near the pulling-sheds were mother-of-pearl fragments, bright and flaking.
Michael Warren and the devil came to rest suspended up above the yard of the coal-merchant, facing east and looking down at a slight angle on the stretch of terraced houses opposite that ran between the bottom openings of Scarletwell Street and Spring Lane. Dipping his horned and auburn head, the devil whispered in the youngster’s ear.
“You know, whenever they describe this ride I can provide, they always get it wrong. They tell how the great devil slippery Sam O’Day, if asked, will bear you up above the world and let you see its homes and houses with their roofs gone, so that all the folk inside are visible. That’s true enough, for as far as it goes, but it misunderstands what’s really going on. Yes, I bear people up above the world, but only in the sense that I can lift them, if I choose, into a higher mathematical dimension such as those we’ve been discussing. As for my supposed ability to vanish all the rooftops so that sorcerers can spy upon their neighbors’ wives at bath-time, how am I expected to do that? And if I could, why would I bother to? This Flight is my most legendary attribute, apart from all the murders. Don’t they think I might have something to impart that’s rather more important than a glimpse of nipple? Here, you look down at the houses for yourself, and tell me what you think you’re looking at. Have I made all the rooftops disappear, or haven’t I?”
Of course, the devil knew that this was far from a straightforward question. That was largely why he’d asked it, just to watch the puzzled and conflicted look upon the child’s face when he tried to answer.
“No. All of the rooftops are still there and I can see them, but …”
The boy paused for a moment, as if inwardly debating something, then went on.
“… but I can see the people in the rooms inside as well. In Mrs. Ward’s house on the end I can see Mrs. Ward upstairs putting a stone hot-water bottle in the bed, and Mr. Ward’s downstairs. He’s sitting listening to the radio. How can I see them both when they’re on different floors? Shouldn’t there be a ceiling in the way? And how can I see either of them if the roof’s still there?”
The devil was, despite himself, impressed. Children could sometimes take you by surprise like that. You tended to forget amid the chatter and inanity that their perceptions and their minds were working much, much harder than those of their adult counterparts. This infant had just posed a more incisive question, with more honest curiosity, than mangled Sam O’Day’s last fifteen hell-bound necromancers put together. Thus, he did his best to furnish this intelligent inquiry with a suitable reply.
“Oh, I should think a bright young spark like you could answer that one for himself. You take a closer look. It isn’t that you’re looking through the roof and ceiling, is it?”
Michael Warren squinted dutifully.
“No. No, it’s more like I’m looking round the edge of them.”
The devil hugged the boy until he yelped.
“Good lad! Yes, that’s exactly what you’re doing, peeping into a sealed house around an edge you normally can’t see. It’s like if there were people who were flat, what they call two-dimensional, who lived on a flat sheet of paper. If you were to draw a box round one of them, then that flat person would be sealed off from the rest of the flat world and its inhabitants. They wouldn’t see him, since he would be out of sight behind the line-walls that you’d drawn around him, nor would he be able to see them, enclosed in his flat box.
“But you’re the one who drew the lines, and you have three dimensions. In comparison to all the little flat folk, you have one more whole dimension you can work with, which gives you a big advantage. You can look down through the open top side of the square you’ve drawn, look down through a dimension that the flat folk cannot see and do not know about. You can look down upon the flat chap in the box by looking at him from an angle that, to him, does not exist. Now do you understand how you can see your upstairs and your downstairs neighbors both at once, despite the roof and ceiling in the way? It’s just a matter of perspective. Doesn’t that make much more sense than me conspiring to hide all the rooftops in some unimaginable manner? What am I supposed to do with all the slates?”
The child was staring down towards the row of houses with a dazed expression, but was slowly nodding as if he had taken in at least the bare bones of what he had just been told. Kids had a flexibility and a resilience to their ideas about reality that grown-ups didn’t, in the main. In scrambled Sam O’Day’s opinion, trying to break the spirit or the sanity of children was more effort than the task was worth. Why bother with it? There were adults everywhere, and adults snapped like twigs. Warming reluctantly towards his sickeningly likable and picture-postcard pretty passenger, the devil went on with his tour-guide’s monologue.
“In fact, if you were to look closer at your neighbors, you’d discover that you can see their internal organs and their skeletons around the edges of their skin. If you got closer still you could look round a hidden corner of their bones and see the marrow, though I wouldn’t recommend it. That’s the major reason why I keep my flight to up above the house-tops, if I’m honest. If we were much closer, you’d be too distracted by the blood and guts to properly take in the more important aspects of this educational experience. Would you like to look at the house that you once lived in?”
Michael Warren peered back up towards the fiend across one tartan shoulder. He looked eager, apprehensive, and quite sad. It was, the devil thought, a very adult, complicated look for such a youthful face.
“Yes please. Only, if everybody’s crying, can we go away again? That wizzle make me cry as well, if they’re unhappy.”
Shifty Sam O’Day refrained from pointing out that Michael’s family were hardly likely to be wearing party hats and blowing paper squeakers so soon after his demise, but simply carried the dead child a few doors further down the terrace, heading south. A breeze out of the west brought the perfume of iron and weeds from off the rail-yards where forgotten tenders peeled and rusted, and the white lights were a rationed, sparing sugar frosting on the blustery Boroughs dark. The devil halted over number 17.
“There, now. Let’s see what’s going on.”
The devil gasped at the same moment that the little boy did. What they could glimpse going on inside the house was, frankly, the last thing that either of them had foreseen. If anything the fiend was more astonished than the kid, being much less accustomed to surprises. This one was a shock and no mistake, like when they’d driven him from Persia all those centuries ago by burning fish livers and incense. He’d not been expecting that, and neither had he been expecting this.
The upstairs floor of number 17 was currently deserted, as were the front room and passageway. Only the living room and kitchen were lit-up and occupied, containing half a dozen people by the devil’s estimate. A thin old lady with her smoke-gray hair pinned up into a bun stood in the small back kitchen, waiting while a dented kettle on the gas stove reached the boil. Everyone else was loitering in the adjacent living room around a table set for tea. At one end, near the open kitchen door, a little girl of five or six was sitting in an infant’s high chair, which was much too small for her. An upturned pudding basin had been placed atop her head so that the man who stood behind her chair, a dark-haired fellow in his thirties, could cut round it as he trimmed her fringe. Another woman, also in her thirties, was positioned in between the table and the fireplace. She was in the act of moving a small plate of butter from the hearthside where it had been melting into golden oil and placing it towards the center of the spread white tablecloth. As she did this she was glancing up towards the door that led out to the passage, which was opening as someone entered. This was a tall, solid-looking chap who had a red complexion and the leather-shouldered donkey-jacket of a laborer. In his arms he held …
“It’s me,” said Michael Warren in a startled tone of disbelief.
