The Triple Goddess (78 page)

The irony of the devil lady’s situation was that, because she was understood to be in a cushy post where every soul was blameless but untested, and therefore as ripe for the plucking as the plentiful fruit in the orchards, HQ expected her to turn in a stellar performance. Expert as the authorities were in urban and suburban eschatological warfare, they could not believe that any such retreat might already be as ridden with vice, and as much a maelstrom of intrigue, vendetta and bare-knuckle fighting, as any Hell’s Kitchen filled with greasy human fowl awaiting spit-roasting in the sempiternal fires of Hell. The sort of common-or-garden transgressions of petty larceny, lying, cheating, maliciousness, and bearing false witness that were endemic in country villages demerited nothing worse than second-degree burns.

Devils got cut no slack. The Hadean clerks were punctilious about keeping the tally sheets accurate and up to date, and managers were constantly re-evaluating and revising achievement goals, to the point where one had to be super-inhuman to reach them. HQ took a dim view of diminishing returns, and assigned minor credit for pygmy souls who yielded without a struggle. The devil lady’s new circumstances, she now realized, were extremely difficult ones in which to meet her quotas and score the number of condemnatory points that was expected of one who was operating not as part of a team but like Horace Rumpole in the Penge Bungalow Murders case, “alone and without a leader”.

Admittedly there were a few nuts to crack of size, the greatest of which without question was Ophelia; but it was a devilish nostrum that it was better to be surrounded by hazelnuts and pistachios than the walnuts and almonds and brazils that bent the nutcracker and got left at the bottom of the bowl at Christmas. And trying to crack Ophelia was like attacking a coconut with tweezers.

It was becoming imperative that the devil lady, who prized her independence above all else, pull off some sort of coup, in order to convince the HQ boffins that she was still qualified to retain her licence as a field operative, with all the operational latitude and allowances that she was entitled to.

But how? Despite her first-rate training and numerous refresher courses, she was finding it more and more difficult to do the sort of sterling work that she had once achieved so effortlessly. The days when she had seemed almost programmed to turn in list after list of corruptive feats at the end of each reporting period, when the impossible was done daily and the Hellish equivalent of a miracle took only a little longer, were ancient history. She could not remember the last time that she had looked forward to getting up in the morning and hurling herself into her work; nor when at the end of each soul-drive she submitted with equanimity to the detailed and lengthy process of obtaining proofs and attestations and signatures and countersignatures, and being interviewed by the Damnations Committee, and responding to contestations or refutations of any of her claimed “scores”, and the necessity of accepting without protest denial of any of them irrespective of whether the judges’ unappealable decision was right or wrong—all of which had to be gone through before her statistics could be updated and her newly confirmed “kills” logged in the Eternal Register.

These days it was only the allure of the strongest freshly brewed coffee, made from beans ground by her servant to her specifications and brought up to her bedroom on a tray with the
Pluto Chronicle
—whose motto, plagiarized by
The New York Times
, was “All the News That’s Unfit to Print”—that got her going in the morning. The latter was filled with inhuman interest stories, and was essential reading if one were to remain
au courant
with which celebrities had been gazetted in the Arrivals columns. In addition to the coffee’s clarion call, there was the almost illicit pleasure of the cooked English breakfast that awaited her when she dressed and came downstairs.

Without these incentives, or if there had been nothing more awaiting her than a miserable Continental repast of cereal, rolls, butter and jam, the DL might never have been able to drag herself from under the duck-down duvet. After fresh-squeezed orange juice, or grapefruit either whole with a cherry on top or in segments dusted with caster sugar, there were red tongues of back bacon...unless she was in the mood for crispy-edged curls of streaky…accompanied by bubbling sausages so plump that they were bursting out of their skins in their eagerness to seduce her. There were grilled tomatoes so dishevelled that they looked as though they had spent the night on the town.

There were lemony, dawn-in-the-desert scrambled eggs, or the wintry glaciers of the fried made glorious summer by their suns of yolk, or round glossy cushions of the poached, all on nutty granary toast slathered with yellow dairy butter and a smear of Marmite. There were creamy-gilled field mushrooms gathered damp from fairy rings in the swirling mists of morn—or so the devil lady fondly imagined—and as a treat a couple of kidneys or slice of black pudding. All washed down with a pot of loose-leaf
Assam Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe tea from Fortnum & Mason.

The DL drank the remaining slug of whisky and soda in her glass and helped herself to four fingers more, neat.

What her earthly constituents failed to understand, she reflected, was the true nature of Hell. The classic depiction of demons pitchforking wailing sinners into flames and rivers of brimstone was a lot of hooey. The myth only persisted because there were insufficient funds in the advertising budget for an innovative campaign that would replace the traditional image with something less mediaeval and hackneyed.

There were many such trite images. The devils’ tails, for example, those signature appendages, were not natural outgrowths at all but detachable and self-adhering growths from a live culture. Male and female apprentice or trainee devils, when they had satisfied the examiners that they had reached the minimum theoretical and practical levels required to operate at entry level in a given field were awarded their tails and red gowns at the graduation ceremony. The men were also given a small bottle of Sulfura aftershave, and the women toilet water. Thereafter, the pieces were most commonly seen on formal occasions as part of the Infernal black subfusc—only the ceremonial gowns were red—dress attire, along with cloven patterned overshoes and artificial horns—just as Effie had surmised.

At other times, the wearing of the tail, like that of a kilt, was optional. Because it was a dead giveaway on assignment, the devil lady only sported hers in public when she was looking to offend or frighten, as she had been when she made her first solo venture through the village and encountered Hob. Most of the time it lay coiled and wrapped in a silk snood, fast asleep, in a chest with her collection of professional diplomas, advanced degree certificates, course attendance records, and commendations.

