by Tom Holt
He spent a couple of minutes groping around in the dark for something—the tibia of a long-dead monk, by the feel of it—to push the door open with, just in case Dmitri had balanced a bag of flour or something on the top. As it turned out, he hadn’t, so that was all right, and the remaining three nasties of the ancient defence system proved to have rusted solid, and it was all a bit of an anticlimax, not that he was in any mood to complain.
The chamber—five thousand years old, quite possibly older—was lit by a single shaft of light, neon-bright after half an hour in pitch darkness, lancing down from a slit in the roof a hundred feet overhead. That slit in the roof was his only way out, and soon he’d have all the fun and games of scaling the sheer wall without climbing gear, but he’d done that kind of thing so often in the past few years that the thought of it made him stifle a yawn. Meanwhile, ahead of him on the back wall of the secret chamber was an inscription in arcane cabbalistic symbols. Just as well he could speak arcane cabbalistic like a native.
Actually, a lot of it was irrelevant, and a whole lot more was stuff he already knew or had worked out for himself from first principles, so the net gain of actual useful information was pretty negligible and really not enough to justify all the aggravation. There was just one bit he didn’t understand. A cluster of hieroglyphs in a far corner of the chamber, where the light from the roof was dim so that he could barely make them out, but one of them looked for all the world like a holly leaf. And the one next to it—well, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a plum pudding, except of course it couldn’t be, just as the one next to that one couldn’t possibly be a reindeer, any more than the one next to it could be a sprig of mistletoe. In fact, the only bit he could make out was the writing directly underneath, which said quite clearly (in ancient Akkadian cuneiform), BEWARE, HE WILL RETURN TO THE CITY, unless what looked like a double dot over the final wedge was actually a natural flaw in the rock or a stonemason’s typo, in which case it said, THIS WALL IS TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE.
He will return? Who, for crying out loud? In accordance with the ancient rule of textual analysis, difficilior lectio, he decided it had to be the second one, which made about as much sense as most things he’d read on walls in secret chambers lately, so stuff it.
All of which had been a long time ago in what was starting to feel increasingly like another life lived by someone else who’d had much more fun, and he hadn’t given it a moment’s thought since. After all, it had been pretty dark in the chamber, he’d been tired and wet and in a hurry, and there was no way that a five-thousand-year-old Akkadian inscription could have included pictograms of a holly leaf, a Christmas pud, a reindeer or a sprig of mistletoe, since none of the above were known in antediluvian Akkad, so they couldn’t have had words for them, could they? And the alternative reading was so much more likely.
Except, now that he came to think of it …
The last thing he’d done before leaving the chamber was to take a few photographs. Force of habit, really, or the fanciful self-delusion that he was at heart a serious archaeologist. Probably they were still somewhere on his phone because he’d never quite managed to figure out how to delete stuff. So, as soon as his shift ended, he plonked himself down in a corner of the staffroom, fished out his phone and scrolled through until he found what he was looking for.
At the time he’d been primarily interested in all the other stuff, so the mysterious pictograms were right out on the edge of the frame, slightly blurred and none too bright, but a certain amount of zooming and digital jiggery-pokery worked wonders, and before long he was staring once again at those curious symbols, which still looked remarkably like a holly leaf, a Christmas pudding, a reindeer and a sprig of mistletoe. And from the angle the picture had been taken he could quite clearly see that the double dot was indeed a double dot, rather than a pimple in the stone or a bat dropping. Furthermore, directly underneath was a crude representation of a bearded thunder god driving a chariot drawn by horned beasts, and under that was a further line of Akkadian which he’d somehow overlooked: BEHOLD, HE COMPILES A CATALOGUE, SCHEDULE OR REGISTER. TWICE HE PERUSES IT. SURELY HE WILL IN DUE COURSE ASCERTAIN THE VIRTUOUS ONE AND THE EVILDOER. And then, repeated, with the double dot unambiguously clear: BEWARE, HE WILL RETURN TO THE CITY.
