Bobby on a stick

by Vasileios Kalampakas

  * * *

  A sinister-looking red light dominated the large cabin space of the assault team’s helicopter. What was left of the Normal Bureau’s combatants fitted inside two helicopters in all. I was riding alongside Jules and his own hand-picked team. Everyone looked slightly ridiculous in the football jersey’s, especially the women in the team who found the chest plates extremely discomforting and most had decided to just leave them behind. If it hadn’t been for the constant chopping noise of the rotor blades and the grim visage on everyone’s faces, the cabin could’ve been just the setting for an expensive, sports-themed porn film.

  As we banked left and right, crisscrossing in the air along with the other extremely modified blackhawk (the modifications largely consisted of a relic bible attached to its nose, leather-bound and hand-written by a catholic Saint), it looked almost as if a couple of playful night-birds courting in the sweet, warm summer night. In fact, there was nothing sweet about the night, and as we approached the gateway location, I felt my stomach churn. It could’ve been the uneasy flying, it could have been something I ate. For the most part, I didn’t want to think it was the shakes, the kind of fear that sometimes took over right before a job, or so my false memories told me.

  It was fear of failing. Like when you’re trying to pull that Jenga block without ruining everything, or when you’re about to flip that omelette in the frying pan, only in a larger scale. I’d taken things up to that point in my stride; just adapting, reacting, and trying to see the silver lining. I still didn’t feel sure about why I just hadn’t given everyone the one-fingered salute (or in some foreign countries, the two-fingered salute - I’m sure someone like Baron Hasso-Ludwig Freiherr von Papen would have gotten the idea right).

  Maybe it was the whole absurdity of everything. A part of me thought that this was just too bad to be true, and I just had to believe that it was a very big practical joke, or some kind of huge, honest misunderstanding. Another part of me was definitely awed by the newly discovered fact that I couldn’t die. It felt empowering to the point of just wanting to do crazy stuff for fun, like jumping off a plane without a parachute, going lava-boating, firing myself from a howitzer, or visiting an Asian country and trying the local cuisine. Of all the above, I was trying my luck against the hordes of Hell.

  But as I saw the men and women around me who were probably thinking they might not make it out of this one alive, and that they had made quite possibly the worst career choice in human history, the thought of Eileen just popped into my head out of nowhere; exactly like when you can’t remember that guy’s name and it flashes in your mind when you’re taking a dump. Was I doing all this, just for Eileen?

  I mean, I remembered liking her, and I certainly remembered her anger and passion as a guardian spirit, and the looks she gave me, but it was very far fetched to believe that I was going literally through hell for a woman. Not that it wasn’t a pretty common phenomenon in the everyday lives of most men, but that was just a metaphor. I just couldn’t think it was possible, but it felt right, even if that was the only reason I was about to get knee-deep in demon blood.

  Of course, I had nothing to lose, apart from the rest of the world that made it such an interesting place to live in. I’d get through this alive and that was guaranteed, but there was no guarantee I’d really want to in the end.

  I was resting my hand-picked, finely sawed-off shotgun on my lap, feeling its comforting weight. It was interesting to note that it had the words ‘et ibit in inferno erant’ carved on its stock. Jules had told me that it roughly meant ‘go to hell and stay there’. I found it quite fitting and picked that one among a multitude of relics, including - but not limited to - the spear of Longinus, Mjolnir, and other similar stuff I thought belonged to a museum or perhaps a comic book. Seriously, a hammer?

  As I traced my hand across the shotgun’s stock, and felt the engraved letters, the pilot was heard through the intercom:

  “We’re in the pipe, five by five, flare in three minutes, stand by to drop, coming in hot,” I heard the man say, and I couldn’t understand anything other than that something would happen in three minutes. Jules made a hand signal like a circle and everyone around the cabin started checking their stuff. I tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention and had to shout to make myself heard over the noise and the vibrations:

  “What the hell did he say?”

  “We’re right on course, he’s going to hover over the landing zone and we’re going to have to rappel down, because we are going to be under fire, probably.”

  “I thought we were fighting demons. What kind of fire?”

  “Every kind of fire, sir.”

  “Remind me again, what was the tactical plan?”

  “Take down the large bastards, and then start picking out the little scrawny ones, and buy some time while you go in and extract Eileen before we blow that shit up.”

  “Where these my words or yours?”

  “Your words, sir.”

  “Yup, I think you’re right, I can understand it perfectly. Everyone’s ready then?”

