by Mark Cain
“Which was … ?” Satan yawned. He was getting bored with our conversation. It was clear he wanted me out of there.
“That Flo was like The Spark. When he said that, I felt a chill. I think in some way Bik was right.”
“The Spark, huh?” Satan chortled. “Spare me the fire giant mumbo jumbo. But he’s basically correct.”
“Lord Satan,” I hesitated, “is The Spark hope itself?”
“Close, but no cigar. It’s far bigger than that. But I’m tired of explaining things to you. Go up to Gates Level and ask Pete to show you the Well of Souls. Maybe you can figure out the rest for yourself.”
“The Well of Souls?”
“Yes.” He leaned over to me and hissed. “Meeting adjourned!”
Chapter 20
Satan walked over to his La-Z-Boy and gently shook BOOH. The bat opened one eye then began purring when he saw his master. The Earl of Hell smiled and whispered something in BOOH’s ear. He nodded eagerly then hopped off the chair.
The nap, and time spent in Satan’s presence, had done BOOH a world of good. He seemed his old self.
The Devil nodded, satisfied. “Minion,” he said, not taking his eyes of his pet. “Take BOOH with you up to Gates Level. But I don’t want you wearing him out. Use the Elevator. It’s waiting for you two now.”
“Uh, okay. Come on BOOH. We’re going to talk with St. Peter.” I looked to Satan. “You know he doesn’t like me, right?”
“So what do I care? He’ll answer your questions. He’s such a pompous know-it-all, he won’t be able to help himself. Now, get out of here before I toss you out.”
As promised, Hell’s Elevator was outside Satan’s office, door open, waiting for us. The demon who animated the Elevator must have really hated being so accommodating.
Hell’s Elevator is really big, but it’s not hangar size big, and getting a bat the size of a small Cessna inside was a bit of a trick. BOOH squeezed himself into the metal box, bending his head until it almost touched his stomach. By the time he pulled his last foot inside, the Elevator was almost completely filled with a solid furry ball of scrunched BOOH. I couldn’t even see his mouth, just his beady red eyes.
I wasn’t sure how I was going to get in myself. “Yikes!” I squawked as BOOH reached out a claw and pulled me inside. He draped me across his belly. The situation reminded me of something I had done back in college with ten of my dorm mates, and I started laughing. “BOOH,” I said, still chuckling, “do you think you can punch the button for Gates Level?”
The furry monster stretched out one toe and snagged the GL button with a claw. The doors closed, and the ELEVATOR blasted upward.
The demon running the thing was almost as fast as BOOH, and before we knew it the GL light started glowing. The Elevator dinged once then stopped.
Now, on Satan’s level of Hell, the Elevator door will open automatically. It’s a rare courtesy that he extends to the occasional guest who comes from Gates Level. On GL, however, there is no automatic door opener, so BOOH and I needed to open the thing ourselves. Normally, that’s only a mild inconvenience, but being stuffed as we were in the elevator, like two sardines - or rather, a sardine and a blue whale - this was going to be a challenge.
I couldn’t do a thing, being smooshed face-down against BOOH’s chest the way I was, but he managed to slip a claw under the lip of the door (which was on the scale of one fronting a garage) and pop it open. In a couple of seconds, we tumbled out of the Elevator, like the Marx Brothers did in the stateroom scene from ‘A Night at the Opera.’
Gates Level, the neutral zone between Hell and that other place, seems made of clouds, though the walking surface is solid enough. Today was more overcast than usual. The Pearly Gates were only visible as a bright glow behind a veil of precipitate gauze. The Gate to Hell was all-to-visible, though. I noted that the “Abandon all Hope” sign above the Escalator was dark again. Normally, the sign was top priority, but the HVAC system was taking precedence over everything else at the moment, especially now that Orson couldn't work independently anymore. The sign would stay a black rectangle until I had time to put in a new bulb.
