The Scarlet Gospels

  “Or a different driver,” Caz said behind the driver’s back. He had slipped out of the passenger side while the driver made his way to the back of the limo, and he had not emerged from Hell without his knife. He waved it at the driver, whose response was quick and unequivocal.

  “Take the car. Just don’t hurt me, okay? I got five kids. No wife but five fucking kids. You want to see? I got pictures.” He reached into his jacket.

  “I’m sure you’re an excellent breeder,” Caz said. “But I don’t need pictures of the kids. I just need you to help the reverend out of the car.”

  “Out?”

  “Oh, he can stay, but I don’t think he wants to ride all the way to New York with a car full of unrepentent sinners.”

  The reverend didn’t need Caz to repeat himself. He had the answer already in mind.

  “Get me the fuck out of this car,” he said. “It’s not going to New York. It’s going to the lake of fire and I don’t want to be riding in it when it gets there!” He stuck out his overly bejeweled fat-fingered hand. “Help me here, Jimmy, or Julius or whatever the fuck your name is.”

  “Frederick.”

  “Just get me the fuck out of this car.”

  “Please don’t take the Savior’s name in vain, Reverend,” Caz said.

  “Ah, fuck you,” the reverend said.

  The reverend reached up and might have caught hold of the door if Caz hadn’t found his hand first and, supplementing Frederick’s strength, hauled all three hundred and seven pounds of Reverend Kutchaver up out of the considerable depression he’d made in the limo seat. Once they had the worst of the work done, Frederick let go of his half of the burden and Caz took the hint and did the same. The reverend loosed a shrill shout and went down on his hands and knees in the litter of the rock shards at the edge of the highway.

  “Welsford, you idiot. Where are you? I fell down. Help me up or I swear to Christ I will fire you and make goddamn sure that no one will hire you if you live to be a hundred and fucking fifty.”

  Welsford scrambled to help his beloved employer and preened over him like a sycophantic lover. The sight was enough to make Caz laugh out loud.

  “What’s so fucking funny?” the reverend demanded of Caz as Welsford fussed over him, brushing dirt from his suit with short little strokes of his hand.

  “It’s an inside joke,” Caz said. “Oh yeah, and I’ll be needing everyone’s phones, of course.”

  Once all forms of communication had been confiscated, Caz climbed into the driver’s seat, then rolled down the window and drove off, leaving the sanctimonious reverend and his staff in the Arizona dust.

  “Caz,” Harry said as the car barreled down the length of highway.

  “Yes, Harold?”

  “God bless you.”

  4

  Lucifer lay under a great weight of shattered stone, his body so exquisitely knitted that it had remained whole beneath the fall of Hell’s heavens. The voices that stirred him from his comatose state were not human; rather they spoke in the fluting voices of his own tribe of angels, though their debate (which he understood perfectly well despite the passage of centuries) was scarcely evidence that they were messengers of love.

  “We should have been here to see this, Bathraiat. Somebody should have been keeping an eye on things and raised the alarm the moment the stone became unstable. I would have wanted a seat up front for this! Can you imagine the panic, and the screaming and the praying—”

  “Demons don’t pray, Thakii!”

  “Of course they pray.”

  “You really are a cretin, aren’t you? Who the fuck would they pray to?”

  “They had a leader. Some rebel. Shite! I don’t remember his name. You know me and names. He was a dickhead and everybody says so. And old Bitch Tits kicked him down here. He started some rebellion.”

  “Lucifer?”

  “That’s the one. Lucifer. They prayed to Lucifer.”

  “Why?”

  “Didn’t he build this place?”

  “So? Who cares?”

  “I care.”

  “You care? About somebody other than yourself? What kind of shite is that?”

  “I’m not saying I care as in ‘tears-and-lamentation’ care. I care that the fuckwit who had this come to pass—and it’s a big job—I’m saying whoever that selfish fuckwit was, he could have told a few friends and we all could have been sitting on the sidelines watching the slaughter like civilized creatures. Instead we were standing around doing nothing in a state of ignorance—”

  “Shut up, will you?”

  “I can do whatever—”

  “Shut your mouth, brother, and open your eyes. Do you see what I see? There! Under that rock!”

  At that, Lucifer drew a deep breath, and the massive stone that pressed down on his body loosed a single loud crack as it split from end to end.

  “God. In. Heaven,” the one called Bathraiat said.

  The two angels looked up at Lucifer. Their natures were not capable of shame. What could perfect beings such as they ever have to be ashamed of? But their instincts, however coarsened by lack of use they were, told them this was no ordinary demon.

  “It’s him,” Bathraiat said.

  “But he looks so—”

  “Shut up, brother,” Bathraiat hissed. “Be best if you kept your opinions to yourself.”

  “You’re not afraid of him, are you?”

  “I said shut the mouth.”

  “You know what? Fuck you,” Thakii said, and then turning to Lucifer, “and especially fuck you, Lucifer almighty. We were having a fine time till you showed up.”

  Having spoken his mind, the angel started to turn away, but one word uttered by Lucifer—“Don’t”—was enough to stop the angel in mid-motion.

