by Cobyboy
He turned his head to look at us. The twin horns that curled magnificently and menacingly from his head knocked against the back of his chair, making him curse in annoyance.
It is never a good feeling to look at Satan. Especially when you can barely see him through the steam, so you step forward and suddenly his face appears in front of you all at once.
He has a skull-face, grotesque and full of teeth, the empty eye sockets still staring and still seeing everything you do. The heat and humidity of the steam had soaked into the bones of his face, softening them up, so that I could see each bone flexing and bending as he gnashed his teeth in disgust at our human faces.
"You again," he said to the driver.
The voice of the Devil is the most petrifying, blood-curdling sound you'll ever hear. Like a scream in the night and the roar of a charging bear rolled into one. But my driver, God bless him, didn't seem disturbed at all. In fact, he rolled his eyes as if he was getting really tired of the Devil's bullshit.
"Yup," he said. "Here for another one. Let me just take this do-gooder off your hands. You don't need his sort down here."
"The lawyer," Satan said, rolling his head back and showing his sinewy throat to us. "Yes, yes... take him away. He disgusts me. I hate people who can't decide whether they're good or bad."
He let out a guttural noise of disgust. It almost sounded like the noise a teenaged girl would make when her dad insists on chaperoning her trip to the mall.
The driver nudged me in the ribs. For a moment I had forgotten myself; I was so distracted by the sight of the Devil lying naked across a chair in front of me. It was quite a sight to behold. But I was here, ostensibly, to do a job, and I had to keep up appearances.
"Then it's settled," I said. "We'll just go and grab him, then."
Satan, impatient for us to be gone, waved his hand in a shooing motion.
The driver started to leave, noticed I hadn't moved, and leaned back into the room to grab me.
"Hold on," I said, shaking his hand off my sleeve. "I'll be right out. You go on ahead."
For the first time, that expression of mild amusement and confidence melted from the driver's face. He looked legitimately concerned. Apparently, it was not common for the souls he escorted to request a private audience with the Devil.
"Trust me," I said quietly to him. "I really do know what I'm doing, this time. If I'm not out in a minute, you just go get the guy's soul. Alright?"
The driver shrugged and left the room. He seemed to want to be out of Satan's presence as soon as possible, even if it meant leaving me in the belly of the beast.
Without looking, Satan reached out and adjusted a valve on the wall. With a hiss, a fresh waft of steam entered the room, clouding it so thoroughly that I could no longer see past the Devil's knees. Which was a welcome reprieve.
"Why are you still here?" he asked. His hackle-raising voice came drifting out of the fog, as though disembodied.
"I didn't come to collect a soul," I said. "I came to challenge you to a game of chess."
The Devil's legs shifted. And then the mist parted to reveal his face and chest as he sat up to look at me. Quickly the steam settled back in around him, but I could still see his skeletal face and the faint glint of cruel light in his eye sockets.
"Death," he said. "Is that you?"
I nodded. "It is me."
"Why do you look like a Ukrainian prostitute?"
"Just a trick," I said. "Is that what I look like? I haven't had a chance to look in a mirror yet."
"Do yourself a favor and avoid reflective surfaces at all costs," the Devil advised. "If you really are Death, than I'm sure you can prove it on the board..."
He waved his hand. The steam began to clear away, sucked back up into vent grilles in the ceiling and floor. All the heat and dampness was pulled away, leaving us inexplicably dry and cool.
Satan stood and, blessedly, found a towel to wrap around the pieces of his anatomy which were most frightening to behold. He led the way across the room. He was several feet taller than me, and his horns twined a further two feet above his head, spreading in every direction like the crown of a tree. His hooves made an awful clatter upon the floor. His knees bent the wrong way, folding awkwardly backward at the knee. Just looking at them made me feel a bit nauseous and lightheaded. All in all, he made for a very unnatural and unpleasant image.