It was, as well. There was no getting round it, even in the fourth dimension.
Coming through the door into the living room with a broad grin across his rosy face, the burly working man was carrying a child, perhaps three years of age, a boy with elfin features and blond curls that were quite unmistakable. It was a slightly smaller version of the little spirit that the fiend was currently suspending up above the rooftops. It was Michael Warren, evidently very much alive and unaware that he was at that moment being studied by his own bewildered ghost.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” predicted screwed-up Sam O’Day with confidence.
How had the white-haired builder managed it, especially with a black eye and mild concussion? How had he escaped the snooker that his colleague and opponent had ensnared him in? The devil tried imagining a trick shot that would furnish the unprecedented outcome he was at that moment witnessing, but found to his embarrassment that he could not. The trilliard ball that represented Michael Warren must at some point have been knocked into the pocket that was decorated with a golden skull, the death-hole at the table’s northeast corner. Otherwise his soul would not have been careening round the Attics of the Breath in its pajamas. Just as obviously, the ball had then somehow bounced out again, or in some other fashion been returned to play, returned to life. If not, who was the rascal with the white-gold ringlets being welcomed back into the bosom of his family, down below in the unfolded pop-up book of number 17, St. Andrew’s Road? This merited, the devil thought, closer investigation.
“This is certainly a turn-up for the books. Up here you’re dead, yet down there you’re alive again. I wonder why? Are you by any chance some kind of zombie from a voodoo film? Or, more remotely, I suppose you might be the messiah. What do you think? Were there any signs or omens coinciding with your birth, clouds shaped like crowns, rays of unearthly light or anything like that?”
The youngster shook his head, still gaping at the cheery scene being played out beneath him.
“No. We’re only ordinary. Everybody’s ordinary on Andrew’s Road. What does it mean, that I’m down there? Does it mean that I won’t be dead for very long?”
The devil shrugged.
“It certainly appears that way, though I confess that for the life of me I can’t see how. There’s something very complicated going on with you, young man, and I’m a devil for complexity. Perhaps your background might provide some sort of clue? Come, tell me who those people are, the ones squealing with joy at your return and milling round the room down there. Who’s that old lady in the kitchen?”
Michael Warren sounded both cautiously proud and touchingly protective as he ventured his reply.
“That’s Clara Swan, and she’s my gran. She’s got the longest hair of anybody in the world, but it’s all tied up in a bun because when it hangs down it catches fire. She used to be a servant for some people in a great big house.”
The devil raised one bristling eyebrow thoughtfully. There were a number of big houses round these parts. It wasn’t likely that this toddler’s grandmother had served the Spencers out at Althorp, but you never knew. The boy continued his inventory.
“The other lady is my mom, who’s called Doreen. When she wiz just a little girl they had a war, and her and my aunt Emma watched a bomber crash in Gold Street from their bedroom window. That man carrying me, coming through the door, that’s my dad. He’s called Tommy, and he rolls big heavy barrels at the brewery. Everybody says he dresses very well, and that he’s good at dancing, but I’ve never seen him doing it. The other man’s my uncle Alf who drives a double-decker bus and rides a bicycle when he calls in to see our gran on his way home from work. He cuts our hair for us, the way he’s doing for my sister Alma. She’s the bossy girl in the high chair.”
Unseen by his small passenger, the devil’s irises turned black for several seconds with surprise, then faded back to their initial colors, red or green, the stains of war or else the stains of outdoor love. His young charge had a sister, and her name was Alma. Alma Warren. Reconstructed Sam O’Day had heard of Alma Warren. She’d grow up to be a moderately famous artist, doing paperback and record covers, who had intermittent visionary spasms. During one of these she would, in thirty years or so, attempt a portrait of the Fifth Infernal Duke in his full dress regalia, the reptile and arachnid image-wrap with the electric peacock-feather trim. The picture wouldn’t be much of a likeness, and she wouldn’t even bother trying to depict the lizard lining of his tailored aura, but the devil would feel vaguely flattered all the same. The artist clearly found her subject beautiful, and if he’d felt the same way about her it might have been his Persian passion all over again. Unfortunately, Alma Warren would grow up into a frightful dog, and switchback Sam O’Day was very picky when it came to women. Back in Persia, Raguel’s daughter Sara had been luscious. Even Lil his ex-wife, who had fornicated with abominations, hadn’t let herself go to the same extent that Alma Warren would do. Though the devil would admit that he quite liked the woman, he would also quickly point out that he didn’t like her in that way, just in case anybody got the wrong idea.
So, Michael Warren was the pretty brother of alarming-looking Alma Warren, who could somehow entice fiends to sit for her. And then there was that strange event of cryptic import that would take place nearly fifty years from now, in 2006, with which the woman artist would be heavily involved. Within the trillion-fragment jigsaw of the demon-king’s elaborate mind, the pieces started tumbling into intriguing new arrangements. Something positively Byzantine was going on, the devil was more certain by the moment. He reviewed what he could pre-remember of the labyrinthine pattern of events that would surround the early years of the next century, looking for clues and for connections. There was all that business of a female saint in the twenty-fives, with which the devil had a personal involvement. That affair had tenuous links with the occurrences in 2006, links that related to the ancestry of Alma Warren …
And her brother.
Oh, now, this was interesting. They were siblings, and so had their ancestry in common.
That meant Michael Warren was a Vernall too. It didn’t matter if he knew it, and it mattered less whether he liked it. He was tied by blood-bonds to the old profession, to the ancient trade.
The fiend knew that the greater part of Mansoul’s unique local terminology came from the Norman or the Saxon, phrases such as Frith Bohr, Porthimoth di Norhan and the like. Vernall was older, though. The devil could recall hearing the word around these parts since, what, the Roman occupation? And he had a notion that it might derive from earlier traditions still, from Druids or the antlered Hob-men that preceded them, weird figures crouching in the smoke-drifts of antiquity. Though Vernall was a job description, it described an occupation that was based in an archaic world-view, one which had not been in evidence for some two thousand years and one which did not see reality in terms the modern world would recognize.
