by Cobyboy
"What's that?" I asked, only half listening; I kept glancing impatiently toward the door, wondering how much longer we really ought to be standing around out here. The proceedings would be getting underway, and these cases never took very long to process. It's hard to go slow in a courtroom when you have a judge who already knows everything about the universe.
"I'm an angel," said Lamina. "So I have a specific job that I have to do. Assigned to me by God."
"Right," I replied.
"Have you ever wondered what job it is that I do?"
I shrugged. "Once or twice, maybe. But I like to keep work out of my personal relationships."
"And have you ever wondered how you were going to fool anyone into letting you escort a soul between Heaven and Hell?"
"I didn't think I would fool anyone, Lamina. I was just going to try and convince them that I needed to go. You might be able to trick all the angels, but not God. He would see through anything."
Lamina smiled. "He knows all. He sees all. He already knows that I'm helping you. He knows what my plan is. But He hasn't done anything to stop it. Whatever reason you have for wanting to go to Hell, Death, I think that God understands and has already pretty much given you permission."
I thought about that. Maybe it was true. Either that, or He was just waiting for us to get into the courtroom, where every major angel in heaven was gathered, and make a fool out of us in front of them.
My contemplations carried me away to an inner realm. I was no longer watching the world around me at all. But then Lamina touched my arm. It was a sensual touch, one that seemed deliberately engineered to get the most immediate reaction out of a lonely man. And that wasn't far from true, I don't think.
I came back to reality. And immediately I recoiled, letting out a yell of surprise and pulling violently away from Lamina. But it wasn't Lamina anymore. It was an ugly old woman. And by ugly I don't mean just wrinkled, liver-spotted, hanging jowls. I mean really ugly, like a witch.
The witch laughed. And it was certainly the laughter of a witch, all evil and menacing.
Before I could decide what to do, between running away or decking the creature with a swift right hook, she suddenly became Lamina again.
"What on Earth!" I cried out.
"What in Heaven, you mean," said Lamina. "This is my job, Death. Like you, I travel between Earth and Heaven freely. My task is to appear as different women in different contexts. You see, misguided human men are the biggest threat to God's plan. Whenever some leader gets a dumb idea, I'm there to use my womanly charms to nudge him back in the right direction. My official title is Progress Facilitator."
I thought about this, and asked the first and most obvious question. "What if you're dealing with a homosexual?"
"We have an angel for that too," said Lamina. "He's a little less busy than I am."
"So, you can make yourself look like whatever you want?"
She nodded. "The right woman in the right place at the right time can change the course of history. We've seen it before. The only thing men desire more than power is women."
"And a good death," I added.
She raised an eyebrow. "Speaking from experience?"
I shrugged. The truth was, even the noblest and most glorious of warriors, when faced with the imminence of death in the form of my pale, bony face, want nothing more than to go right back to living.
"Well, we're getting off subject," said Lamina. "Yes, I can alter my appearance and voice. But I can also alter the appearance and voice of others."
Now she raised her eyebrow again, wiggling it in my direction like a dancing caterpillar. I saw what she was trying to say.
"Will it hurt?" I asked.
"No. Just don't look into any mirrors and you'll be fine... wait, hold still..."
She reached out, brushing the heel of her hand over my forehead. It tickled. I wanted her to do it again, but apparently the job was already done.
"You look... good," she said, rather doubtfully. "It will be enough to fool the angels. God will see through it, like you said, but if my inkling is right He'll go along with our plan anyway."
"Thank you, Lamina," I said. "Should I go in alone?"
She nodded. "The others know my tricks. If I come in behind you, they'll get suspicious. And don't worry; the disguise will wear off in a few hours..."
***
And that is how I found myself, for the first time, on the floor of God's great courtroom. It was essentially a football stadium, though with cold, polished marble instead of astroturf. And the bleachers were also marble. Hard slabs held up by mini Doric style columns.