  “What?” said Thakii.

  “You are numbered among the dead, angel,” Lucifer said.

  “I am?” Thakii looked puzzled. Then smiled in blissful adoration and ceased.

  The energies from which he had been nurtured, inheriting their willfulness and their lusts and their escalating confusions, immediately began to vacate his body and go in search of new pastures to seed. The light in the warm flesh of his muscles flickered out as all the strength in him perished. He curled in upon himself, his head becoming elongated and shrinking as he collapsed like a building set with charges. If there was any pain in his demise he let out no complaint.

  The other angel, whose skin was subtly imprinted with what looked like eyes, delineated in red with black irises, blinked in acceptance.

  “It is boring, day after day,” the creature said. “I get to feeling that anything is preferable to this.”

  “Anything?”

  “Yes,” the angel said, deliberately providing the executioner with his cue.

  “Dead,” Lucifer said.

  The other angel nodded and, curling in upon himself, was unmade twice as quickly.

  Lucifer climbed up into the tallest pinnacle of sky-stone and did his best to assess his whereabouts. But it was by no means easy. The deluge of fractured stone had effectively flattened every last topographical detail that might have helped him to work out where he was and in which direction he had hope of making an unseen departure. He had no desire to find any others here. He simply wanted anonymity for a while, to sit in a quiet place and try to figure out what to do with the unwanted resurrection that had been gifted to him.

  But first he needed to get up and out of Hell’s wasteland without drawing any further attention to himself. The number of angelic presences here was growing; he saw them stepping down out of the darkness all around him, eager to witness the ruins of Hell. He took advantage of their morbidity—plotting a path of departure that would keep him away from the grisly sites that drew the angels’ clammy attentions and instead took him away through narrow cracks between the heaped stones.

  Once he’d put some distance between himself and the worst of it all, it was easy. He found a dead soldier in a robe that was large eno
ugh for him to envelop himself. He removed the soldier’s clothing and wrapped it around his own body to keep the light in his flesh from attracting the gazes of the curious as he made his way up out of Hell and into the world of men.

  5

  D’Amour sat in darkness. Whatever the time, day or night, darkness. Being blind in Hell had seemed scarcely real, but once he got back into New York—back into his apartment and later his office—he began to comprehend how merciless the Hell Priest’s final curse on him had been. Like everyone blessed with the gift of sight, he had taken it for granted. He had lived with his eyes. They made it possible for him to exist in the eternal present. As long as he could see ahead, he could at least attempt not to look back. Now he had to rely upon memory to find his way around his world, and memory took him out of the present and forced him to constantly cast his mind into the murky waters of the past. He had never been very good at it, but regardless, he wanted the now again.

  With no reason to think there’d be an end to his curse, Harry decided to close the agency. It wasn’t as though Harry needed the money anymore either. As soon as Caz and Harry were ruled out as suspects in Norma’s death, the matters of her estate were settled. For a woman living in such humble circumstances, Norma had been quite well-off. Harry was surprised to find that she owned the building in which she lived, along with half the buildings in the vicinity, several gas stations, a handful of car dealerships, and an island off the coast of California. She’d left everything to Harry.

  Still, even with his newfound wealth, the decision to close up shop was brutal on Harry, and Caz was his only lifeline to sanity. When the decision was finally made, they went to Harry’s office together and ran through the jobs that had still been outstanding when they’d taken off in pursuit of Norma. There were a couple that Harry felt he’d virtually wrapped up and would be able to finish with Caz there to give him some help. But most of the jobs were simply not feasible in his blind state, and he made the calls to all the clients in question, explaining that he had met with an accident and was unable to finish the job he’d accepted. Where there were advanced fees, he promised to return them.

  “It feels like I’ve died,” he said to Caz when he’d finished.

  “Well, you didn’t.”

  “And I should be grateful, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “I love you, Harold, but I don’t have the energy to cheer you up. Why don’t we put the pity party on hold while you tell me what you want to do with all this shit?”

  “This shit is my life, Caz. Try to show a little compassion.”

  “You’re starting to sound like a bigger queen than me. Brooding only looks good in the movies. Trust me, in real life, it’s fucking annoying. Let’s start going through the files to figure out what you want to keep? You need to get out of the office by the end of next week.”

  “I should have kept it.”

  “And done what with it? Open a driving school?”

  “All right, all right: I get it.”

  Harry reached out and grabbed for the bottle of Scotch on his desk.

  “Did you move my Scotch?”

  “Sure did.”

  “Why?”

  “You were slurring at your clients.”

  Harry sat for a moment, digesting Caz’s words, then changed the subject.

  “How’s married life?”

  “Kinky,” Caz said. “Dale is the best thing that ever happened to me. You should call Lana. You guys have a lot in common. Mostly, you’re both stubborn assholes.”

  “Yep,” said Harry, wishing he had something to swig.

  6

  The sky-stone had broken into three massive parts as far as the Hell Priest could discern. It had shed pebbles no larger than a hand and slabs big enough to be minor moons.