  “We’ll see, sir. A-Team, sound off!” Jules said and one by one everyone in the cabin shouted out their name, the number on their jersey’s, and confirmed their readiness. I thought the uniform numbers would come in handy; I didn’t know any of them by their names so I could just call them by their numbers. And that was probably the extend of help the football gear would provide. I was hoping we might get lucky, but then again I tried to think claws like Novorski’s against their flesh. I asked myself what was wrong with me, but I had to at least tell them to feel better for myself. I cupped my hands and had to shout to be heard:

  “Don’t get killed! Okay?”

  Most of them couldn’t hear me through their helmets, and shook their heads. I gave it another shot:

  “Don’t DIE! Okay?”

  “No, sir. No pie!” one of the women shouted back, and I just gave her a thumbs up, sighed and fell silent. I heard the pilot through the intercom once more:

  “Thirty seconds to flare, rope in and hang tight!”

  Everyone passed their ropes through their carabiners and double-checked their harnesses, while the helicopter started lurching every way possible violently. I thought the pilot’d lost control and we were about to crash, while I saw a bunch of flares go off and light up everything with intense light. The other chopper in the pair did pretty much the same, but as I saw its flares pop away, a huge hand suddenly grabbed its underbelly and it abruptly disappeared out of my field of view. Jules screamed at the men:

  “Safeties off! Go empty on that thing!”

  And then the two men handling each minigun on the side just started shooting, trying to hit whatever kind of demon had grabbed the helicopter out of the sky. I only saw it once more, as the pilot wrestled to gain altitude or shake that demon off, even while our guys filled the sky with tracer fire, and the folks on the other chopper tried to get off some shots as well. Then our own helicopter suddenly pitched up as if a giant pair of reins were suddenly trying to stop us.

  As the chopper started to hover above the ground, I could see the gateway’s building, a nondescript museum-like construct with a wide staircase leading up to a metal door, inscribed with all sorts of weird shapes and alphabets. Behind that, huge wells from the abandoned copper mine were dug in the earth, almost dried up, like huge shot glasses waiting to be filled. There was mayhem all around us, all kinds of hellish creatures fighting with the Bureau’s men and women; some of the fiends and monsters were carrying guns, some wielded rocket launchers, and others were cradling sharp dangerous things like scythes, swords and axes. Mostly axes. Jules screamed like a maniac:

  “Go! Go! Go!” and everyone jumped off the chopper, cradling their rope lines with one hand, their weapon in the other one. I hadn’t realised it, but I was already tumbling down, with Jules grabbing me from my belt. As I felt the softened impact on the sandy ground, I saw our chopper swiftly break off
and try to gain height; I also saw the other helicopter that had been struggling with that demon finally succumb to gravity and clumsily fall sideways onto a silo, its screeching sound drawing the attention of everyone for the slightest moment.

  We all saw some of the men jump only moments before the chopper became lost in a cloud of concrete and smoke. The demon that had brought it down lay slumped on the ground, and even as I heard Jules rally the team and focus at hooking up with our people inside, I could feel my chest and ears thumping from the ferocious vibrations of wild gun-fire. Everyone seemed to have opened fire; I saw everything as though strobe lights were flashing all around me.

  Had I been an epileptic, I’m sure I’d have had a seizure. Instead, there was this buzzing inside my head, and a terrible feeling of sudden under-pressure, as something like a bazooka round flew right beside my head. As I turned around, trying to see what had caused the sudden panic from trained professionals who supposedly fired small, controlled bursts, preserving ammo and making each shot count.

  Generally when things don’t happen in their usual fashion, there’s probably some kind of extraordinary reason that more often than not calls for extraordinary measures. I was looking at a twenty-foot tall extraordinary reason, with all the charm and guile of a pair of outhouses, with four arms as thick as a man’s torso, armed with bony blades larger than a broadsword and judging from their shiny sheen, sharper than a scalpel. The panicked response of just starting to shoot on full auto was, if not anything else, quite understandable even though rather underwhelming.

  I saw the demon lurch forward, ready to cut half a dozen men in tiny slices. Jules right beside me had gone apeshit gun-crazy, and having emptied his empty Magnum .44 he tossed it on the ground and drew a really keen blade out of a sheath on his back, charging at the demon like a really confused Superbowl samurai fan.

  The demon saw him, and grinned. Shying away everything the others threw at him, he turned to face Jules head on, with the most probable outcome being Jules turning into a cut-away cardboard version of his old self, while the rest of us looked in sympathy and complete helplessness.