Jersey sat and stared at the picture until the battery went flat, then he closed the phone and tucked it away in his inside pocket. Oh come on, he thought.
But, on the other hand, as far as traditional folk myths and quaint local customs were concerned, the Venturis were generally quite relaxed. They had no beef with deeply rooted indigenous superstitions as a rule, particularly ones with a proven track record of commercial exploitability. The only exception he’d come across so far, in fact, was Father Christmas, down on whom, however, they’d come like a ton of neutronium bricks. He flicked to the relevant page of the booklet and refreshed his memory. An atavistic survival of primitive folk-belief; doesn’t exist, and never has. Pretty strong stuff from the sultans of laissez-faire. No, the Venturis really didn’t hold with Christmas, not one little bit. In fact, the only person he’d ever come across who cared for it less was his old sparring-partner Dmitri.
He picked up the little wooden paddle and, in the sprinkle-flecked foam of his caramel latte, picked out in flawless Akkadian cuneiform, Beware, he will return ...
Oh come on, he repeated to himself. Surely not.
20
“This time,” said Mr. Lucifer, “I think you’ve gone too far.”
Bernie’s face fell. “You don’t like it.”
The banner headline was, HELL FREEZES OVER! The PowerPoint slides showed the Desolate Plains inches deep in synthetic snowflakes, the Lake of Burning Pitch covered with an inch-thick slab of ice, with happy Lycra-clad people skating up and down under the slogan, IT’S A HELL OF A WINTER WONDERLAND! Mr. L. shook his head. “It’s not us,” he said. “Really.”
“I could work on it some more.”
“You’re a good boy, Bernie, and you’ve done well.” Mr. Lucifer had that look on his face. It was all the worse because, just for once, he was trying not to cause pain and hurt, which of course made it far more painful and hurtful than if he’d been doing it on purpose. “In fact, you’ve done amazingly well. I can’t believe some of the garbage humans will actually pay good money for. But demons dressed up as snowmen—”
“It’s the incongruity factor,” Bernie said quickly, “which lies at the base of all human humour. That, and one simple gag that catches the imagination. That’s all there is to it, really.”
He knew he had a point. So far, in the space of three weeks, over a hundred thousand human tourists had paid ten dollars a head to watch a not-particularly-inspired clown act performed by a scratch team of dog-headed fiends from Circle Five, almost entirely because they liked the name Cheeky Devils. It doesn’t have to be good; in fact, you can be too good for your own good—too slick, too clever, off-puttingly excellent. It just needs to be a bit good, a bit quirky, a bit different, and have a catchy name or an earworm slogan. How else could anyone account for the amazing success of the improvised beach resort they’d thrown together on the shores of the Sea of Desolation, with a few skips of builders’ sand, a dozen bird-headed fiends in penguin suits and the shout line Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea? Or, come to that, Google?
“Sorry,” Mr. Lucifer said. “I’m not saying it’s a bad idea; it’s more about how much aggravation it’s all going to make for the department heads. You know how much trouble they have with the temperature controls at the best of times.” He sighed. “You’d think, with a bottomless pool of inflammable liquids and a box of matches, they ought to be able to keep a fire in, but …” He pulled a sad face. “Never mind,” he said. “I bet your next idea will be a honey.”
Bernie made an effort and masked his disappointment. He’d been living and breathing Hell-on-ice for the last week: all that work, all the attention to detail, right down to the colour scheme for the Snowflake’s C
hance slot-machine arcade. He’d been dreaming about it, which probably explained the bags under his eyes and the way he jumped at sudden noises. And to have it all arbitrarily dismissed with a shake of the head and some rigmarole about upsetting the deadheads in Engineering.
“Besides,” Mr. Lucifer went on, “there’s no need.”
Made no sense. “Excuse me?”