  All of Hell had been virtually flattened by the falling sky, which left the Cenobite guessing his location as he traveled. He sensed now that he had finally discovered the remains of the city, and his instinct was confirmed when he came upon a split in the rock that was barely a crack at one end and yawned to the distance of perhaps a quarter mile at the other. He walked toward the narrow end of the fissure while peering down into its depths. There wasn’t enough light, even for one whose eyes were as sensitive as his, to make out anything below, at least not until several planes of yellow flame burst from the crevice and illuminated the rubble.

  He saw here the houses of the richest demons: the Crawley Crescent, with its perfect sweep of white marble houses that had once faced out toward an ancient stand of Thriasacat trees to which legend attached the notion that should they ever ail, then the city would also ail. And should they die, so then would the city. Here now was the proof, lying crushed at the bottom of the fissure and lit by the same fire that had first illuminated the depths. He could see several Thriasacat branches, stripped of foliage and split, the sweet swell of their sap hanging in the air.

  The Hell Priest was not for the most part superstitious, but there were a few cases that crossed the boundaries of his distrust and had become a profound part of his understanding of the world. The legend of the Thriasacat trees had here been proved true. Strange to say—given that he’d witnessed the stone falling and known that nothing beneath it could have survived—he had held on to the remote idea that the stand of Thriasacat trees would have escaped by some miracle. But no. The sky had killed everything.

  And he had played a part in all of this. Were it not for his ambitions there would have been no need to raise Lucifer against him. And if Lucifer had stayed asleep in death, there would still be a sky in the sky. So this was of his making: this silence, this death. It was what he thought he had wanted all along.

  7

  Caz finished packing Harry’s things, then left to tend to Dale. Waiting for his friend to return, Harry sat, the window open a crack, and listened to the flux of the traffic as the lights changed at the intersection. The afternoon was slipping away; the passage of blue sky visible between the buildings would be steadily darkening. The traffic would be even heavier now as the flow was swollen by people heading home or out for dinner, their heads still buzzing with what the day had brought. Sure, work could be a pain in the ass, but it was purpose, and what was a life, any life, his life, without purpose?

  “Nothing…” he muttered to himself, and, uncorking the Scotch Caz finally had relinquished upon leaving, put the bottle to his lips. As he did so, a glimmer of light appeared at the corner of his eye. He lowered the bottle, his heart suddenly beating quick time. He’d seen something. His sight wasn’t extinguished after all!

  Very slowly, so as not to upset the healing going on in his head, he turned toward whatever was coming back into view. That’s when he saw her.

  “Norma?”

  “Hi, Harry.”

  She looked healthy, more like the Norma Paine whom Harry had first met so many years ago. Her body wasn’t insubstantial, like some cheap Hollywood phantom. She was perfectly solid. But it was she and only she who had come into view, a body framed by darkness.

  “I can see you. Christ, I can see you. I always tried imagining what ghosts looked like to you, but I wasn’t even close. Oh, Norma, I can’t believe you’re here.”

  “It’s good to see you too, Harry. I’ve missed you.”

  “Can we … I mean … can I hug you?”

  “I’m afraid not. But we can sit here and talk as long as you want. I don’t have a curfew. I can come and go as I please.”

  “Come and go from where?”

  “That’s between me and … the Architect of my New Accommodations. Just know that I’m very comfortable where I am now. And believe me, it was worth waiting for. But I had to come back and see you, Harry. I miss you so much. And I have a few tips I want to pass on. Dos and don’ts, if you will, when dealing with the recently deceased. I thought I’d be dying of natural causes at a hundred and one. That’s how old my momma was when she died. And my grandmother too. So I
was pretty damn certain I’d do the same, by which time I would have taught you everything I knew about, you know, getting the dead to move on. And you’d just take over from there.”

  “Wait—”

  “You can’t contain your excitement, right? You get to save people who were kicked into the Hereafter a little too suddenly. They’re wandering around half-crazy, Harry, trying to figure out what in the name of sweet Jesus they’re supposed to do now. And, good news, you’re their only hope!”

  “Slow down. I don’t—”

  “You certainly have your choice of offices,” she said. “A lot of them have a panoramic view of the city.”

  “Yeah, where the hell did all the money come from?”

  “I got a lot of money given to me over the years, Harry. All from relatives of dead folks I helped. They heard what I’d done for their family members and wanted to say thank you. I gave it all to you.”

  “I know. And it was entirely too generous, Norma—”

  “Generosity had nothing to do with it. I gave you that money so you could afford to do what you need to do. Don’t make me take it back. I can do that, you know.”

  “You might have to. I don’t think I can do what you’re asking of me.”

  “You feeling sorry for yourself again because of a little darkness in your life? I heard you with Caz. He was right. All that brooding? Ain’t healthy. Don’t make me lecture you from beyond the grave. I’ve done enough of it already.”

  Harry smiled. “God, I missed that. But it has nothing to do with being blind, Norma. You made it look easy. But you’re so much stronger than me. How does a lost soul help lost souls?”

  Norma smiled and the darkness in the room diminished.

  “Who better?” she said. “And while you’re thinking about it, open up your blinds and look down.”

  “When I open that window, I’m going to see what you saw every day of your sightless life, aren’t I?”