Following in his wet hoof prints, I soon found myself in a luxurious bedroom where four naked she-demons were waiting in various poses, all of them highly suggestive. I shielded my eyes; the Devil gave me a very sarcastic apology and ushered his lady friends out of the room.
"Here we are," he said, sighing in comfort as he plopped down into a huge armchair.
I took the chair across from him. In between us was a chess table, the kind made specifically for the game. The eight by eight grid of squares I was so used to was engraved directly into the wood, the grooves painted white so they would stand out. The light colored squares were plain lacquered wood. The dark squares were actually scorched black; I rubbed my finger into one, and it came away sooty.
Satan opened a drawer on the side of the table and brought out all his pieces. It was a rather humorous set. And highly vulgar. All the pieces were represented by naked human figures. The king was a grotesquely well endowed man. The queen was cartoonishly voluptuous, posed in a sultry fashion. And I'll just let you use your imagination as far as the other pieces go.
"Before we begin," said Satan, "I would like to know why."
"Why I came to challenge you?" I asked.
He nodded.
"Because I wanted to see the look on your face when I destroyed you," I replied. It was a dishonest answer, and he knew it, but he did not reiterate his question.
"I have some conditions I would like to put in place," he said.
I sat back, feeling quite confident. "Go ahead. It's your house. I'll play by your rules. No handicap is going to save you."
I was talking a big game, but in reality I knew Satan to be an incredibly adept player who used unorthodox moves, the type that I wouldn't even think of. But that was the point. I was feeling truly excited to play chess for the first time in centuries.
Satan grinned wide, showing me his jack-o-lantern teeth; perfect sharp triangles of grimy, plaque-covered enamel.
"I will make this even more fun," he said. "I like to see people suffer. I like to see them start to squirm as they realize they are no longer in control of their own destiny, that my own devisements will become the sole purpose for their existence... and that is what I will do here. I know that I cannot keep you for long, but I would like to give you as much pain as possible in the short time that you're here."
"So, beat me in this game," I said.
"I plan on it, my friend. But it's not just that. Let's put some conditions on it. If you win, you are free to go. You can do whatever you like. Go back to Heaven and be bored, or stay here for a while as my guest and take a tour of all the wonderful atrocities. I don't care."
"And if I lose?" I asked.
"If you lose," he repeated, grinning wider, "then I get to throw you into a private Hell, a torture chamber designed just for you. You will stay there until you break."
"What does that mean? When I break?"
"Everyone breaks in a different way," the Devil explained. "Some people become despondent. They no longer seem to occupy their bodies; they enter a sort of vegetative state. When that happens, you have to come up with a fresh way to shock their nervous systems and get them to respond again. After all, they're here to suffer, not to retreat into the fortress of the mind.
"Other people scream when they break. They scream so loud you can hear it from the other side of Hell. And I wish I was exaggerating. Or maybe I don't." He giggled, bouncing in his seat from excitement. "If I had to guess, I would say you're the screaming sort. But let's just go ahead and find out!"
I shrugged and nodded, as if this was a perfectly reasonable and ordinary request.
"Anything more to say?" Satan asked. "Any last words before you move the first piece and condemn yourself?"
He was rubbing his hands together. His excitement was so obvious, so palpable, that it became contagious. I was feeling thrilled. Ready to play chess or to get up and run a mile.
He had given me white, so I got to move first. I elected to start by pushing a pawn forward, the one in front of my bishop. I didn't want to do anything too weird until I could see his play style in action.
He was every bit as crazy and wild as I had heard. He made such weird moves, that still turned out to be fairly competent. The first ten minutes of the game, played slowly and with much thought before a piece was touched, passed in this way. I would make one of my typical moves, considered and professional, and he would follow up by doing something that I would ordinarily advise against, but which somehow worked out well. Even so, the game started to slowly shift in my direction. If it continued like this, I was guaranteed to win, even if the Devil made it as hard on me as possible.