Mr. Lucifer smiled at him. “No need,” he repeated. “You’ve done so well with all those other ideas you had, we don’t need any more money. We’ve got loads. We’re lousy with the stuff. Our budget’s twice what it was under the old management, in fact, I’m having a hard time thinking of anything to spend it on. Maintenance is bang up to date; we can replace Boiler Six with all new gear; carpets in the corridors; a brand new nail to hang the the executive washroom key on—everything we could possibly want. If we made any more money, it’d just lie around in the strongroom in big heaps, making the place look untidy.”
Just when you think you’ve got them seeing the big picture. “With respect, Mr. Lucifer,” Bernie said, “that’s not how it works. You can’t just make enough money and then stop.”
“Can’t you? Why?”
“Because it’s not—” He stopped, calmed himself down. “We humans have a saying, expand or die. Either a business grows or it shrivels away. It’s like driving on the freeway: you can’t just stop dead in the middle of the traffic. You need momentum, you need dynamic energy, you need eager green shoots groping upwards towards the sun.”
“No, actually, we don’t.” Mr. Lucifer was giving him that look again. “What we need is to keep the lights on and the roof from leaking. And we need to keep the department heads from throwing hissy fits and giving me a hard time. That’s all, really. Sorry, I thought you knew that.”
“Mr. Lucifer.” He could hear the wobble in his voice. “With respect. You can never have too much money.”
“Don’t you believe it. Root of all evil, says so in the operating manual.”
Bernie opened his mouth and then realised he didn’t know what to say. What he didn’t want to say—not if he knew what was good for him—was, That’s not how the Venturi brothers see things, but he was having an awful job keeping those words the right side of his teeth. “Sure, Mr. L.,” he mumbled. “Sorry to have bothered you.”
Mr. Lucifer looked relieved. “Not at all,” he said with genuine warmth. And that was the killer. Mr. Lucifer liked him, he knew; he was trying to be nice. “You’re doing your best for the old place, I appreciate that, truly I do. And you’ve been a real help. I don’t know how we’d have managed without you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Lucifer. That means a lot to me.”
“Sometimes I think you care more about this place than I do. Actually, I know you do. Which is so weird,” he added with a frown, “but what the heck. That’s what’s so special about you humans. You can get fond of practically anything if you set your minds to it.”
Sympathy from the Devil? Indeed. He thought about that last remark for the rest of the afternoon, as he wrote up the quarterly figures. Was it true? Did he care about, had he grown fond of … well, Hell? Surely not. Hell was the place where bad people went and had bad things done to them for ever and ever. A bad place, a very bad place, the best that could be said for it was that it was a necessary evil—now, there was an idea for a brand name. Only you’d probably have to turn it round. Evil Necessities, EN swimwear, EN lingerie, the G-string from Hell, no, maybe not. A necessary evil, something you endure because there’s no alternative, except that the Venturis had shown that simply wasn’t true. You could get shot of good and evil, still have free will and make out like bandits while you were at it. In which case, the creaking relic of an outmoded ethical system to which he was devoting all his waking energies was an unnecessary evil, rightfully mothballed and quite properly obsolete, and here he was busting a gut to keep it going.
But it was true. He had grown fond of it. Or at least he’d grown fond of the people—some of them, a very few of them, because all the rest were arseholes, which was only right and proper, in context, and to be expected—and even the place itself, the gloomy shadows, the ominous red glow, the gaunt, semi-derelict buildings (not semi-derelict any more; I did that, he noted with pride). It wasn’t much, in fact it was pretty ghastly when you looked at it objectively, but it was his job, his responsibility, his baby. You can’t help getting attached to something that depends on you for its very existence.
Just listen to yourself. He leaned back in his chair with his eyes wide open, and the calculator fell from his fingers onto the (newly carpeted) floor. In his mind he visualised a red carpet, lots of round tables crammed into a vast function room, tuxedos and shimmering designer gowns, a master of ceremonies beckoning him up to the podium to receive his Lifetime Award for Services to Treachery. I would like to accept this award on behalf of all the tortured, agonised souls who made this possible, for the whole human race.