“The Devil”, though it was traditional to refer to the marquee position as that of a singular male individual called “Old Nick”, was the incumbent chairperson of an Infernal committee of the most senior devils. It was a rotating position amongst officers who were proposed and seconded and voted for by their peers on the Infernal Council. All had to stand for re-election, unless they wished to withdraw from public service and go back to running departments of their respective specialties, every four years in a process similar to that which decided the representatives on a Parochial Church Council. As on most committees, whoever was in the chair had a casting vote in addition to his or her own for the purpose of deciding tie-breaks, and although The Devil was in charge of determining the Fell Agenda he or she otherwise possessed no greater executive power than was arrived at by consensus amongst the members.

Hell was an institution bound up in red tape, a megalopolis run by civil servants doing their best, or worst, to make sense of and enforce the Infernal Constitution, and Amendments thereto, and Apocrypha, which formed a Byzantine canon of often-conflicting principles and procedures. Filling the ranks of Hell was accomplished through a streaming process in which devils were classified and graded on the strength of assessments made at the end of their training. Some were fast-tracked to become Specialists, and the others divided between the many levels of senior to junior devil.

The accommodations of different categories of devil were segregated: the élite caste of the Specialists lived in a Green Zone compound at HQ that was off-limits to other personnel, and they did not mix with their lesser brethren except on business. The non-commissioned devil officers, those who were not senior enough to qualify for field assignments, lived in condominium or apartment blocks with shared living and bathroom facilities for cooking, dining, laundry, and washing. Those who had failed their examinations were given one of many thousands of black-collar jobs.

A few were always kept aside to fill the iconic cameo roles that Hell kept open for marketing and advertising purposes: in Tartarus there had been many mythological Sisyphuses rolling stones uphill, and Ixions bound to flaming wheels, and Tantaluses attempting to grasp out-of-reach fruit and drink ever-receding water, and Danaides trying to fill bathtubs using sieves for jugs. These individuals were drawn from a pool of morons who were good for not much else; and when they had lost their edge even at these no-brainer tasks and were no longer giving them as much welly as they called for or were rendered useless by repetitive-stress injuries, they were tossed back into the pool to do simple paperwork and process forms.

Unlike the career native species of demon and the laboratory-grown imps, devils were not indigenous to the Infernal zone. All were worldly importees, former free-willed human beings who had lost their identities when they were confounded into damnation. It was from this background that they drew their terrible power to subvert rather than convert: as soon as the mortally poisonous shirt of Nessus was upon them, and their eligibility for Salvation had been withdrawn, senior devils were continuously compelled to suffer the agony of being sent top-sides for field work, and associating with those who were as they once had been in an attempt to subvert them. It was the jealousy searing the devils’ guts that goaded them to perform at maximum corruptive strength, and however much they were able to conceal it they all suffered agonies from re-inhabiting their former natural environments and being constantly reminded how different things might have gone for them.

The demon corps supplied the middle- and lower echelons of administrators and indentured servants, such as the devil lady’s man. Demons were born and raised in Hell, hereditary citizens, and their skills and abilities were passed down in the genes from generation to generation. Although the law required that every demon do as any of the devil class commanded, some demons had succeeded in pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to positions as departmental heads, which in effect made them more important than many lesser devils. This made for some interesting psychological stand-offs around HQ.

At the bottom of the heap were the imps, dogsbodies to whom menial tasks were assigned by their demon superiors. Imps were not allowed to address a devil and were ineligible for advancement to even the lowest grade of demon. Although they were a noisy lot with the lowest of IQs, they worked extremely hard and were unfailingly cheerful.

The devil lady was still in the lower first tier of senior devils, and as such she was entitled to draw a servant from the ranks of the middle-ranking demons, and to select her own field assignments on the understanding that she would rise, move sideways, or fall in the rankings according to how well she did. Because the lowest points were awarded for garnering souls from the easiest environments, once a career field-devil had gained notoriety in a premier position by bringing home prize “kills”, it was extremely demeaning to be forced to apply for lower profile positions that came with cheesier accommodation and fewer perks. Consequently hubris was rampant amongst devils who refused to recognize that they were no longer capable of performing at peak level.

“Being in Hell” represented a state of exclusion from Heaven; and although devils were eligible to receive honours and privileges for distinguishing themselves, the competition and pressure were unremittingly brutal and intense. Although wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, gluttony—the Seven Deadly or Cardinal Sins, or Capital Vices, were no longer temptations in Hell because downfall through succumbing to them was a pre-existing condition; and although pain and misery and hopelessness were common to both those who dwelt in Hell and Earth (in a state of predecease, as devils referred to it) in the human condition there was always a possibility of their being eradicated or transcended by the beneficial opposites. Disease was the only perniciousness that did not exist in Hell. Nor were the ecstasies of Heaven reserved only for the hereafter, being sensible by any who chose to enter it or dwell there in their relationships, conduct, charity, and aesthetic appreciations. In worldly love for the unworldly graces, and in love itself, and joy, reverence, awe, admiration, serenity, forgiveness, and hope…Heaven was there to be found.

There was also a difference in the states represented by Death after Life, in Hell, and Life after Death, in Heaven, in that souls who went to Heaven did not assume the gritty integrity of those in the Other Place but were absorbed into Creation as droplets of rainwater were by land and ocean and the life thereupon or within. The earthly membrane that contained life, upon death broke, or burst like the skin of a grape, and contributed its elixir to the pool of goodness. Thereafter every living being born into the universe, whether it be person, beast, fowl, fish, reptile, insect, tree, plant, or flower, each contained essence of the goodness that had gone before; and it was not a fractional or infinitesimal piece of the whole, because in Heaven there were no sizes, variations or gradations: everything was all of everything...or it was nothing, which meant that it was not of Heaven.