A Vernall tended to the boundaries and corners, and it was in the mundane sense of a common verger that the term came to be understood throughout the Boroughs during medieval times. The ragged edges that comprised a Vernall’s jurisdiction, though, had not originally been limited to those weed-strangled margins of the mortal and material world alone.
The corners that a Vernall had traditionally marked and measured and attended to were those that bent into the fourth direction; were the junctions that existed between life and death, madness and sanity, between the Upstairs and the Downstairs of existence. Vernalls overlooked the crossroads of two very different planes, sentinels straddling a gulf that no one else could see. As such they would be prone to certain instabilities, yet at the same time often were recipient to more-than-normal insights, talents or capacities. In just the recent lineage of Michael Warren and his sister Alma, shook-up Sam O’Day could think of three or four striking examples of these odd hereditary tendencies. There had been Ernest Vernall, working on the restoration of St. Paul’s when he fell into conversation with a builder. Snowy Vernall, Ernest’s fearless son, and Thursa, Ernest’s daughter, with her preternatural grasp of higher-space acoustics. There had been ferocious May, the deathmonger, and the magnificent and tragic Audrey Vernall, languishing at present in a run-down mental hospital abutting Berry Wood. Vernalls observed the corners of mortality, and watched the bend that all too often they would end up going round themselves.
Hanging above St. Andrew’s Road with Michael Warren’s tiny essence held between his claws, the devil counted all the aces in the hand of information he’d been dealt. This clueless child, currently dead but in a few days time apparently alive, had been the cause of a colossal brawl between the Master Builders. More than this he was a Vernall by descent, related to a woman artist who was central to the crucial business that would take place in the spring of 2006. This forthcoming event was known, in Mansoul, as the Vernall’s Inquest. Much depended on it, not least the eventual destiny of certain damned souls that the fiend had a specific interest in. There might be some way slipshod Sam O’Day could tweak the dew-dropped strands of interwoven circumstance to his advantage. He would have to think about it.
Though excited by the tingling web of possibilities, the devil managed to sound nonchalant as he addressed the captive boy.
“Hmm. Well, your family all seem very pleased to have you back with them, but it appears there’s been a dreadful mix-up here. At some point over the next day or so you obviously come back to life, so probably you’re not meant to be running round Upstairs at all. I’d better end my flight and take you back up to the Attics of the Breath until I can decide what’s to be done with you.”
The astral toddler shifted in the devil’s grip. It seemed as if, once reassured that being dead would not be permanent in his case, Michael Warren was beginning to enjoy this ride the fiend had promised him and was reluctant to see it concluded. He conceded with a heavy sigh, as if doing the devil an enormous favor.
“I suppose so, but don’t go so fast this time. You said you’d answer questions for me, but I can’t ask any if my mouth’s all full of wind.”
The devil gravely tipped his horns in the direction of the infant dangling beneath him.
“Fair enough. I’ll take it nice and easy, so that you can ask me anything you like.”
He turned in a great spiral fan of red and green and started drifting north along St. Andrew’s Road towards the meadow sheltering at the foot of Spencer Bridge. They’d barely reached the fireside-flavored heights above the coal merchant’s before the lad had formulated his first irritating query.
“How does it all work, then, life and death?”
How nice. He’d got a little Wittgenstein for company. Unseen behind the kiddy’s back, the devil opened wide his fang-filled jaws and mimed biting the baby’s head off, chewing it a time or two, then spitting it into the bays of heaped up slack below them. Relishing this fleeting fantasy, he let his features settle back into their customary insidious leer as he replied.
“There’s really only life. Death’s an illusion of perspective that afflicts the third dimension. Only in the mortal and three-sided world do you see time as something that is passing, vanishing away behind you into nothingness. You think of time as something that one day will be used up, will all be gone. Seen from a higher plane, though, time is nothing but another distance, just the same as height or breadth or depth. Everything in the universe of space and time is going on at once, occurring in a glorious super-instant with the dawn of time on one side of it and time’s end upon the other. All the minutes in between, including those that mark the decades of your lifespan, are suspended in the grand, unchanging bubble of existence for eternity.
“Think of your life as being like a book, a solid thing where the last line’s already written while you’re starting the first page. Your consciousness progresses through the narrative from its beginning to its end, and you become caught up in the illusion of events unfolding and time going by as these things are experienced by the characters within the drama. In reality, however, all the words that shape the tale are fixed upon the page, the pages bound in their unvarying order. Nothing in the book is changing or developing. Nothing in the book is moving save the reader’s mind as it moves through the chapters. When the story’s finished and the book is closed, it does not burst immediately into flames. The people in the story and their twists of fortune are not disappeared without a trace as though they’d not been written. All the sentences describing them are still there in the solid and unchanging tome, and at your leisure you may read the whole of it again as often as you like.
“It’s just the same with life. Why, every second of it is a paragraph you will revisit countless times and find new meanings in, although the wording is not changed. Each episode remains unaltered at its designated point within the text, and every moment thus endures forever. Moments of exquisite bliss and moments of profound despair, suspended in time’s endless amber, all the hell or heaven any brimstone preacher could conceivably desire. Each day and every deed’s eternal, little boy. Live them in such a way that you can bear to live with them eternally.”
The pair were floating in among the treetops of the darkened meadow, heading in the rough direction of the public lavatories that had once been a slipper-baths, at the far end. A plume of fading snapshots smoldered in their wake. The dangling child was silent for a while as he digested what the devil had just said, but only for a while.
“Well, if my life’s a story and when I get to the end I just go back and live it all again, then where wiz that Upstairs place that you found me in?”
The devil grimaced, by now starting to get bored with the responsibilities of parenthood.
“Upstairs is simply on a higher plane with more dimensions than the three or four that you’re familiar with down here. Think of it as a sort of library or reading room, a place where all of you can stand outside of time, re-reading your own marvelous adventures, or, if you should choose, move onward to explore your further possibilities in that remarkable and everlasting place. Speaking of which, the elm that we’re approaching is the one we can ascend into the Attics of the Breath. If you’d prefer I’ll go up slowly so that you can understand what’s happening.”
