Death: A Life (6 page)

“In fact,” I continued, “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you were made an archangel yourself one day.”

“You think so?” said Urizel, brightening considerably.
“Archangel
Urizel does have a nice ring to it…”

“Well,” I said, slapping his feathered back. “I should be on my way.”

“Of course, of course,” said Urizel happily. “It was Earth you wanted, wasn’t it? Just go past that inscrutable piece of blackness and take a right and you’re pretty much there.”

I thanked him and was just about to leave when Urizel raised his lily-white hand and cried, “Wait!” If I had had blood in my veins, or veins in my body, they would undoubtedly have frozen. After all my evasions, was I about to be caught?

“Before you go,” said Urizel, “what do you think of this?”

He swung his sword over his head in a frighteningly unstable elliptical arc, before whirling it beneath both wings and arms. He leapt in the air, let out a high-pitched yelp, and ended crouched before me, holding his sword quivering above his head, a small bead of angelic sweat dripping down his forehead before evaporating into a cosmic mist. A flurry of feathers fluttered down upon us. Urizel looked up expectantly.

“Well,” I said, feeling every inch the spawn of my father. “That’s just brilliant.”

Slowly
nothingness became somethingness and I found Mother frantically searching for me behind a crab nebula. As I approached I heard Father insisting that I had probably returned to Hell and that they should carry on without me. I cleared my throat and Mother rushed across to hug me, swearing that she’d never leave me again, while Father avoided my looks of reproach and said we should be getting on.

Earth was like nothing I had ever seen before. For a start it was smooth and round. Nothing in Hell had been smooth and round. There was a famous saying in Hell that went: “If it isn’t spiky and it isn’t painful, it isn’t Hell.”

As we flew closer we could see that instead of being a scorched wilderness of fire and smoke, the ground was covered in a lush blanket of green, a color I had previously only seen on the festering wounds of the damned. I was amazed to see that the oceans of Earth did not consist of roiling slicks of brimstone, but of a nonacidic liquid that swept calmly into the shore in gentle translucent waves. What’s more, the trees were not knotted and bent, nor were their branches impaling the screaming bodies of fallen angels. The air did not choke; the sky did not sag; the lakes and rivers were not filled with sickening, oozing, teethsome creatures, or indeed any of my relations. In short, it was nothing like Hell. At least not to begin with.

Upon arrival, Father stood arms akimbo surveying the new land, while Mother was all aflutter, slithering back and forth across the lush grass, perplexed as to why her scales were not being hideously scraped by jagged stones. After a few minutes of frolic she stopped and turned to Father excitedly.

“So where are the gates?”

“What gates?” said Father.

“Well, what are we meant to do, dear, if there aren’t any gates to guard?”

“Whatever you want,” said Father, with an expansive gesture.

“Oh,” said Mother, and stopped her slithering. I could see she was confused.

“The same goes for you…you,” said Father pointing at me, his brow knitted as my name once again eluded him. I didn’t know what to say.

That first night we sat around Father’s flames and held one another close. It was all so new and strange, and I had a feeling that while I had been Satan’s son in Hell, here I would have no special dispensations. I was to be a nobody, a nothing, a nonentity. That night I let the Darkness of the Bottomless Pit out of my bag. It shook itself out and looked at me with a vacant stare. I patted it and it curled around my feet. For the first time in my existence I felt totally free. It felt terrible.

The next day I began to explore this new world. I found Father already hard at work tempting. He was lying on his side trying to convince a hovering mosquito that it should drink blood rather than tree sap. The mosquito was putting up a fight, but Father was quite strong willed when he put his mind to it.

Mosquitoes: Guileless.

“You know what the other creatures of the forest call you,” whispered Father.

“No,” said the mosquito with its antenna flapping.

“They call you a sap-drinking sissy.”

“I don’t believe you,” said the mosquito indignantly.

“Oh, but it’s true,” said Father, all open-faced and honest. “I heard them myself.”

“Why? Why would they do that?” said the mosquito, tears shining in its tiny little eyes.

“They think you’re pathetic. I heard one of the horses say that all that sap has made you stupid.”