Things were pretty quiet up on Gates Level. Only a few souls were standing in line before Peter, and he dispatched them quickly. The saint frowned at me as I approached. Since he didn’t like me, this wasn’t much of a surprise. “Why is BOOH hitching a ride on the Elevator? Ah, never mind. Are you here to fix the sign? Welles and Edison obviously didn’t do a very good job. And what about that pile of rubble over there? I’ve been waiting for you to clean that up since the incident with the Hellions.”
I glanced over at the debris that was blocking the entrance to the Stairway to Hell. Or the Stairway to Paradise. It all depended on which end of the stairwell you were at.
Everything’s relative, I suppose.
The Hellions, or Free Hellions as they more properly were called, was a gang of damned souls that had tried to escape Hell by means of the Stairway. I’d stopped them, with a little help from Pinkerton, by collapsing the exit from the stairwell to Gates Level. I frowned. There really needed to be a proper, dramatic entryway there, but my masonry skills were about as good as Lucy Ricardo’s. At the very least, though, I needed to tidy things up.
I painted a smile on my face and did my best to be polite to the prickly saint. “I know, St. Peter. Unfortunately, we’ve got sort of a crisis on our hands right now.”
“And when do you not?”
“Well,” I said, shuffling my feet a bit. “It’s true there’s always some sort of mess down in Hell. Sort of by definition, if you know what I mean.”
Peter snorted. He had a way of doing it that I found particularly irritating. Heaven’s Concierge could communicate more disdain and patrician superiority in a single snort than others could manage with a paragraph of disparagement. “What’s wrong now?”
“Heating system’s on the fritz. Air conditioning too, though we don’t use much of that.”
Peter looked amused. “No heat in Hell? I can see that would be a problem for you.”
Okay. I knew it wasn’t his issue to solve, and he clearly didn’t give a shit about my troubles, but I had questions to ask and wanted good answers, so I decided it was time to get him invested in the situation. “It could be a problem for you too.”
“Really?” he said, picking up his letter opener – it was shaped like a sword and had been given to him by the archangel Michael - and slitting open some envelopes that were piled on his desk. “And exactly why would it be a problem for me?”
“Why, Pete,” I said casually, the informal tone making his head pop up like a Whac-A-Mole mole. “Have you never heard the expression, ‘a cold day in Hell?’”
This was the best part of my day so far. I got to watch Peter’s expression change from puzzled to thoughtful to horrified. The saint paled, as the ramifications sunk in. “How,” he stammered, “how can I help?”
Better. I shrugged. “Don’t know, but Satan sent me up here to see something. And he thought you could answer some questions for me.”
Peter placed the letter opener on the Book of Life then took a small sign with a little gold chain attached and hung it on a nail that had been hammered into the front of his desk. I took a look at what the sign said: “On break. Back soon. St. Peter.”
“What do you want to see?”
“The Well of Souls.”
The saint shook his head. “You can’t see that. It’s behind the Pearly Gates. Wait,” he said with sudden understanding. “I think I know what Satan means. Follow me.”
Peter led me and BOOH, who hopped along behind us, past the Gates of Hell and toward the pathway that led to Charon’s ferry, one of the other ways to get down to the Netherworld. Peter walked past the trail, though, and I soon found myself in an area of Gates Level I’d never visited before.
In the distance, obscured by some of the low-flying clouds that littered the landscape of the GL, something was glowing. As we got closer to the source,
I gave a whistle. Before me, was a gigantic lake, filled with golden light. “Wow!” was about all I could muster.
“Yes, impressive, isn’t it?”
“I thought you said the Well of Souls was behind the Pearly Gates.”
“It is, but this is another Well of Souls. The one in Heaven holds those waiting to be born on Earth. This is the Well of [Damned] Souls.”
“What’s that noise you just made?”
“Hmm?” Peter was staring thoughtfully at the well. “That’s the sound of brackets. It’s a little hard to do. Sort of a constriction of the glottis, a little like the “ch” sound in the German ‘Ich.’”