Hanging there in a breeze perfumed by coal and chlorophyll, suspended like the undercarriage of some gaudy pirate zeppelin, Michael Warren uttered a mistrustful murmur of assent. As they sailed closer to the designated elm the devil savored the small boy’s bewilderment at the perceptual changes he was no doubt going through. The tree seemed to be getting larger as they neared it, just as one would usually expect, except that this was not accompanied by a sensation that the pair of them were truly getting any nearer to their destination. It felt more as if the further they progressed towards the tree, the smaller they themselves were getting. In an effort to preempt a flood of questions from his passenger, the fiend instead elected to explain the process to the lad.
“You’re probably wondering why we appear to be becoming smaller, or alternatively why that elm there seems to be becoming monstrously enlarged as we get closer to it. It’s all on account of a discrepancy between the way dimensions look to one another. We talked earlier about the notion of flat people who had only two dimensions, living hypothetically within the limits of a sheet of paper. Well, imagine that the sheet of paper they were living in had actually been folded up to form a paper cube. They would be living in a world of three dimensions, but with their perceptions limited to only two dimensions, they could never see or understand it to be so. That’s quite like human beings, things with three dimensions living in a universe of four dimensions that they cannot properly perceive.
“Now, you’ve been taken up onto a loftier plane yet, as if our little flat chap had been moved into a space where he could overlook not only his flat world of two dimensions, but could also see the cube that it in fact was part of. How would a shape with three dimensions translate in the thoughts and the perceptions of a being who had only two? Without the concept of a cube, might not our flattened fellow see it as much like the flat, square world he was familiar with, but bigger somehow, in some way that he could not define? That’s the effect that you’re experiencing now, that you experienced if you looked back into whichever portal you climbed up through to the Attics of the Breath. Didn’t the room in which you’d died look so much vaster than it had in life? In fact, I don’t know if you ever suffered from a fever or delirium when you were still alive, in which the bedroom walls seemed to be frighteningly far away? You did? That sometimes happens when a human’s wandering in the clammy territories between life and death. They get a glimpse of their environment’s true scale, as it will seem to them when they’ve moved up a plane or two. I mean, look at the elm now. It’s enormous.”
And indeed it was, as was the formerly small meadow that surrounded it. The devil tipped into a spiraling trajectory around the vertical and craggy landscape of the trunk, reprising the maneuver he’d adopted when he’d carried Michael Warren here into this world, except at greatly reduced speed and heading up instead of down. As they described their first slow circle round the tree and doubled back upon themselves, the phantom ribbon of stop-motion images that they were leaving in their wake became more evident, predominately red and green, winding across the grassy plot to wind itself around the now-gigantic elm. They spiraled up towards the hidden point at which shambolic Sam O’Day knew there to be a crook-door that would let them back into the Attics, but before they’d reached it his increasingly infuriating cargo had thought up another tiresome question.
“How do trees grow up into the Upstairs place, when they’ve got roots down here next to the public lavs? And what about the pigeons that wiz sitting in the branches higher up? How can they all go back and forth without them being dead like me?”
Anagram Sam was glad that his and Lil’s relationship had borne no offspring. Well, she’d given birth to a great ooze of monsters, obviously, things like dogs turned inside out and things like flattened yard-wide crabs that were the lurid pink of bubble gum. Such horrors, though, did little more than babble senselessly or howl until their mother got fed up and ate them during her post-natal blues. They barely had awareness of their own grotesque existence, much less the ability to formulate an irritating question, and were thus preferable to human kids like this one was, for all that he had two blue eyes and they had either none at all or several red ones clustered at the centers of their faces as is the arrangement with tarantulas. The devil tried to keep a civil tone as he replied.
“My, aren’t you the inquiring little scholar? Well, the answer is that in the case of trees and certain other forms of plant life, they already have a structure that expresses perfectly a timeless life in more than three dimensions. Being motionless, the only movement is that of their growth, which leaves a solid trail of wood behind in much the same way we ourselves are leaving a long stream of ghostly images. The tree’s shape is its history, each bough the curve of a magnificent time-statue which I can assure you that we folk Upstairs appreciate just as enthusiastically as do you humans.
“As for pigeons they are not at all as other birds, and different rules apply to them. For one thing, their perceptions are five times as fast as those of people or most other animals. This means they have a very different sense of time, with all things in the world save them slowed to a crawl in their quicksilver minds. More interesting still they are one of the only birds, in fact one of the only living creatures not a mammal, which can feed its young with milk. I don’t pretend to know exactly why the pigeon should be favored over all the other beasts in its relation to the higher realm, but I imagine that the business with the milk has got a lot to do with it. It probably enhances their symbolic value in the eyes of management, so that they have a special dispensation to behave as psychopomps and flutter back and forth between the pastures of the living and the dead, something like that. I’m not sure what they’re for, but mark my words, there’s more to pigeons than most people think.”
They circled upward at a stately pace around a trunk now some ten yards across and getting on a hundred feet in its circumference. Aware now that the crook-door which gave access to the Attics of the Breath was only one twist further up the spiral, well-spun Sam O’Day decided that he’d best inform his bothersome young fellow traveler exactly what the doorway was before he took him through it, to forestall the high-pitched inquisition that inevitably would accompany such an initiative.
“Before you ask, just up round the next bend there’s something called a crook-door. It’s a kind of four-way hinge between dimensions that will take us back Upstairs into Mansoul. Most earthly rooms have got a crook door in at least one upper corner, and most open spaces have as well, although with open spaces you can only make out where the corners are when you’re Upstairs and looking down. Unless, of course, you happen to be something that has made the journey countless times, like, say, a demon or a pigeon, and you know by heart where every entrance is located. Be prepared, now. There’s a crook-door just ahead of us, and as we go through you’ll feel something flip inside you as we switch from the perspective of this lower world to that of the superior plane above.”
The fiend increased his speed a little, soaring up towards the occult corner he could sense, invisible, not very far above. As they and the red-green procession trailing after them swirled closer to the unseen aperture, like paint-stained water circling an inverted sky-drain, all the noises of the neighborhood were stretched and elongated to the escalating din of a string-heavy orchestra. The cars on Spencer Bridge, the goods-train rattling beneath it and the murmur of the nearby river, all these sounds were pulled into a cavernous bass drone by the acoustics of the Upstairs world that waited overhead.
As the syllabic salad that was Sam O’Day had just predicted, when they shot out through the crook-door and traversed the juncture of two planes there was a moment when it felt as if their stomachs had turned over, but inside their heads. Then, in a flurry of bright apple colors they exploded from a fifty-foot square aperture framed with a trim of bark that had been greatly magnified, zipped one more time round the titanic elm and splashed amid a pillow-fight of pigeons up into the ringing heights above the Attics of the Breath.