Maybe it wouldn't take a private Hell to break me and make me scream. Maybe this would be enough; a clear cut game, an easy victory, against the being who was my last hope for a real challenge. I started to sink further into my chair, overcome with a numbing grief.
The Devil was still having a good time, still enjoying the game, but I could tell he was slightly dejected about his imminent loss. Not that he cared about losing the game; he just wanted to be able to throw me in a torture room.
But then, quite inexplicably, everything changed.
His play style shifted in completely the other direction. He began to play like a machine, cold and logical, devoid of any sense of fun or boldness. Perhaps he had flipped a switch, made a conscious shift toward serious play. He was realizing that, if he wanted to be able to torture me, he was going to have to take this game a little more seriously.
I also noticed a chance in his body language. Until now, he had been slouched casually forward, one arm laid out along the edge of the board. But now he was sitting up straight, eyebrows furrowed. And I noticed one more thing. At the start of each of his turns, he displayed the same little tic; a glance upward along the wall, toward the ceiling, as though he was trying very hard to concentrate his thoughts.
While I was relaxed, playing easy and relatively loose, he suddenly turned stiff and sober and played the game like a robot. I thought maybe this was a sign that my high level of competency was starting to get to him. He was becoming annoyed and I was spoiling his good mood.
But then, after a few more turns, I realized the game was shifting in his favor. He was starting to win!
The first time he put me in check was the most petrifying moment of my billions of years of existence. But it was quickly trumped when, two moves later, he pulled checkmate and ended the game victoriously.
I had been beaten. I had come here looking for a hard-won victory. And now here I was, left defeated, left to pick up the shattered pieces of my ego.
I had never lost a game of chess. Not once. Not a single time since I created the game. They say there is a first time for everything. But I never agreed with the saying until that very moment.
Satan sat back, laughing maniacally and rubbing his hands together vigorously enough to start a fire. And that's not an exaggeration; he really did start a fire. Orange flames leapt up from between his palms, releasing acrid smoke into the air. One of the many useless talents Satan possesses.
"I won," he said. "I won! I beat you, Death! I killed your king! Hah!"
He pointed at me with a sharp finger. The nail was highly polished from millennia of use, doing things I'd rather not know about. It reflected the room quite nicely. And in that reflection I caught a glimpse of something strange.
Looking over my shoulder, up along the wall behind me, I saw a screen. On that screen, a simulation had been keeping track of our game and advising Satan on the best moves to make. He probably hadn't started the game with it. He'd actually made an honest effort at first. When it became obvious that he would lose, he had switched to dirty tactics.
The first thing I felt when I saw that screen was intense relief. I was still undefeated. His victory didn't count. I did feel a slight bit of shame that a super-advanced modern computer could even beat me, but I tempered that with the assumption that, after playing against said computer another two or three times, I would figure out how to win against it.
The second thing I felt was fear. I was in the Devil's domain. He wasn't one to follow rules, to follow logic, to follow honor and decency.
"Well, you didn't win," I said. "I definitely would have beaten you if you hadn't cheated."
"Yes," said Satan. "But that doesn't change the facts. You lost. A deal's a deal."
"Since when did you start believing in that cliché?" I asked.
"Since now," he replied, "when I learned it could benefit me. For the record, I still think you're a screamer."
He stood up, towering over me, and in a moment I was surrounded by a small army of lesser demons, ready to stab me with pitchforks if I made a wrong move.
"Just so we're clear," I said. "I'm still a better player."
Satan nodded. "Sure. But I'm better at winning."
***
Yeah, I could have teleported away. There's no way Satan could really hold me in Hell. But I guess I wanted to show him, and myself, that I was tough enough. I always wanted that big, ugly, red bastard to know that not all of us are cowardly cheaters who will try and weasel our way out of everything bad and into everything good. Technically he did win the game, so I was obligated to go along with the conditions. Or so my flawed thinking went.
