Undead and Unfinished

by Davidson, MaryJanice

  “I have never worn them.”

  A muffled sob from the Antichrist. Or maybe I was the one sobbing.

  “They are black. So they go ... with everything. I can wear them ... with everything!”

  “Please! We’ll think of something else! Betsy, you don’t know what you’re saying. You can’t do this! There’s no coming back from this!”

  “I have no choice. You think the devil’s gonna show up for a half-assed sacrifice of last year’s running shoes?”

  “I don’t care, it’s not worth it! Think about what you’re doing! Please, don’t do something you’ll never be able to take ba-aaaaah!”

  I had flung them into the fire. Laura shrieked. No—that was me. I shrieked, as though I were the one on fire.

  Laura tried to dash past me. “We can save them! They can be repaired and good as new! No! Let me go, Betsy. I can save them!”

  I was able to catch her by the elbow and swing her away from the merrily blazing high heels. “It has to be done.” My sister and I clung to each other, sobbing. “The sacrifice has to be made.”

  “Wow,” someone said from behind us. Laura stiffened in my arms, and we turned.

  “I won’t deny it, dear. I didn’t think you’d be able to go through with it.” The devil took in our tear-stained faces and grinned. “I should have brought a box of Kleenex.”

  Chapter 22

  l am not happy that Betsy had to go through that terrible ordeal just to get you to show up,” the Antichrist began. ”And she went through that for me! I can never thank her enough. So don’t you be mean and don’t you make fun of her.“

  “But how will I fill my evening?” Satan smirked. “Or yours? And my dear, dumb daughter, Betsy did it so much more for herself.”

  “Hey!” I yelped.

  “No, you’re right.” The devil paused. “It’s not that you’re dumb, Laura. It’s that you only know about this singular plane of existence.”

  “Okay, that’s b—wait, I’m still offended on both our behaves.”

  “But she does only know about this plane. And you did go through all that to escape your own tedious reality.”

  Through pure force of habit I opened my mouth to protest, then thought it over and shrugged instead. “Yeah, well. It’s true. But that doesn’t make you right all the time, Lena Olin.”

  Laura looked at me, big blue eyes puzzled. I figured I should elaborate, but before I could, God’s Problem Child stepped all over me, verbally speaking.

  “In the guise of helping you, Betsy gets to run away from the train wreck of a life she’s made for herself.”

  “Hey! Don’t imply I had anything to do with any trains or any wrecks, you—”

  “The dead roommates, of course. The half brother. The dead parents.”

  “The Ant,” I forced out through teeth that wanted to gnash my molars into dust, “was not my mother.”

  “Her best friend is in a funk, and not just because she’s recently realized her parents are my permanent guests. Jessica’s love life is in, as we say, the shitter.”

  “Who is we?”

  “Then there’s her pathologically illogical hatred of all things Thanksgiving—”

  “Hey, I’m not alone in that one! Just ask a Native American. If you can find one. See? See? My point.”

  “And let’s not forget the vampire king—”

  “Who is let’s? Who is we? Who are these people?”

  “—who has spent the last several days in a cold rage at his wife. Or perhaps at himself, for marrying her. My point, daughter, is that you mustn’t ascribe your sister with qualities she does not have.”

  Laura, aghast, looked at me. I opened my mouth ... then shrugged again. “I got nothin’. She’s right. My life is so shitty right now, a day trip to hell sounds like a good idea.”

  I had it. I’d figured it out. This, this is what experience meant. It meant I wasn’t any more capable of keeping myself out of disastrous jams, I just knew that the car I was driving? The one with no brakes? Was also on fire. Headed for an orphanage. Which was also on fire. And chased by cop cars, which were ablaze.

  “Experience sucks,” I explained to my sister and her mom. “That’s all it means.”

  Chapter 23

  That was ... hmm, what is the word? Ah! Pointless. A word that leaps effortlessly to mind whenever the queen of the vampires expresses an opinion.”

  “Well, excuse me for having a moment of self-awareness!”