  I thought it couldn’t hurt to actually use the damn thing, so I just pointed the shotgun towards the advancing demon, and with the smell of it’s sulphur-laden fumes right at my nostrils, I shouted at him, trying not to look at the stock:

  “Et.. xzibit in inferno errand!”

  The demon paused in his lethal stride, and even Jules stood with both hands holding his sword above his head, right before he was ready to deliver a blow. I must’ve done something wrong and something right at the same time when I tried again:

  “Et, ibit infernum in.. Just go back to hell already!” I screamed and felt the kick of the double-barreled sawed-off shotgun. As I realised I wasn’t quite prepared for it, feeling my nuts squeezed beyond their usual design capacity, I reeled from the pain, and through blurry vision I saw the demon take every single buckshot to the face, little writhing blue flames of holiness eating him up from the inside, even as the rest of the guys opened up fire once more, with Jules timing his blow perfectly, aiming right for the head.

  As the demon roared in excruciating pain for the last time, it fell on its back with its hoofed feet wildly flailing in the air. I think I saw a few smiles, but there was little time for high-fives, since our surprise arrival had attracted the very loving attention of more of Hell’s minions. Not very surprisingly, from my point of view all I could think of though was that I could never have children after that one.

  I saw various imps, lesser demons, and a couple or more of flying demons had broken off their siege of the gateway building, and were headed our way. Jules offered his hand so I could get up. I grabbed it and even though my balls felt like lead weights I got up and saw a line of men had formed up on our flank, and they were already opening fire against the devilish things coming our way without a care in the world.

  Jules was taking opportunity shots with his reloaded Magnum and at the same time shouted at me, even as I was reloading my own shotgun:

  “Sir, we have to keep moving! Close the distance between us and the defenders and get some covering fire!”

  “What happened to the plan of cutting down the big ones first?” I asked him and saw he was a bit shaken, not the bad motherfucker he was supposed to be. At least, not the guy with that gleam in his eyes that I’d seen before.

  “Sir? I think it’s highly inadvisable under the circumstances, considering half the men are gone!”

  I prided myself in knowing pretty much nothing about fighting, except from when to run like hell. And exactly because of that, I knew this wasn’t the time for running, or taking care not to get shot. This was indeed our make or break. These men, and the world at large, not just me, needed Jules Caesar, not some nice guy in a black suit. I knew I had to piss him off:

  “You mean, you’re scared?”

  “What?”

  “I said, I can understand it if you’re scared. I mean, you’re not immortal like I am. It’s perfectly understandable if you want to sit back tight while I -”

  “Sit back tight? Sit back tight, sir?” he asked, truly in total disbelief and helplessly mounting anger.

  “Yeah, you can sit back tight since you’re scared and let the one man who can’t die save your negro ass,” I said, thinking that even among all the chaos and mayhem, calling him ‘negro’ would be the perfect way to get him in a superfly-TNT state of mind.

  “Niggah, you just ticked off my bad mojo. Ain’t no immortal white boy gonna save my ass and call me ‘negro’, niggah! Stay back, you might get ichor on that jersey.”

  “What’s the hell’s an ichor?”

  “The shit oozing out of that dead motherfucker’s head. Jones, Johansson, Jonas, on me! The rest of you, pick your targets, and make it count!” Jules said and looked like he was ready to take them all on himself. I took a look at the entrance to the gateway, a few dozen yards away, the bodies of demons and imps strewn all around, a ragged bunch of guys in black suits taking double-tap precision shots with their pistols and rifles, some already up close and personal with some kind of wolf-like creatures.

  “Jules, you can take care of these things, right?”

  “Fucking right I can!” he replied and emptied a clip on a flying demon, ripping its wings apart and placing a volley of bullets right on its head which burst in flames, right before the demon crashed on the ground, ichor oozing out of every bullet hole. That was a pretty solid demonstration that in fact he could take care of them, so I calmly started walking towards the building’s entrance, silently repeating to myself that I was immortal.

  Curiously enough, no one bothered to have a go at a figure that didn’t seem at all preoccupied with the ongoing firefight, so I reached the defenders totally unscathed with my football jersey in perfect condition, taking a couple of shots at a few imps that thought that perhaps I was worth biting their teeth into. A woman called out to me, her hair ruffled up but still wearing her sunglasses. She was kneeling down behind a badly chipped marble column, in what must’ve been the epitome of keeping one’s cool:

  “Sir, glad to have you!” she shouted and let off a few rounds, the sound of her pistol quickly followed by unearthly shriek. She had just killed something, but I didn’t bother to venture a look, staying as cool as the circumstances demanded:

  “Can you hold out here?”