Beyond the glass roof, silver lines on black mapped out the facets of a splendidly unfurled dodecahedroid that was moving slowly, like a becalmed galleon of lights, through the unbounded darkness outside the immense arcade. The devil hovered for a moment with the dressing gown-clad child clutched tight against his breast, against the clanging of his mighty anvil heart, and then commenced a leisurely flight back along the vast emporium’s length towards the purple and vermilion of sunset in the east. He’d take the boy back to the stretch of that colossal corridor, the early afternoon of some few days before, where they’d first happened on each other. Once there, he’d decide what should be done about this little puzzle, who was dead one minute and alive the next, whose plight had got the very builders worked up into a stupendous slapping match.
He hoped to pass the journey privately reviewing all his options, all the moves that might be made in the trans-temporal chess game that was his elaborate existence, his bedizened web. Ideally, he’d have time to carefully consider every way in which his opportune encounter with this bonny lad, this Vernall that he’d met upon their customary corner between here and the hereafter, could be turned to shuffling Sam O’Day’s future advantage. Sadly, his anticipations proved unduly optimistic and they’d barely sailed a hundred yards before the pendant tyke struck up another round of Twenty Questions.
“So, then, why is this place called Mansoul?”
The devil was beginning to chew through his famously short tether. Yes, he’d promised that he’d answer any queries that the kid might put to him, but this was getting past a joke. Didn’t this squeaking ferret ever take a break from his interrogations? Suspect Sam O’Day was modifying his appraisal of the manner in which Michael Warren’s life had ended. Where he’d earlier supposed that the boy’s trusting nature might have led him into murderous hands or an abandoned fridge, he now thought it more likely that the infant had been done away with by his relatives in an attempt to shut the little blighter up. Although obliged by all the rules of demonology to furnish a reply, the devil couldn’t keep a bitter edge entirely from his tone as he complied.
“It’s called Mansoul because Mansoul’s its name. It’s like somebody asking you why you’re called Michael Warren. You’re called that because that’s who you are, and Mansoul’s called Mansoul because that’s what it is. I mean, you couldn’t give a thing a plainer label. It’s entirely self-explanatory and anyone with any sense would just accept it, although I can see you’re not included in that category.
“One of your better human poets, footsore Bunyan, jailbird John, he used to wander through the earthly township of Northampton from his home in nearby Bedfordshire, and at the same time he was wandering in his poetic vision through this higher aspect of the place. Some passing spirit must have told him the location’s name, and by some huge fluke he was able to remember it when he returned to mortal consciousness, or at least long enough to jot it down and use it in his pamphlet Holy War.”
They soared down the eternal hall, while up above the colors of the firmament outside wound back through time, from midnight jet to violet dusk and sundown like a burning slaughterhouse. Below, the dizzying row of vats went flickering by, punched holes on the unreeling music-roll of an old Pianola. As they passed beneath the blue-gray heavens of the previous day and on towards the glistening oyster-shell of dawn, the devil felt sure from the quality of Michael Warren’s thoughtful silence that the child was formulating yet another fatuous inquiry, and at least in that one sense he wasn’t disappointed.
“Why did you say that it wiz a fluke how that man could remember anything? And wizzle I remember all of this when I come back to life?”
The devil snarled his answer, spitting inadvertent beads of caustic venom on the collar of the infant’s dressing gown and bleaching out the tartan fabric in a trail of smoldering white-yellow burns.
“No, sonny Jim, you won’t. It’s one of the immutable conditions that attends the way in which the thing you see as time is really structured. Nothing that occurs here, in this place outside of time, truly has time to be committed unto mortal memory. If you pass through the narrative that is your life a thousand times, still every thought and deed shall be exactly as it was upon the first such passage. You’ll have no recall of having said or done these things before, save for those momentary lapses of forgetfulness that people know as déjà vu. And save such fragments as you may retrieve from dreams, or rarities such as John Bunyan’s vision, no one ever has the faintest recollection of what happens to them in these elevated climes. So, really, there’s no point in asking me these bloody stupid questions, is there? You’ll forget the whole experience once you’re returned to life, and that will mean that it has been a waste of your time, and, more woefully, my own. If you’d got any idea what a devil has to go through in the normal course of its existence then you wouldn’t plague me with these ultimately useless trivialities.”
They were then traveling through the pearl and raspberry atmosphere of Friday’s dawn, onward and into the black thread-lit tunnel that was Thursday night. Craning his neck to look back at the fiend across one drool-scorched shoulder, Michael Warren’s cherub face was such that you might think he was attempting to be sly as he responded to the devil’s outburst, if his slyness hadn’t been so clumsy and transparent.
“Well, why don’t you tell me what a devil has to go through, then? What are you, anyway? Are you somebody who wiz very bad, or have you always been a devil? You said that you’d answer anything I asked you, so you answer that.”
The devil ground his fangs to glistering pumice, although looking on the bright side, if he absolutely had to chat to this insufferably perky young pajama-piglet, then it might as well be about something that he never shied from speaking of at length, namely himself.
“Well, since you ask, no. No, I haven’t always been a devil. When the luminescent halo that is space-time rippled out from nonexistence, all at once, then I saw the entirety of my immortal being, which included this benighted period that I must spend in service as a lowly fiend. But how I am now is not how I was back at the start of things, nor is it how I shall be when I’m further down my road. Back at my outset, I was but a glorious part, one of a myriad comprising a far greater entity that basked in simple being, there before the advent of both world and time. I was a builder back then, if you can believe that. Had the white frock and the billiard cue and everything.
“You have to bear in mind that this was back before there was time as we know it now, or a material universe of any sort. There wasn’t any trouble. Naturally, that didn’t last. It was decided higher up that part of the great being of which I was one component should be pushed down two or three dimensions to create a plane of physical existence. In effect, some of us were demoted from a world of naught but light and bliss into this new construction, this new realm of bodily sensation, of emotions and the endless torrent of delights and torments that those things entail. I’ll grudgingly admit that this disastrous reshuffle might well have been necessary, in some way that we who labored in the lower ranks were not aware of. Even so, it bloody hurt.