God Himself sat atop a tall seat, much like a judge in any Earthly courtroom. But this particular seat was capable of sinking down or raising up, depending on the desired effect. Right now, God was so high up that I could only laugh; the legs of His throne were like cartoon stilts and I could barely see the surreal shifting of His face. All around me, the hushed conversation of thousands of angels rolled like the muttering of distant wind.
"What reason have you for wishing to undertake this voyage?" God asked, His voice booming down like the voice of an announcer in a sports arena; it seemed to come from everywhere, rolling in like thunder to crash around me.
There was no real reason for me to be careful with the next part. God, by even asking this question, had proven Lamina correct; He was going along with this harebrained scheme, for reasons of His own. The assembled angels would have limited, if any, knowledge of the souls who resided in Lower Heaven, or their relations.
I decided to really ham it up. Might as well make the case for this lawyer guy's retrieval even stronger than it already was.
"I was one of the people he saved from prison," I said. "By the end of our case, the jury was convinced I was perfectly innocent. But I wasn't. I really did do that crime. It was a bad one. But Mr. Peake got me out of it. And I swear, I vowed to live a better life. I was a saint the rest of my days. As you can see I was successful, because I ended up here."
I heard someone yawn. The angels were barely paying any attention. They were obligated to be here, but they were obviously bored out of their minds. They didn't care what happened to me. They didn't care about the outcome of this hearing. I'm sure they weren't thinking about anything other than what Heavenly delights they were going to enjoy once this dull crap was over.
God raised His Mighty Gavel, which was just a regular gavel except it was made of gold and diamond, and slammed it down. The bang echoed like a gunshot, startling the angels to attention.
"Go then and do what must be done," God boomed. "Your transport will be waiting for you at the bottom of the Court steps. May I be with you through your descent to Hell and during your stay there."
And that was it. I left the courtroom and found my way back outside. Lamina wasn't there. I climbed down the steps alone, resisting the urge to look up at the stars. The vertigo that ensued from that might cause me to fall off the edge of the narrow, dizzying height of the staircase.
10
As I neared the bottom, I was able to discern the orange glow issued by my Hellbound transport vehicle. It was a covered wagon, jet black and featureless. The driver was a rangy old sort, the kind of guy who could not be frightened, intimidated, bullied or cajoled. Not by the Devil himself. I had seen him around Heaven from time to time, always walking slowly, always seemingly in the middle of some personal agenda that had nothing to do with anything or anyone else.
The light came from a torch that burned up behind the old driver with his drooping mustache. I used it as a beacon to find my way off the frightening stairs, stepping back onto the terra firma of Upper Heaven.
"You Hellbound?" the driver asked, his voice seeming to filter out through his mustache and becoming gruffer and more muffled as a result.
I nodded, and made to climb into the seat beside him. A single look from the driver made me freeze.
"Nuh-uh," he said, cocking his head to the rear. "You sit in the back. Unle
ss you want your pretty little brains turning to liquid and pouring out your ears from what you're going to see otherwise."
"I don't know who I look like," I said, "but I can handle it."
He gave me a frown, a raised set of eyebrows, a shrug. I climbed up next to him, sliding across the flat wooden plank of the seat. For the first time I noticed that our horses had wings. These were not the attachable kind. They were deep-rooted, naturally occurring. It is said that pegasi are to horses what angels are to humans. Biologically and apparently similar, but far holier. When lowly Man found his second favorite animal after the dog, it was not necessary for it to be able to fly.
The driver gave his reins a flick. The pegasi pranced forward, their fabulous manes swinging back and forth. They were such annoyingly regal creatures, but undeniably powerful.
I thought I was prepared for what happened next, but when the pegasi stepped off the edge of Heaven into the Celestial Void I think my stomach made a brief excursion into my throat.