But it wasn't just that. It was Celestial relations as a whole. Now, Satan is not a Celestial. He's actually a Subterranean. But it's like comparing an alligator to a crocodile; the main difference is location.
The point is, the Devil is just as important for the function of Creation as I am, as the angels are, as God Himself is. So I could not risk fouling up the works of the three planes, Heaven and Earth and Hell, which were a well-oiled machine that had been ticking along for eons. I would not be the wrench that ground the machine to a halt. And, knowing I would one day be forced to return to Hell for one reason or another, I didn't want to give Satan any reason to dislike me.
By the time we exited Satan's bedchamber, and walked through the steam room, and found our way back out into the hallway, my driver friend was gone. He had followed my directions and gone off to fetch the soul for himself. The man seemed like a consummate professional to me. He certainly wouldn't fail to return the soul to Heaven and keep things moving smoothly. I had nothing to worry about other than getting through the next few hours of torment.
It is an honor to be escorted by the Devil himself to your own torture chamber. Unfortunately he is a rather insufferable bastard, prone to making plenty of jokes at the expense of whoever is in earshot, and it was a long walk. I was near to breaking already by the time we reached a certain door in Satan's so-called "test hall" where he tries out new ideas for torture rooms.
This particular door had a sticky note attached to it. The name "DEATH" was written on it in sloppy handwriting. Probably some lesser demon had done it in a hurry and then ran off before Satan could show up and give him a hard time.
"Is this is it?" I asked, nodding at the sticky note. "Seems like an innocuous door. Can't be anything too bad behind that."
The Devil smiled. Reaching past me, he turned the handle and pushed the door open. I narrowed my eyes, cringing a little, afraid of what I might see. It's actually pretty difficult to try and imagine what your worst fear would look like. It's hard to even know what your worst fear is. But I guess I was expecting some elaborate torture rack, made of gears and pulleys and saw blades and whatnot.
What I actually saw was a surprise to me. But probably not to you, come to think of it.
It was a chess set. A simple table standing in the middle of the room. Two old woo
den chairs to either side. Dark, deeply pitted in places, smooth and shiny. Polished. Beautiful old chairs. The kind that are great for sitting in if you want to stay alert and not get too comfortable.
"Go on in," said Satan. "This is your place."
I stepped inside. What choice did I have, at this point? I was starting to feel uneasy. Unsettled. I kept looking around, expecting something outrageously horrific to come springing out at me.
The room was sort of octagonal in shape. On each plane, set into alcoves, were what seemed to be the types of statues you see in a wax museum. Highly detailed, realistic, but slightly uncanny versions of people whose faces you know well.
In this case, I recognized them all as people I had played chess against in the past. Alfred of Wessex was there. Napoleon Bonaparte. Ben Franklin. Charlie Chaplin. The old Chinese man who had been taking a bath when I found him. Mahendra, wearing modern clothing and with a modern hairstyle. It was a perfectly accurate display of the most memorable opponents I'd ever had, barring Celestials such as Zanus and Lamina.
"As soon as I shut this door," Satan said from behind me, "it will begin. Go ahead and have a seat."
I approached the table, feeling the smooth painted wooden surface. Cool to the touch. The pieces were ivory, I think, which was already bad. I'm very much against the use of ivory in any context. It's one of the few ethical standpoints I will take with humans. Undoubtedly, though, the pieces were quite beautiful. Many beautiful things require evil, sacrifice, death, to make them possible.
"Which side?" I asked.
"It doesn't matter," was the reply.
I took the black side. It was the one which would allow me to see the door at all times. This was the only comfort available to me.
I sat and looked over my pieces. I noticed right away that they were all slightly off. Not in the centers of their squares. Facing the wrong way. For instance I like my knights to face toward the left, but these were both looking straight across the board toward white. With a little fussy tongue click, I reached out to fix the pieces... only to find that I couldn't budge them.