  “It’ll get real up close and personal soon, sir!” she cried out, while a burst of fire from her teammates must’ve found its target only a few yards away.

  ”Jules is drawing some of that shit his way, I think he’ll hook up with you sooner or later.”

  “Copy that, sir! Good luck!” she shouted over the sound of her pistol blazing away and I thought I saw her grin, while I replied in a curious fit of nonchalance: “I hope I won’t be late for the party!”

  Someone knocked rhythmically on the door for me, and in a moment it opened from the inside. There was this Bure
au man with a suit that simply nodded knowingly, and without further ado ushered me in and went outside, holding a machete and an Uzi. I closed the door behind me, turned all the locks and put its bar into place with some effort. The muffled sounds of the fighting outside could still reach me, but otherwise, I was completely alone inside the gateway’s building.

  Surrounded by luxury that itched to be carried away to a getaway car, I followed the main hallway towards a faint, blue shimmering light. Past an archway with all sorts of apocryphal inscriptions carved in a gold plaque, I reached a small circular pool, no more than a few yards across. I couldn’t see any sort of cables, pipes, lasers or the stuff usually associated with weird machinery.

  It felt like water-lilies should be floating inside, and little frogs leaping around, catching insects for dinner. Hadn’t it been for the fighting outside and the ticking clock, I could have just fallen asleep right next to it. Or perhaps have a sudden urge to pee.

  The sole source of light inside that small and otherwise quite plain and empty chamber was this small pool. Small waves flitted across its surface, which was more like a mirror in turmoil, silvery and without depth, very much unlike water. No sound came out of it, just this intense, blueish light and I knew then this was the ‘intrinsic field reality horizon’ Jules had told me I had to go through.

  He could’ve told me to just take a dip in the pond. I took a deep breath and held it before I jumped inside, shotgun at the ready. For a moment all I could think of was not to shoot the first thing that I saw on the other side. Then everything seemed to disconnect from my mind, from my feet upwards, as if I was very carefully and gradually being sliced. I then saw blinding flashing spots in my eyes, right before complete darkness took me.

  IX

  The briefings and the charts, all the various documents and maps they had shown me could not have relayed the fact that going through the damnable gateway was like filling your stomach with bricks and sand, before violently vomiting everything through your nose. My head felt like it had already been donated to science and then returned as if it hadn’t been found useful at all.

  I looked around and saw I was in the same chamber, only the pond, the gateway, was curiously enough placed on the ceiling. Everything else seemed exactly the same. I picked up my shotgun and checked my ammo. I also checked the ‘device’. It was still strapped on my back, tight and snug as a baby on a back pouch. On the outside the ‘device’ looked just like a stick pony toy. The difference being the stick was made of an intricate, super-light alloy, and the head, the pony bit, was like an enlarged, stylized knight’s chess piece made of some kind of crystal, among other more exotic materials.

  There was no one around the chamber. I half-expected it to be crawling with demons, with Bureau men fighting at close quarters. Like, face-to-face close. At least I expected someone to be guarding the gateway. But there was just me in there. I could hear faint sounds from the outside, but it didn’t sound like the firefight I’d just left behind, but rather more like a murmur, or perhaps kids whining. As I was about to make my way out and find Eileen, I saw a blueish, translucent form very similar to what John had looked like.

  Age-old human instincts and fake memories of a lifetime of running from the cops would have made me take a few steps back and start running away from a ghost, which was universally considered scary, abnormal, and potentially hazardous for one’s sanity. Instead, I just lay there looking almost apathetic as I saw the unmistakable form of Eileen pass through the walls. She looked pissed, and quite incorporeal, as in, made of thin blue air.

  “What the hell took you so long?” she shouted and grabbed me by the wrist. Interestingly enough, she actually pulled me through the wall, and while I saw very tiny amounts of matter flash through my eyes in just a split second, I hadn’t realised she could do that. I was still looking like I had wet myself when I came over to the other side. Immortal or not, literally going through a brick wall was something I hadn’t gotten used to, and did not intend to anyway.