  “You are excused; I know full well how rare and wonderful such moments are for you. Now.” The devil clapped her hands together, like a kindergarten teacher briskly bringing the rowdy ankle-biters under her command. “Since you have both agreed to come to my domain, there are a few elementary rules you must—”

  “No.”

  The devil blinked. “Pardon?”

  “We say. Not you. Because I know something you prob’ly wish I didn’t. You need µs.” I paused, relishing the sweet, sweet words about to tumble from my lip-glossed mouth (Too Faced in Drop Dead Red). “You need me.” Ha! Reap the whirlwind, Satan!

  “Yeah!” Laura echoed, but she was a shit poker player, because the doubt? It was writ large, as they say. “You need me. Uh. Her.”

  “I smell a list of demands,” Satan said, but to my relief, she didn’t seem annoyed, or even put out. “Speak, 0 Vampire Queen.”

  Bark, bark! “You want Laura to see your domain, or whatever the hell you call it.”

  “Was that supposed to be a pun?”

  “Not on purpose. And you know Laura wouldn’t come by herself. So I’m gonna get her to the Underworld for you. In return, you’re gonna fix it so I can read the Book of the Dead without going nuts.”

  Laura made a muffled squeaking sound, sort of a gasp crossed with a sigh. “The book! Betsy, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “I’m sick to death of the damn thing being in my house and always being right, while at the same time nobody can read the stupid thing.”

  “But, Betsy ... it’s bad. You know it is. Anybody who looks at it for more than a second and a half can feel how bad it is. How can being able to read it be any sort of improvement? Think of what it might cost.”

  “Worth it. Can you imagine all the shit we could have avoided over the last three years if we could read the fucking thing?

  “I’m tired of guessing and wondering. I want to know. I need to know. Your mom’s probably the only one who can—uh.” Probably said too much. “Anyway,” I finished with a forced cough, “that’s my price for bringing your kid back for Old Home Week.”

  “Agreed,” she said at once. And the way Satan said it—the word out so quickly it almost stepped on the end of my sentence—it was a tone I’d never heard from the devil. She had the air of a person who knew she was getting off lightly.

  “But what’s in this for you?” As if she’d tell us. But I’d at least ask. I’d at least know, when this whole thing went screaming off the rails, that I’d asked. That I’d tried. “What do you care if Laura ever sees hell? Maternal obligation isn’t exactly the phrase that springs to mind when we’re talking about you.”

  “I want her to see my home because not seeing it will eventually drive her mad.”

  There was a painful silence as Laura and I digested this. Then I forced another cough (which sounded more like a croak) and said, “You mean make her mad. Really piss her off. Like how people get when they get dragged to their high school reunion. Right? That’s what you don’t want to risk. Right?”

  “You think the dreams are bad now? You think the pains are bad now?” Satan asked her kid. The fallen angel looked as concerned as I’d ever seen her. The devil was a caring mom; who knew? “You have no idea, Laura. And I mean for things to stay just that way. I mean for you to never have an idea. For you never to know how bad it could have gotten. I’m not here for her. I’m not even here for me. I’m here for you.”

  “You mean ... you didn’t do that? You didn’t make that happen to get m
e to come?”

  “By my father, no! I could never hurt you—and even if I could, I would never. You coming into harm—serious, permanent harm—how does that help me?”

  That was logical enough to be true.

  “Laura, you look human. You sound human, you talk like a human. You smell and speak and excrete like a human. You menstruate and—”

  “TMI!”

  Satan ignored me. “But you aren’t. You’re only partly human. And all that is me, within you, that part of you calls to my home, and will always call to you. The part of you that isn’t human yearns toward the dimension where my will shapes reality.”

  “I don’t get it,” I admitted.

  “Laura is an Arabian horse,” Satan explained, “who was raised on a pig farm and thinks she’s a ping.”

  “Your analogies are hideous.” Did that make me queen of the pigs? Or just queen of the pigs who were already dead? “Almost as hideous as—” I eyed her up and down. “As hideous as—wait.”

  “I prefer not to wait for your tedious mental grinding to bring you up to speed. Now, when we go to my dimension, you’ll need—”

  “Wait!”