“I’m not complaining, mind you. There were others far worse off than I. You might recall I mentioned Satan earlier, and said you wouldn’t recognize him if you saw him. That’s because he was the first and greatest to be cast down into emptiness, his fiery energies cooled and condensed to matter, that sublime magnificence reduced to backfill. Take a peek beneath us at the tanks we’re flying over, at the apertures that look down on the mortal plane. In their depths you can make out the contorted coral stems that are in fact the living as seen without time. Their luminous and gem-like qualities have earned these growths, among the spirit population of Mansoul, the name of ‘jewelry’. That’s not, however, what we devils call them. We refer to them as ‘Satan’s Guts’. That’s him, in every shuddering, mysterious particle of the corporeal universe. That’s what became of him, of his immortal blazing body. Like I say, I got off light, comparatively speaking.”
Unstuck Sam O’Day, an oriental fighting kite of threatening device, fluttered in silence for a moment down the Attics of the Breath, along the starlit stretch of passage that was Wednesday night, towards its sunset end. He’d quite upset himself with all that talk about the shining hero who’d become the solid world, become the Satan, the great obstacle, the stumbling block. Still, the distressing tale had kept his paying passenger from kicking up a fuss … and Michael Warren would at some point pay his fare as they’d agreed, the devil would make sure of it. He hadn’t made his mind up as to how yet, that was all. Mindful in case too long a pause should launch a fresh barrage of questions and complaints, the fiend resumed his narrative.
“So there we were, in a dawn world constructed from the living substance of our former governor, still reeling from the onslaught of new feelings and perceptions, left entirely to our own devices, or as much as anybody can be in a predetermined universe. Those were great times to be alive in, I can tell you. They still are, if I fly eastward far enough along the temporal axis of my being. All of those tremendous days still going on, back where we’re all still young and angry and invincible.
“We soon found out, from one of the more easily-duped builders, what this whole new earthly plane had been created for. It turned out it was something called organic life. This, in our eyes, was an exceptionally tricky form of muddy puddle, though in your terms it was probably your trillion-times-great-grandmother. But long before anything even faintly like a human being turned up, we realized that this fleshy business was the only game in town. However, credit where it’s due, it wasn’t until people scrambled wet and shivering from the gene-pool that we knew we’d hit the jackpot. Naturally, by then we’d seen a preview of the whole thing played out on the symbol-level, with the man and woman in their garden and all that, but actually, if anything the squalid mess of the reality was even better.
“Due respect to the symbolic version, though. It had its high points. The young lovely cast initially as Adam’s wife before Eve got the part was a real shocker by the name of Lil. I later married her myself, after she’d walked out on her husband in the first celebrity divorce, with incompatibility as the main reason cited. What had happened was that Adam, being up here on the symbol plane, had eyesight that perceived the world with four dimensions. It was like when you were looking down upon your house just now, and you could view your home’s interior by peering round the walls, around an edge that isn’t usually there. That’s how it went with Lil and Adam. His first glimpse of her was a disaster. He could see around her skin, around the muscles underneath, around her bowels to where the slow chyme moved within them. He was sick all up the Tree of Knowledge. Lil was understandably offended, and went off to copulate with monsters, of which, luckily, I was among the very first.”
The King of Wrath and Michael Warren glided down the length of Wednesday, with the sky beyond the curved glass canopy an overcast and nacreous gray, the lines and angles of its hyper-cumuli limned in a ghostly pink. The tartan package slapdash Sam O’Day was carrying appeared to be absorbed in the unfolding of the fiend’s autobiography and, grateful for the silence, the infernal eminence decided to continue with his deadtime story.
“Back near the beginning, there’s a patch where me and Lil are married, but it doesn’t last. She was too clingy when she could get suction, and I was too headstrong with too many heads. Besides, the human race was waiting just a little further up the line, with all those comely beauties. Human women were a revelation to me, I can tell you, after Lil. Once you’ve had vertebrate there’s no return, and once you look at something with a backbone, there’s no looking back. You’re only young, so you won’t understand about all this, but trust me. I’m the devil, and I know whereof I speak.
“Of all the fiends in Hell, I like to think I was the most romantic and the most appreciative of female charms. In Persia, long ago, there’s an occasion where I fall horns over tail in love with an exotic flower named Sara, daughter of a chap named Raguel. You should have seen how shy I was when I was courting her. I’d give her precious gifts and hardly let her get a glimpse of me, just leave some sign to tell her I’d been there: a necklace resting on a silken cushion, possibly, while part of the room’s carpet was on fire nearby. When finally and bashfully I introduced myself to her, as I thought in the manner of the Beauty and the Beast, her overwrought reaction was no idyll from a fairy tale, I can assure you. Barely were the words ‘I love you’ spoken by one of my mouths than my beloved suffered what I think you humans call a stroke. It wasn’t serious, and after a few days she could speak properly again, at which point she began describing her encounter with me in the most unflattering of terms.
“I was castigated as a horror, a destroyer, when the woman hardly knew me. She completely overlooked all of the admirable things there are about me, and instead portrayed me as some violent and inhuman stereotype. What’s worse, she really rubbed it in by suddenly announcing her forthcoming marriage to another suitor. Naturally, I choked the life out of him on their wedding night, but that’s only what anyone would do in such provoking circumstances. And besides, despite what she claimed later, I could tell that she was only flirting with these other men because she liked to see me angry. Why else would she have proceeded to announce her marriage to a second groom before her first was buried, if she wasn’t trying to lead me on and make me jealous? So I killed him too. I threw him off a balcony. To cut a tedious story short, I did the same with her next five. That’s seven men in all that I dispatched by choking, falling, drowning, burning, straight decapitation, an internal hemorrhage, and finally a heart attack. I almost thought of it as sending her bouquets. I thought she must be interested in me. Why else would she constantly be trying to attract my murderous attention by announcing yet another marriage? Any normal woman, surely, after number five’s head had gone bouncing off down the bedchamber stairs, would have just given up on matrimony and enshrined herself within a nunnery.
“Well, anyway, it turned out I was wrong. She wasn’t playing hard to get. She genuinely didn’t like me. Off she goes to see some conjurer … a class of people, incidentally, that I despise … and gets him to enact what these days would be known as a restraining order. He burned certain substances upon a brazier, preventing me from going near her, in effect deporting me from Persia into Egypt. The ingratitude! Where did those people think they had acquired their grasp of numbers and exquisite patterning if not from me? So, knowing where I wasn’t wanted, I decamped to Egypt and took all the mathematics with me. That, I thought, would teach them, or to be more accurate, it wouldn’t.”