“But I get on so well with the horses,” said the mosquito. “I cool them down with the beating of my little wings.”

“Oh no,” said Father in mock surprise. “The horses hate you. They say you’re worthless. So do the rabbits.”

“Not the rabbits!” cried the mosquito.

“Yes,” said my father. “Those rabbits are two-faced monsters. They say you were a mistake of Creation.”

“Well,” said the mosquito, wiping its dripping proboscis with a minute leg and drawing itself up to its full, tiny height. “I may only be a mosquito, but I am a proud mosquito. Henceforth I shall drink nothing but the blood of living creatures!”

“That’ll show ’em,” said Father, before turning his attention to a
Tyrannosaurus rex
who had been peacefully munching on leaves.

It was little wonder that Father had been so keen on moving us here. No creature on Earth had built up an immunity to lies yet. It was the golden age of gullibility. All of Creation were sitting ducks for his fabrications.

Mother was also finding that her own innate skills were blossoming in this new, innocent environment. I found her in a sumptuous glade with a smile on her face.

“I’ve just made gray squirrels envy red squirrels,” she said.

I had never thought about it before, but Mother must have been extremely frustrated in Hell. As the personification of Sin among the already damned, she had never really had a chance to show what she was capable of doing. But here, for once, she was looking fit to burst with pride, not just maggots and pus.

“It just feels right to me to be here at this point in my existence.” She beamed as a red squirrel and a gray squirrel began wrestling on the ground in front of her.
“So
right.” The grass on which she was standing began to wilt out of sheer laziness.

Nutsradamus, Famed Red Squirrel Seer and Demagogue, Whose Oblique Utterances Begat Many Apocalyptic Squirrel Cults and Belief in an Eternal Hibernation.

You may at this point be wondering just how it was that Mother, Father, and I knew the names of all these creatures, having just arrived on Earth. Well, each animal, vegetable, and mineral on Earth had a laminated card attached to it. On this laminated card was typed the phrase
HI, I’M…
with the creature’s name spelled out beneath it. Of course, such a system had its problems. Many of the smaller creatures could not move because of the weight of the cards attached to them, and a great number of the cards became lost or mixed up. I have it from a good source that “bananas” were originally meant to be called “cycloparaffin,” but Father must have switched the cards without anyone noticing. Once the wrong card had been worn for any amount of time, the name stuck. In fact, back then, if you looked at Earth closely, you could see that it had been finished in a rather ramshackle way. The basics were pretty solid—gravity, atmosphere, sound—but there was still plastic wrapping on some of the trees, and crumbs of manna laced the garden floor from where the Creator had eaten while He worked.

As it was, my first days on Earth were somewhat anticlimactic. Mother and Father seemed so happy tempting and corrupting that I didn’t want to interrupt them. But the fact was that I hadn’t the slightest clue what to do with myself. I tried to convince cows to take over the world, to rampage across the fields slaughtering all in their wake, to start a new religion of udder worship, to build cities devoted to the consumption of grass, their aqueducts running with fresh milk. I even prepared a pictorial presentation of cows traveling into outer space aboard butter-powered space churns, but the cows seemed unconvinced, and soon returned to wondering how many stomachs they had. The current belief was seventeen.

Cows: Unambitious.

I thought maybe I should try something a little smaller and spent an entire morning pouring water on Gold, trying to get him to react. But he just sat there staring at me, completely nonplussed by my suggestions that he should fizz wildly and explode. Things got worse when I tried convincing Helium to get some color in her cheeks, and maybe a little odor. She simply yawned at me languorously and explained that she was a noble gas and, as with all nobility, preferred the inert life.

By my second day on Earth I was disconsolate and had retreated to a cavern and enveloped myself in the comforting embrace of the Darkness. I was blissfully doing absolutely nothing when I heard the sound of grunting coming from a small copse opposite the cave entrance. I crept over to investigate, curious as to what new horrors my parents might be instigating, but was greeted by the sight of two very strange-looking creatures. At first I thought they were angels, or devils, but they were much smaller and had no wings. Instead they had large protuberant brows that lent them an air of immense stupidity that I would soon find out was thoroughly justified. It was my first sighting of humans.