  A pungent, sick smell with the distinct aroma of sulphur attacked my senses. While I grimaced at the almost insufferable odor, I turned my head around and I saw. And then hopelessness grew inside me like beer foam. Just a glimpse, and it made me want to just have a smoke and some idle talk before lying down and letting everything around me go up in flames. It made me think that perhaps that plaque outside the gateway room actually meant ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here’. Because it was a certainly fitting thing to say about that place.

  Legions, not hordes or multitudes, but innumerable armies were amassing in front of us, marching slowly but surely in perfectly ordered rows, their flaming scimitars swaying with each step. Great swarms of flying demons circled overhead, monstrously giant things that seemed like locusts made of bone, their cries echoing the agony they would inflict. It was like watching Dante’s Inferno remade into an epic action movie, something that spelled disaster in so many ways.

  The sky wasn’t the black night sky I’d left behind, but a sickly orange red that belonged to some alien atmosphere or the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. It seemed both scenarios were a reasonable outcome if we failed here. Which was a very real possibility, even if I applied some very creative math on top of certain unavailable power multipliers.

  I could see the men and women of the Normal Bureau standing their ground. There weren’t more than a few hundred at most, nothing but a drop compared to the ocean tide that was about to consume us. Most of them were already engaged in close quarters fighting with what looked like the shock troops of hell, the same kind of demon that I’d killed with my shotgun just a few minutes earlier.

  Once every few moments an intense bright white beam would shoot from something that looked like the ghost version of a unicorn on steroids, and incinerate a few of the brutish demons in one go. Large balls flaring with white and blue starlight would shoot up in the sky from what looked like a huge translucent caterpillar bathed in pixie dust, before exploding in raining swaths of cleansing fire among lesser demons and imps riding hellish hounds, burning them into oblivion.

  But still more of them came, the nightmarish vanguard of the terror that was to be unleashed. It was hideous. And it was unfortunately, quite real; doom, on a monumental scale. I felt I had been cheated. Perhaps if I’d really understood how bad the odds were, I’d just have had a last good night’s sleep and spend the rest of eternity looking morose. Just as I must’ve probably looked like when Eileen slapped me hard across the face, without the slightest warning:

  “Hey! Hey! Snap out of it!”

  “That was totally uncalled for! You could have just nudged me!”

  “You simply sat there, frozen stiff. Why are you wearing that football gear? And what’s with that pony-on-a-stick?” she said, pointing with a finger in disbelief.

  “That’s just some last minute equipment. Looks pretty bad, right?”

  “Blue doesn’t suit you, yeah. The pony, well..”

  “I meant things over here,” I said and saw a fireball explode a few dozen yards away, a gunner team narrowly avoiding it. Eileen said with a sudden weariness:

  “Awful would be a better word. Cataclysmic, perhaps, would be more suitable.”

  “That’s just a fancy word for really bad, right?”

  “We’re wasting time Bobby, and there’s precious little of it. But now you’re here, we can turn things around,” she said with a desperate smile.

  “About that, I’m not so sure. I don’t exactly see the reasoning behind such an optimistic look of events.”

  “But surely, with you in the front we can send them all back to hell!”

  “Am I supposed to ask them to stop their invasion really nice? Because I don’t think that would work,” I said and tried to sound less than serious about it.

  “Bobby, you’re immortal! Even these demons can’t touch you!” Eileen retorted with a feeling of indignation.

  “I’m trying to cope with that mys
elf, but I don’t see how I can pick them off one by one. Unless this thing actually works.”

  “What thing?” she inquired, squinting her blue incorporeal eyes.

  “The pony,” I replied, almost shamefully.

  “What does it do?”

  “I kept asking myself but no-one explained it. For some weird reason, I built it like that myself and it’s supposed to have a nuke-like effect, if it does work in the end, that is.”

  “Nuke-like?”

  “As I said, no-one explained it to me. It’s our best chance anyway. I wouldn’t exactly consider there are many options left, would you?”

  “What about the gateway?”

  “Blow it up?”

  Despite everything, she managed to actually laugh.

  “But, that’s impossible!”

  “How can it be impossible? There’s nothing impossible about blowing something up, is it? You’ve got explosives right?”

  She shook her head wearily, while another volley of beams cut down a group of demons only a few hundred yards away. The sounds of fighting was getting dangerously closer and louder by the minute.

  “They didn’t tell you everything, did they?”

  “What kind of a question is that? If they did, then I’d know everything!”

  “It was a rhetorical question! You think the gateway is just a machine?”