  I’d been so caught up in figuring out who was going to do what, and who was going to get what, and who wasn’t going to go crazy, I’d barely glanced at Satan’s ensemble. But now ...

  Now, there was no shutting it out.

  “Your feet.”

  “—pay close attention to—”

  “Your. Feet.”

  “—for the sake of your immortal—”

  “Your feeeeeet!” I shrieked, and launched myself at my sister’s evil evil evil evil evil mother! Who was wearing a sleeveless gray and black checked shift with a gathered waist and a round neckline, a dress subtle and pretty and which was the perfect outfit to wear ...

  ... with ...

  ... my sacrificed Valentino black-lace pumps!

  I figure Satan wasn’t used to bitchy vampires jumping her, because she went over as though she were made of feathers. I even got in a right cross to her demonic jaw before a thousand firecrackers went off behind my eyes and the bricks above the fireplace jumped forward and slammed me in the back.

  The good news was it didn’t hurt a bit ...

  Chapter 24

  l see I can gloss over the hell-is-another-dimension-and-not-easily-visited portion of my lecture.”

  “I hate you,” I said without opening my eyes. There didn’t seem to be any point to getting an eyeful of where I was and what was going on. “So, so much.”

  “If I were human,” Satan bitched, “I would have an unsightly black eye. This is how you treat a guest you invited into your home?”

  “Invited is a strong word,” I replied.

  “Are you okay? How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Child, she hasn’t opened her eyes.”

  “That’s true, Laura. I haven’t.”

  “Does it feel like anything’s broken?”

  It was nice; Laura sounded superconcerned. “Only my sense of reason, purpose, and childlike wonder.” I opened my eyes. And blinked. Lots. “Where the hell are we?”

  “Yes,” Laura and the devil said in unison. Followed by the devil adding, “I’m astonished you got it right the first time. I had allotted twenty minutes for you to eventually guess right, and then need everything explained at least twice. Starting two minutes ago. And now, see? My entire evening just opened up.”

  “Yes, well, let that be a lesson to you.” I sat up, wincing, then lurched to my feet. My back ached from neck to butt, and I had a whopper of a headache, probably from the devil tossing me ass over teakettle into the bricks above the fireplace. Luckily I’d fed recently, and thank you again, would-be rapists.

  Dead or not, I could still be hurt. I could still die (again). Tough to kill didn’t mean invulnerable. It did mean tough to kill. So I bounced back pretty quickly, and never was I happier about that than when I woke up in hell.

  Which was really, really good, since I was betting she’d fractured my skull and possibly, for funsies, shattered my spine. In hell for—what? Seventy seconds, and already hideously crippled.

  “And I left my overnight bag in the stupid parlor next to the stupid Book of the Dead!” Great. Already this field trip sucked. “No lip gloss.” (I dunno if all vampires were prone to dry lips, or just me, and there was no way to tell, because I had lived on Chapstick since I was six.) “And no change of underwear!”

  “Tsk. I can’t tell you how much—” Satan cut herself off and got a peculiar look on her face. She looked as though she were listening to voices. Which she most likely was. Unlike the average citizen of the damned, the voices in her head were probably real. “Well, that’s just terrific. Sorry, ladies; I must fly. Something has come up.”

  “But—” Laura began, already sounding panicked. In hell for a minute and a half and ditched by the devil? Muy uncool.

  “My assistant can answer your questions and give you a tour. Just go through that door.”

  We looked; we were standing in a room of nothing.

  Okay, I’ll elaborate: we were in a nondescript room with high ceilings and cheap carpeting. Everything was blah gray. No windows, no doors. No sound. No light source. It was almost like we were standing in a fog bank that had walls. It was a room of nothing.

  “But Baal—” Laura began.

  “I’m good, darling, but even I can’t be in two places at once. As I said—my assistant will take over until I return. She’s through that, there. No worries; no one here will bother you. Unless I tell them to.” Satan grinned, and blinked out of sight.

  “Well, this is off to a suck-o start. What’s amazing is that I hear myself, and I actually sound surprised.”