I tried it a couple of times. “Close enough,” the saint said.
“Okay, so this is the Well of [Damned], cough, Souls. But that doesn’t tell me much. I really don’t get it.”
“No reason why you should. It’s not talked about much. But think back, if you can, to the moment I told you that you were damned.”
I closed my eyes and tried to remember. It was harder than I thought, as if a veil had been drawn over my memory. Perhaps that was part of the procedure, or perhaps I had repressed the memory. The saint must have realized this, for I suddenly felt the gentle stroke of his hand on my forehead. Suddenly I recalled standing before St. Peter’s desk for the first time. Peter, looking exactly as he did now, flipped rapidly through the Book of Life, looking for my name.
I didn’t know much about the administrative procedures of salvation, but I always thought things were pretty binary. If your name was in the Book, you entered the Pearly Gates. If it wasn’t, you won the Booby Prize. In my case, I was a booby.
I thought harder and remembered that a frown crossed Peter’s face. Then he reached in his pocket and pulled out a quarter, which he flipped in the air.
“Hey!” I yelled, my eyes popping open. “Was my damnation determined by a coin toss?”
“Whoops!” St. Peter quickly removed his hand from my brow and looked away. He started paying close attention to a small cumulus puppy that seemed to have wandered away from others of its kind. “I don’t,” he said finally, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You do too! You tossed a coin. I remember now.” Funny that I couldn’t before, but it explained why my memory was so cloudy. “How many souls had been damned by a coin toss?”
“Well,” Peter said finally, “you were a borderline case - funny how many of those we get - and that’s how I usually decide in those instances.”
I plopped down on the cloud surface. “Shit,” I grumbled, “I’m in Hell because I lost a coin toss.”
“Never mind about that!” the saint finally snapped. “I don’t answer to you. Besides, that’s all ancient history, and you’re not remembering what’s really important. Keep trying to recall what happened at the precise moment of your damnation.”
Still grumbling, I closed my eyes again. What did happen? And then I remembered. “There was a bright flash of light.”
“Right,” Peter said. “That was the moment when your soul left your body.”
“What??” I said, scrambling to my feet. “First I learn I went to Hell because of a lost coin toss, and now you’re saying I don’t have a soul.” I found that my fists were clenched. I was about to slug a famous saint.
Peter sensed my anger. “Calm yourself. Of course you have a soul, it’s just that once you’re damned not all of it resides in you.”
My anger turned to hurt and despair. I felt like a little boy who had just lost a puppy.
“That bright flash of light you remember was the pure portion of your soul. It separated from you at the moment of your damnation and came here.” Peter indicated the lake. “Once you’re damned, the unsullied part of your soul stays up here. It can’t descend into Hell. It’s still yours, though,” he said hurriedly. “A connection remains.”
“You said only the pure portion of my soul leaves me. So what’s left is … ”
“The dregs,” St. Peter said, patting my shoulder sympathetically. “Sorry about that.”
“Dregs. Great, so I really am all evil.”
“No, no, there’s still plenty of good stuff there. Some great beer comes from the bottom of the barrel.”
“Your metaphors leave something to be desired.”
“Good grief, Minion. Quit feeling sorry for yourself. Some good in a damned person’s soul is pure,” he said, pointing at the lake. “It remains here. The rest is either entirely bad or good, sometimes even substantial good, that is so tightly alloyed with evil that the two cannot be separated. If it makes you feel any better, in your case, there’s more good than bad floating around inside you.”
“If there’s more good in me than bad, even now, after you filched the pure stuff, then why am I in Hell?”
“You lost the coin toss.”
“I know, I know,” I grumbled. “but if I’m more good than bad, why was the coin toss even necessary?”
Peter shrugged. “Being good alone is insufficient. You were deficient in good works. You didn’t do enough of them in your life.”
I felt like I was being sucked into a theological argument that had been going on since at least the Reformation. “Yeah, well what about faith?”