Up beyond the glass roof, Wednesday’s dawn flared briefly before giving way to the black miles of Tuesday night. The hanging toddler was still listening intently to the devil’s monologue.
“In Egypt, though, I got into a spot of bother. Egypt had a reputation as a demon hotspot back at that point of its history, and there were dozens of us hanging out down there. You talk about associating with the wrong crowd. It was trouble waiting quite demonstrably to happen.
“Things came to a head when one of the more lowly devils was tormenting mortal builders in nearby Jerusalem. When the unsettled victims sought King Solomon’s protection, he was able to use magic to ensnare the demon that had been responsible. Now, Solomon, he was a clever bugger, no mistake. This devil that he’d captured was then pressurized and threatened until he gave up the names of everybody in the gang, the whole six dozen of us, from Bel to Andromalius. I was about the only one who put up any sort of fight, but it was ultimately pointless. Solomon had got us dead to rights and set us all to work building his temple for him, in a sort of community service scheme. We got our own back though. There’s troubles that we built into that temple and its site that people wouldn’t understand the scale of for three thousand years or more.
“Since then we’ve roamed the lower and the upper worlds unsupervised, having adventures, dooming occultists, pursuing various hobbies and that sort of thing. In mortal terms, we’re probably best seen as living patterns made out of distinct and different urges, different energies. We’re also a dimension down from the three-sided human realm, in that compared to you we’re flat like parquet flooring, although naturally our tessellations are much more elaborate.
“We’ve had the time, since we were first cast down, to come to terms with our condition and to understand our place in the divine arrangement. We believe that we, like all created things, have the capacity to change and grow. It is our hope that in a thousand or so mortal years we shall again attain the limitless, exalted state that we were born to. Mankind is the sole impediment to our ambitions. If we are to reach the highest realm from our current location in the lowest, then the middle realm must first be pushed up from below, ahead of us. If not, our one alternative is clawing our way through you, I’m afraid, should we desire to ever see the sun again.”
Outside, the heavens changed from black to mauve to gold, from gold to gray, from Tuesday night to Tuesday morning. As nonstandard Sam O’Day flapped backwards down the days with Michael Warren in his rustling arms, he was in one compartment of his Chinese Box intelligence still calculating means by which he might exploit his meeting with the boy. There was somebody in the Boroughs, waiting unsuspectingly some decades down the line, that the arch-demon wanted killed, and someone else he wanted saved. There might yet be some way he could persuade this trusting child to help with one or both of these endeavors.
Tacking against the cold drafts of the unending corridor, they swooped through pale dawn into blacked-out small hours and the miles of Monday midnight. In the east, the sunset of the afternoon on which his passenger had died was looming. Evidently having realized that the devil’s narrative was over, his dependent with the bright churned-butter locks had rapidly devised another pointed question.
“Well, what I don’t understand wiz what you’re doing in the Boroughs when you’re so important. Why aren’t you off somewhere famous like Jerusalem or Egypt?”
The sky above the arcade was now molten as they came out of a graded lilac dusk. Though faintly riled by the young whippersnapper’s disbelieving tone, the fiend conceded that the point raised was a fair one, which deserved an answer.
“Frankly, I’d have thought it would be fairly obvious, even to you, that someone who has access to these timeless higher reaches can quite easily be almost everywhere at once. I’m not just in the Boroughs, and on this specific day in 1959 I’m up to mischief all over what people used to call the Holy Land, and in a lot of other volatile and sunny spots as well. But if I’m honest with you, as indeed I’m forced to be, I have grown very fond of this half-a-square-mile of dirt across the centuries.
“For one thing, well over a thousand years ago the Master Builders chose this town to site their rood, their cross-stone, marking out this land’s load-bearing center. There, down on the lowly district’s southeast corner, there is England’s crux. Out from this central point extends a web of lines, connective creases on the map of space-time linking one place with another, paths imprinted on the fabric of reality by multiple human trajectories. People have journeyed to this crucial juncture from America, from Lambeth and, if we include the monk who followed the instructions of the builders in delivering their cross-stone, from Jerusalem itself. Though all these regions be remote one from another upon the material plane, seen from these higher mathematic reaches they are joined in the most gross and obvious of ways. Indeed, they’re almost the same place.
“The destinies of these locations are entangled in a way that living people cannot see. They act upon and so affect each other, but remotely, at a distance. If the monk I mentioned hadn’t come here from Jerusalem in the eighth century, come here from hallowed ground near where the lads and I built Solomon his temple, then there would have been no channel for the energies of the Crusades when they went crackling back from this site to Jerusalem some three hundred years later. And of course, after one of the earlier Crusades, one of your Norman knights was good enough to build a perfect replica, in Sheep Street, of the temple that King Solomon had made us put up for him in the Holy City. In the lattice of event and consequence, your meager borough is a vital crossroads whereat war and wonder meet to shake each other by the hand. No, mark my words, this neighborhood has fights and fires that make it fascinating to things such as I, and also less ignoble presences.
“Beyond all that, though, do you know, I’ve rather come to like the people here as well. Like is perhaps too strong a word, but let us say I feel a certain sympathy and kinship. Destitute and dirty, drunk as often as they can afford, avoided with revulsion and distaste by anyone of breeding, they, like me and mine, know what it is to be cast down and made into a demon. Well, good luck to them. Good luck to all of us disreputable devils.”
From the lodestone heights of sundown, Michael Warren and the fiend began a slow sycamore-pod descent into the languid summer atmospheres of Monday afternoon. Over the see-through arcade ceiling up above them, lines of polar white described the jewel-faced contours of an algebraic cirrus that unfolded against breathtaking cerulean. Below, the Pianola-music of the Attics’ floor was coming closer with its rows of great square spy-holes opening onto world and time, onto the gemstone snarl of Satan’s Guts.