  “She might not care if you die,” Laura said, clearly trying to be reassuring, which would have gone over better if she didn’t look terrified, “but she seems to care if I do. So if you stick by me, Betsy, I think we’ll be safe.”

  “And I think I’m weirded out.” I gestured. “That’s a door.”

  “Uh ... yes. It is a door. See? I’m not scared. You shouldn’t be, either.”

  “Laura, you sound like an episode of Sesame Street. There wasn’t a door three seconds ago. There wasn’t anything three seconds ago.”

  “Should we—?”

  I looked at her, then back at the door. The doorknob gleamed innocently. I was pretty sure. “I guess we’d better,” I said.

  I stepped forward and gingerly gripped the knob. I was expecting it to be hot. You know ... hellish. But it just turned when I turned it.

  So we went in.

  Chapter 25

  Hell was a waiting room with fading fluorescent lighting and out-of-date Good Housekeeping and Redbook magazines. Also: hell smelled like a doctor’s office, that sharp, sting-y smell that promised you were gonna get hurt, one way or another, before the visit was over.

  “Uh.” Laura was looking around, as wide-eyed as I was. “This is unexpected.”

  “To put it mildly.” I glanced down at a Redbook from April 1979. Those bell-bottoms! Those how-to-satisfy-your-man self-help articles! When the urge to vomit became too much, I knew exactly what I was going to aim for.

  The room was furnished with dinged-up, knocked-around cheap furniture; no one was sitting at the check-in desk. The carpet was a perfect mixture of snot green and eye-booger gray. And there were doors, doors about two inches apart along every wall except where the desk was.

  “Subtle,” I observed, nervously eyeing one of the doors. “I guess you’re supposed to get around hell with these things.”

  “Doors in a waiting room?”

  “That’s all this is.” I glanced up at the ceiling as another ailing fluorescent started to flicker. “People wait. In one of the yuckiest spots ever. You can tell just by standing in this room that unpleasant things are right around the corner. Like an audit you think is done, until they pull out more paperwork.” I shuddered. “It’s brilliantly evil.”


  “Thank you,” my dead stepmother said.

  Of course. Of course the Ant was here. Of course she was the devil’s right hand. With the possible exception of Eva Braun, no one could be more suited to the job.

  “Well, great,” I said, eyeing her. “The good news is, being dead hasn’t made any sort of imprint on your eclectic personal style. Eclectic being another word for hideous.”

  “Says the vampire!” my dead stepmother cried, her overly be-ringed hands flying up to pat her shiny blonde hair. Her hair was as it had always been: the same shade, consistency, and shape of a ripe pineapple. “Only you could have been more a pain in your poor father’s ass after you died.”

  “Uh, whoa,” Laura said, glancing from the Ant to me and back again. “At least this isn’t stressful. Or weird.”

  “So, the devil’s handmaiden is really ... the devil’s handmaiden! Ha! Color me the opposite of surprised. Ugh, what are you wearing? You can’t tell me all the clothing designers went to heaven. Can’t you dig up ... I dunno ... Yves Saint Laurent? No. Wait. He was just a coke hound who liked to drink. That’s not really the sort of thing people burn in hell for. Too bad he didn’t kill someone and cover it up. Cavalli? I’m pretty sure he was blasphemous when he wasn’t cranking out panties ... aw, nuts. He’s not dead.”

  “Maybe we’re getting off track,” Laura began.

  “Oooh, Donna Karan! Right? The whole fur thing? Dammit, I think she’s still alive, too. Uh ...”

  The Ant puffed out a harassed breath, apparently never having noticed her hair never, ever moved. (It was interesting to me that people kept habits like breathing and sighing when they didn’t need them anymore.) “It’s nice to see you again, Laura.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. T—”

  “No, no, no. Please, my name is—”

  “Mud,” I suggested. “Mud Barfbag Taylor. Call her Asshat for short.”

  “—Antonia.”

  Laura stretched an arm over the Ant’s desk (hell didn’t supply Post-Its, I noticed) and they shook. “I just wanted you to know, Mud Bar—um, Antonia, that though I understand Baal is my mother, you carried me for nine months and—”