St. Peter looked at me appraisingly. “My guess is you were a little deficient in that as well.”
He was right, I knew. “So … so just being good … ”
“… isn’t good enough,” St. Peter said, finishing my sentence. “Look. They’re all important: being a good person, doing good works, having faith. When someone doesn’t make it into the Book of Life, it’s because they are deficient in one or more of the categories.”
Swell. That explained a lot, though, such as why a number of obviously good people were rotting in Hell. Especially if there were so many borderline cases that a coin toss was necessary.
“Minion, we’re drifting from our main topic.”
“Hmm?” I said, distracted.
“The Well of Souls.”
I shook my head to clear it. “Right. You were saying?”
“The pure portion of your soul is in the Well.”
“I heard that already, but why?”
“Don’t know exactly,” Peter said, sitting on the bank next to the lake of golden light. I sat down beside him. “What I’ve been told is that a few people upstairs,” he said, looking up to some place I couldn’t see, “had once considered experimenting with recycling … I mean reincarnation. You’ve got to remember that this Well of Souls is just as unsullied as the Well of Unborn Souls in Heaven. In fact, they’re connected.”
“What? Why?”
“Well, the thinking was, if the level of Heaven’s well dropped too low and demand for souls exceeded supply, the valve between the two would open and we’d use some of these old souls. They’re really good as new, you know.”
“Has that ever happened?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
I had a sudden awful thought. “What would happen if the Well of [Damned] Souls got too low?”
Peter laughed. “Not likely that. Far more people go to Hell than to Heaven. We’ve had to widen the lake several times just to handle the influx of new old souls.”
“But if it did?”
“Not sure,” Peter admitted with a shrug. “I wasn’t involved in designing this system. It was here when I arrived. Why do you ask?”
“Nothing.” The fact that the two wells were connected made me very uncomfortable. “I was just wondering if the valve between the two is one-way or two-way.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning if this Well of [Damned] Souls got too low, would it start to drain the other well?”
St Peter looked at me. I looked at St. Peter. We both shuddered.
For a few moments, neither of us talked. Then I ventured another question. “Did you ever wonder what the Well of [Damned] Souls is for, other than being a holding tank for stuff that can’t go down to Hell?”
&nb
sp; “As far as I know, that’s its only purpose.”
A flash of insight hit me, and my nausea returned with a vengeance. I was pretty sure that Pete was wrong about the well. I shuddered again.
“What’s wrong, Minion? Catching a chill?”
“Hope not,” I mumbled. Then a final question popped into my head. “St. Peter, this may seem a little off-topic, but I was wondering, is a soul a form of hope?” I know Satan had said no, but I was interested in getting another perspective, especially one from the other side.
Peter scratched his beard. “I’ve never thought of it like that, but in a way, yes. Every soul is hope, hope for good, hope for salvation. Potential.”
I got to my feet. “Thanks, St. Peter. I think I’ve learned what I came to find out.”
Peter rose. Literally. He floated up, then when his head had reached about the level of mine, he unfolded his legs and touched his feet to the ground. It was a pretty neat trick. “Well, I’m glad I was helpful. I hope you can stop that cold day in Hell before things get too chilly down there. If you don’t, next time you come up here, you might be dealing with another saint.”
“Pardon?”
“An, ah, infelicitous statement I made once to Paul, involving that ‘all Hell freezes over” expression.”
It seemed even saints weren’t above using the phrase. “Come on, BOOH. I’m sure St. Peter wants to get back to work, and it’s time for you and me to go.”
But BOOH wasn’t paying any attention to me. He was standing on the edge of the Well of [Damned] Souls, staring into its depths. Then he dove in.
“What’s he doing?” Peter shouted.
I looked down at my friend, who had just surfaced and begun to swim for shore. “The backstroke, I think.”
“He can’t do that!”
“No, look. He’s really pretty good at it. He could put Johnny Weissmuller to shame.”
Peter punched my arm. “That’s not what I meant. I meant, it’s not allowed.”