The pegasi dove downward sharply, wasting no time, dragging our rickety wagon with them. I was pressed against the wall by gravity and inertia; my toes were hooked under a little metal bar on the floor, my calves nearly cramping with the effort of keeping myself in my seat. The torch guttered over my head. Black smoke curled away into the Void as the lacquer on the carriage burned away.
"Havin' fun?" the driver asked.
With great effort, I was able to peel my head off the wall of the carriage and give him a dirty look.
And down we went, through the Void. It unfolded like a flower or a kaleidescope. We fell through as its petals opened to let us pass. Colors burst into life around us. Little sparkles of light, like stars being born and dying, in every direction. A wall of what looked like oil, a rainbow sheen dancing over it, reared up out of the gloom far below and was crashed through it. It was the barrier between Heaven and Earth. And there we were at the edge of space, careening through the atmosphere, suddenly tossed into the material world like castaways.
I had often seen Earth from this height on my flights between reapings, so this wasn't so bad. I relaxed as the pegasi leveled out slightly, bringing us toward the surface at a less extreme angle. Settling forward, I gripped a handlebar and took a series of quick breaths to try and calm my roiling stomach.
"Maybe you should have sat in the back," said the driver, smiling over at me.
"I'm fine," I said. "I told you I could handle it."
His smile grew. He looked over his shoulder, back up toward the stars. "That?" he said. "That was nothin'. Just wait."
Uh-oh. I didn't like the sound of that.
***
Turns out getting to Hell is a bit trickier for other people.
I'm a Celestial. Therefore, if I ever need to move between domains I can pretty much just teleport. But since I was playing the part of an ordinary denizen of the Suburbs, I was forced to take a different path.
We came down somewhere in Russia. We fell in over an old mining road that hadn't been used in a century or more. We flew through ancient forest that seemed frozen in time, perfectly still and silent beneath a thick layer of snow. It was cold, with the wind flying into my face as we flashed along.
"There was this thing that happened once," the driver said, shouting over the wind. "Back in 1989, some scientists in Siberia drilled a great big hole about nine miles deep into the Earth. When they lowered some of their sensory doodads down into the hole, they recorded a temperature of a couple thousand degrees. Right before their microphone done melted to goo, they were able to record a bit of audio.
"There were screams. The screams of the damned down in Hell. A terrifying sound. Story goes a lot of the scientists abandoned the whole project. Some other weird stuff happened the night after they recorded the sounds. Some crazy big demon thing came flying up out of the hole, forming the Russian words for 'I have conquered' out of its smoke. Everyone who was still at the site was dosed with some medicine that made them forget. But I guess the story lived on..."
He fell silent, shaking his head slowly.
I had spent more time on Earth than any other being in history. And I know the real truth behind the universe and its creation. You can't fool me. I immediately recognized this story as a fairly well known urban myth. It's a weird truth about humans that, in the absence of any actual fear, they like to create new reasons to be afraid. Spooky stories and unexplained mysteries have existed for as long as people have.
"Is it true?" I asked.
The driver chuckled, and proceeded to give me half an answer. "Well, it's sure convenient to have a nice straight hole to drive into..."
So, we were in Siberia. That made sense. Not many other places on Earth were ever seen under such deep freeze, as though they had been exposed to the vacuum of space, while still containing roads and even a few grim looking smokestacks and apartment blocks on the horizon. The old ferris wheel in Pripyat would have fit right in among these desolate sights.
We traveled through the trees for a time, and then out over a rolling open plain of deep snow. It was an unending sea of the most bone-chilling, life-killing cold you could ever imagine. It was a hopeless place, beautiful in a stark and terrifying way. The fact that anyone could live here was a testament to the creativity and adaptability of humankind. And a strong case for the viability of off-world colonies, I thought. Living on Mars wouldn't have been too different from this.
A rounded mountain rose ahead of us, sprinkled with a stubble of stunted fir trees. But our destination came before that. The driver turned slightly to the right, and the pegasi carried us up into the caldera of what at first seemed to be a little pimple on the face of the Earth. But, in the center of that pimple, I saw the yawning mouth of a deep, dark hole.