  “Aren’t we talking about that pond back in there?”

  “That’s just the doorway to the after-world, Bobby. A gate is much bigger than a door, isn’t it?” she said flapping her arms wildly.

  “How much bigger is it then? Like, say, a bigger pool?”

  “A lot bigger than a pool,” she answered morosely, suddenly looking just as gloomy as I felt once I had first seen what we were really up against.

  “A small lake? Look, it doesn’t really matter. There’s no way in hell to win this. Let’s fall back while they’re not all over us.”

  “You have no idea how this whole thing works, do you? And you actually built it? That’s a laugh.”

  “All I know is that it doesn’t involve silly hats. They said I’d know it when I saw it, and that you’d know what to do,” I said, pointing an accusational finger at her.

  “They said that? Well, someone must’ve thought you might not go this far if you knew.”

  “Know what? I’ve been jerked around so often I get dizzy just by thinking about it. Now I’m immortal, and suddenly I have to fight off the hordes of hell. I keep surprising myself all the time! The only reason I’m doing this is that I’m stuck with it.”

  “In a very real way, you are stuck with it Bobby. Because it seems you are the gateway,” she said, her see-through eyes level with mine. She kept confusing me.

  “I don’t understand. You mean, in an abstract kind of way? Like, I’m the guy behind it?”

  “No, you are the gateway. Its purpose and function is linked with your soul. It’s what has made you immortal. But that doesn’t mean you can’t die, Bobby,” she said with her arms at her waist while a mangled, half-dead sky-demon crashed a few yards away, flailing wildly in its death throes.

  “I can? I’m new to this, really, and no-one explains a damn thing in plain English, so it’s -”

  “That’s why the demons wanted you here in the after-world, Bobby. To perform a ritual sacrifice, unlock the gateway and allow them free passage. We kind of forced their hand actually. They’d prefer it if you just waltzed in here all alone, still thinking you were doing this to save your ass from Falconi.”

  “And why did the Bureau convince me to come here?”

  “Because, you’re the only one who can destroy this connection, this living gateway for good!”

  “How am I supposed to do that if I can’t remember anything about it?”

  “And that’s why Falconi erased your memory! Don’t you see? There was no way to escape his plan, but only to beat them in their own game! You have to stop them, and find out how to destroy your link with the gateway, Bobby!”

  “Which is, how big exactly?”

  “You’re standing on it!” she shouted, and smiled despite herself.

  “What, this building?”

  “Sulphur, Nevada. Just on the other side of the fence, in the after-world. Not a lot less picturesque.”

  “The whole town?” I asked, trying to make sure I wasn’t simply hearing things.

  “Yeah, on this side, in the after-world, there’s already a network of moats shaped like a pentagram. It’s got blood, bile and tears running throughout it. We’re sitting right at the center. You can actually see the pillars of fire around you, about three miles out. That’s like candles. Hear that constant murmuring sound that seems to reverberate through everything? Those are the first incantations, Bobby.”

  “You mean, like in a satanic ritual? Pentagrams, candles, virgins, non-consensual orgies? That’s stuff real?”

  “Should you be asking that question when you can clearly see a unicorn that shoots white beams off its horn and a giant caterpillar throwing balls of cleansing fire?”

  “Not really, no. So, their plan is to kill all of you, and get to me; either from this side, or from the normal side of things?”

  “Yes, that’s their plan,” she said nodding profusely, relieved that I had finally understood something essentially simple.

  “And then hunt me down, tie me up, and perform a ritual sacrifice that will open up a gateway six miles wide, to pour their hordes onto the face of the earth?”

  “I’m afraid so, Bobby.”

  “And that would kill me?” I asked, vainly trying to understand just how immortal I was in practical terms.

  “The sacrifice itself would not, but then you would be rendered mortal again. At least, I think. I’m not sure what Satan’s policy for keeping pets is, but I don’t think he’d make a very agreeable master.”

  “So much for being immortal. I’m afraid their plan’s working all too well.”

  As I uttered these words, I suddenly had a flash of genius or perhaps insanity:

  “Which is a very good thing. It’s actually wonderful,” I repeated to myself.

  “If you’re going to be like that you just might walk up there and end it. I can’t really stop you anyway,” said Eileen, looking genuinely hurt.

  “No, no. It’s great. There will be some tricky timing issues, but we can pull it off, I think.”

  “Pull what off?”

  “I’ll tell you. I just have to remember how that pony works..”