Upon the corridor’s north side, dismembered Sam O’Day could see the pitch-sealed woodwork of the balcony where he’d first apprehended the small dressing gown-wrapped pilgrim, and, a little further down, the lower stories where accreted dreams had risen up like stalagmites of psychic guano, forming a long terrace of surreal house- and shop-fronts. One of these establishments, a jumble of unconscious nonsense called ‘The Snail Races,’ had an alley-mouth not far away from it where a rotund old woman who was either dead, or dreaming, or else being dreamed, had set up a night-watchman’s brazier on which it seemed that she was roasting chestnuts. Other than the crone, hunched over her hot coals and utterly oblivious to the devil or his youthful hostage, there was nobody about the Attics of the Breath, at least in the vicinity of this specific moment of the day. Most gratifyingly, there were no black-eyed builders stalking back and forth with trilliard cues to set about the child-abducting Duke of Hell on his return. It looked like a safe place to put the boy down until spiral Sam could work out what to do with him.
Like settling vicious blossom with his streamers rippling up above him in Meccano colors, green and red, the devil touched down lightly on the sprung pine floorboards. He made a great show of setting Michael Warren safely back on terra firma in one piece, so that the infant would feel bad for ever having doubted his infernal benefactor’s honorable intentions.
“There! We’re right back where I found you, and without a blond curl out of place. I’ll bet you’re starting to appreciate just what a decent fellow I can be. As well, I’ll bet you’re worrying about exactly how you’re going to pay me for the marvelous excursion we’ve just been on. Well, you needn’t fret. I’ve got a tiny errand you could do for me in mind. Then we’d be quits, like we agreed. You do remember our agreement, don’t you?”
The tot’s eyes were darting back and forth as he in turn considered and ruled out escape routes. You could almost see the miniature cogs turning in his head before he came to the discouraging conclusion that there wasn’t anywhere that he might run to where the devil couldn’t snatch him up before he’d gone three paces. With his gaze still fluttering about evasively, he nodded with reluctance in response to the fiend’s question.
“Yes. You said if I did you a favor sometime then you’d take me on your ride for nothing. But that wiz only a little while ago. You made it sound as if I wouldn’t have to pay the favor back until a long time had gone by.”
The devil smirked indulgently.
“I think you’ll find that what I said was you could do a favor for me further down the line, which is to say at some point in the future. As it happens, that’s exactly where my little errand’s going to take you. There’s a person living forty or so years due west of here, in the next century, who I’m not very happy with. What I’d be very much obliged if you’d arrange for me is to have this unpleasant person killed. Specifically, I want their breastbone smashed to flakes of chalk. I want their heart and lungs crushed into an undifferentiated pulp. Just carry out this simple task for me, and I’ll magnanimously cancel all outstanding debts between us. How’s that for a handsome proposition?”
Michael Warren’s jaw fell open and he mutely shook his head from side to side as he began to back uncertainly away from slinky Sam O’Day. The devil sighed regretfully and took a step towards the boy. Perhaps a livid and perpetual scar across his spirit-belly would convince him that there wasn’t really much room for negotiation here.
It was at this point that the sharp voice of the chestnut lady rang out from behind the demon’s back.
“Not that way, dear. You come towards me. Don’t let that old fright tell you what’s what.”
The fiend wheeled round indignantly upon the source of this ill-mannered interruption. Standing upright now beside her smoking brazier, the dream or ghost of the old biddy had pink cheeks and iron eyes that were fixed unwaveringly on the fiend. Dressed in black skirts she wore an apron that was also black, with iridescent scarabs and winged solar discs embroidered on its hem. The woman was a deathmonger, and something told the devil that her presence here did not bode well for his immediate intentions with regard to Michael Warren. She called out again, not taking her dark, beady eye from the arch-demon for an instant.
“That’s a good boy. You go round him and you come to me. Don’t worry, dear. I’ll see he doesn’t hurt you.”
From the corner of his red left eye he saw the child run scampering past in the direction of the brazier’s sulking glow. Incensed, the devil turned his most bone-melting glare on the old relic as he spoke directly to her.
“Oh. You’ll see that I don’t hurt him, will you? And how will you manage that, exactly, from the septic depths of my digestive system?”
The old girl’s eyes narrowed. Stepping timidly out of the shadows of the alley-mouth behind her were a gang of dirty and delinquent-looking children, possibly the ones he’d dove-bombed earlier when him and Michael Warren had been setting off upon their flight. As the deathmonger spoke again she did so slowly, in a tone of cold deliberation.
“I’m a deathmonger, my dear, and we know all the oldest remedies. We’ve even got a remedy for you.”
Taking one small hand from behind her back she hurled a fistful of some viscous substance on the graying coals. She then took from a pocket of her apron a small bottle of cheap scent which she upended over her night-watchman’s brazier. Stale perfume hissed upon hot embers where the rancid fish-guts were already cooking, and the devil screamed. He couldn’t … aah! He couldn’t stand it. An allergic spasm shuddered through his substance and his rags stood up stiff as he retched. It was the cursing conjurer in Persia, it was stinking Persia all over again and like then he could feel his very semblance starting to unravel. He boiled up into another body, an enormous brazen dragon with a bellowing three-headed man astride its back and snorting through his bull’s head, lowing though his head like a black ram and stamping, stamping until all the timbers of the timeless Attics shook like straw, like water. Down below him he could see the scuttling tartan form of Michael Warren as the toddler ran to hide in the deathmonger’s skirts.
He was swallowing his own volcanic spit, the nausea and wracking torment threatening to shatter him. He coughed, and down his human nose came burning snot, black blood and a confusion of exotic sub-atomic particles, mesons and anti-quarks. The devil knew he couldn’t hold this form together for much longer before it collapsed into a pyroclastic flow of rage and rue. He focused all eight of his stinging, swollen eyes upon the cowering infant, and his voice was like an atom bomb in a cathedral, cracking five of the glass panes above the Attics of the Breath.
“WE HAD A DEAL!”
Both of his hides, the man-like skin and dragon scales alike, erupted into giant blisters that had surfaces like dying bubbles, swimming with a spectrum of slick petrol colors just before they burst. Rapidly losing an entire dimension, he leaked shape and modeling into the ether. Realizing that he only had sufficient power left for a flat display, the devil squirmed into a monstrous borealis, shimmering spider-lizard curtains made of light that seemed to fill the stupefying whole of the emporium. For a few moments it was as though all the boards and rafters were on fire with him, and his bird-eating eyes in headlamp clusters glared from every twisting flame, now red, now green, fire engines and gas chamber doors.
Then there was nothing left of him save a few sparks, bowling along in a fish-flavored breeze down the eternal hallway.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Chronology :
January 24, 2021 : Book 2, Chapter 2 -- Added.
HTML file generated from :
http://revoltlib.com/