“Necessary evil,” he muttered under his breath, but that didn’t compute. What’s the function of divine retribution? To act as a deterrent, silly; everybody knows that. But the Venturis have abolished good and evil, therefore nobody needs to be deterred any more; this place is—his first thought was a museum, but it couldn’t claim that distinction because museums preserve objects of great value. This place was a sump, a toxic waste depot, a silo for nastiness with a half-life of for ever and ever, and the poor creatures suffering in its pits and furnaces were only there because they’d had the misfortune to live and die before the Venturis came.
He shuddered right down to his socks. There but for the grace and capital investment of Ab and Snib, he thought. Could easily have been me in there, and I wouldn’t be enjoying it one little bit. But they were very bad people, he told himself in a shaky little inner voice. They deserved it. That’s what he’d told himself when he first took this job, traded his humanity for a regular wage and a health plan. But all the rules had changed, hadn’t they?
Fond of the place, and the bitch of it was, it was true. Not just fond. Practically every waking thought he had was for the promotion and welfare of this abomination. He made himself pause and think about that. True or untrue? Was he on fire, pun intended, with passion for this institution and all it stood for, or was it because he’d just discovered he had a gift for management and marketing, and this place had given him the scope to use it? That and because there were a handful of people here who actually seemed to like him, and when someone likes you it’s so very, very hard not to like them back, even when they’re the Common Enemy of Man?
Um.
I need to get out more, he thought. Also, I should probably update my CV. Except …
You can hate the business and still love your job. Once, when running an errand to the Maintenance department, he’d got lost in the labyrinth of tunnels under the Despair building, opened the wrong door and found himself in the vast chamber where 99 per cent of the world’s investment bankers had ended up over the decades. Naturally he got out of there as soon as he possibly could, but on the way he couldn’t help but glance at the floor-to-ceiling screens that covered the walls, detailing the biographies of the inmates. Even a fleeting glimpse was enough to make it clear that there was a definite pattern. Take a bright young man, intelligent and keen to make the most of his all-too-short time on Earth. He goes to a good school and then to college. He soaks up ideas like a flower drinking sunlight; quite likely he marches to Stop the War or Ban the this or Save the that; he experiences the joy of friendship, the satisfaction of good company, the thrill of love. And then he gets a job. Part of him is ashamed because it’s selling out, abandoning the possibility of the beautiful life of altruism and service to others, but not to worry, he says to himself; it won’t change me; I’ll still be me; I could never willingly hurt anybody. And then he starts doing the job, and he finds he’s good at it. It’s like being paid to play a wildly exciting game, and some of the people there like him, and winning is a great feeling, and
he wins quite often. And the more you win, the more they want you to play, until the skill becomes the reason—the sensation of air in your wings, the dizzying splendour of the view from on high—and the money, as it rolls in in obscene waves and foam-crested breakers, the money really doesn’t matter except, vitally, as the only really credible way of keeping score, of knowing how you’re doing. Are you still as good as you were last year? Are you still up there bathing in the golden sunlight? Are you still soaring? And it’s all right, because you know that what’s keeping you up there is hot thin air. It’s not real, it doesn’t matter, and you don’t stop to think what has to burn to generate that heat, until the wax melts, and you fall suddenly, and the next thing you see is a spotty kid who’s lost his way in the tunnels, staring at you with unfathomable pity.
Those faces he’d seen in there had stayed with him ever since. They weren’t bad people. They were thoughtless people who did bad things, because the system gave them scope to do so and didn’t make it clear to them that what they were doing was wrong.
The W word. How quaint. How it dates you. I remember Right and Wrong, says the white-haired old man to his grandchildren, who don’t really believe him, any more than they would if he told them he’d once seen a dragon. Because there can’t really be dragons. A living creature can’t generate fire inside its tummy, and a lizard that shape could never possibly fly. Likewise, the whole idea of Good and Evil is so ridiculously silly, looked at logically, that you can’t bring yourself to accept that sensible, rational people ever believed in all that stuff.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you. I only wanted a stapler.”