"Some tales aren't true, but they aren't fiction either," said the driver. "Some stories have a little bit of both sprinkled in." He turned his head and looked at the torch. "I sure hope that thing doesn't go out. I hate driving in the dark... Well, at least it'll be warm!"
And down we went. I almost heard the final click of the chain lift before the rollercoaster car went over the big drop. Straight down into the mouth of Hell. I grabbed hard onto whatever I could find, wedging myself in place with trembling muscles.
The top of the hole was perfectly rounded. As though a precise boring tool had been used to dig it out. But as we got further down, the weak light of our torch revealed a different composition. The hole narrowed until we barely fit at all, until we looked and felt just like a cork in a wine bottle, just barely squeezing through. Whoever or whatever had dug this had evidently struck a layer of harder, denser material, and elected to decrease the scope of their digging.
And then we flashed through a much wider space, a naturally occurring cavern under the ground. I heard a sound of streaming water, caught a rich scent of decay and dampness. It was still very cold, but getting a little warmer.
Down and down. The pegasi were now doing nothing at all, other than streamlining their bodies so that they would continue to fall straight. Gravity was doing everything else. We plummeted at terminal velocity, straight as an arrow into the bowels of the Earth.
Much sooner than I had anticipated, we reached the higher levels of Hell. In reverse to how Heaven is laid out, the lesser demons reside higher up in Hell and the more important ones dwell lower.
We began to pass by balconies and little alcoves where lesser demons had carved out apartments. We went by some torture areas where slightly less heinous offenders were well entrenched in their eternal torments. Someone was strapped to a table and being tickled forever with a feather. Someone else was being forced to pull out their own teeth. The screams came from everywhere, the agonized howls of the damned. They echoed up through the twists and turns and nauseating labyrinths of Hell, a far darker and vaster and more dangerous domain than Heaven.
The pegasi leveled out, using their great wings to bring us fluttering down onto a bridge. We trundled along, headed toward a castle
carved into the face of a black cliff. To either side, the bridge supports dropped away into an unfathomable abyss; far down in the darkness, I saw the fluttering and flailing shapes of doomed souls.
"When you're going through Hell, keep going," the driver said. He stared straight forward, driving his pegasi along. He showed no sign of noticing or caring about the horrors that lurked all around him. I guess he was used to it. Like a mailman whose daily route led through a few rough neighborhoods.
We took a ramp up into the castle, crossing rickety bridges and passing over narrow stone ledges. The castle was huge, a confusing jumble of rooms large and small. It may have rivaled the Celestial Palace in perceivable size. But no one was here. It was devoid of life, and stripped clean of any furnishings whatsoever.
"Here's how this works," the driver told me as we negotiated a spiral staircase and nearly teetered over the edge at every turn. "It's all formula and formalities. We go see Satan, we make an appeal for the soul of our retrieval, he gives us permission, and we go ahead and fetch it. It's simple. Goes the same way every time. Believe me, the Devil has too many fun and exciting things to do than waste any time dealing with us idiots. Got it?"
"Got it," I said, humoring the guy, though I already knew everything he was talking about. I had my own plans, and I wasn't worried about pulling them off. Getting the lawyer's soul back to Heaven was an important job, but not a time-sensitive one. We all had eternity ahead of us.
***
At length we arrived in Satan's lavish Southern Quarters. So called because they stand on the southern edge of Hell. They consist of several dozen well appointed rooms, half of them air conditioned to the point of making the moisture in your eyes freeze and the other half super heated and very humid, like steam rooms in a sauna.
Satan was languishing in one of the heated rooms, his long red legs and shiny black hooves dangling to the floor over the arm of a chair. He refused to meet us anywhere else, so we were forced to plunge into the sulphur stench of the Devil's steam room to talk with him.