Undead and Unfinished

by Davidson, MaryJanice

  “Then dragged my dad to the altar, had sex with him, then bit off his head and devoured his still-twitching body.”

  “Oh, Betsy, really!” Laura frowned at me. “Grow up.”

  “See? You’re already turning evil. This place is gonna be a bad influence on you; I can already tell. I sense it, as I sense the Ant needs a makeover.”

  “When I heard you would be visiting us,” the Ant was yakking, “of course I asked the Morningstar if I could help. I just didn’t think I’d be able to so soon. I hope you understand you are foremost in her thoughts—”

  “Vomit,” I said to the ceiling. Interesting that there now was one. And it looked like every waiting room ceiling I’d ever seen: a yawn-inducing popcorn ceiling, pitted with little holes from where people tossed pencils at it. “And again, I say vomit.”

  “—even though she was called away. But I’ll look after you.” I felt a narrow-eyed glance. “Both of you. I guess. Hmpf Meanwhile, if I can answer any questions, please just come right out and ask.”

  “Excellent. Because I’ve got lots of questions. When you decided to whore yourself in order to break up my mother’s marriage, did you do it because you were an amoral slut, or because you didn’t get enough of Daddy’s attention when you were a little girl? Or some weird pervy combo of both? And when you’d do it with my mother’s husband, did you talk to him about all the bad clothes and bad hair treatments you wanted him to buy, or just grunt like animals?”

  “Betsy!” mother and daughter shrieked in unison.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” I yawned. “So are we getting a tour or what?”

  Chapter 26

  We followed my stepmother as she gave us a tour of hell. Laura was staring around, wide-eyed and fascinated, but I was mostly annoyed. I knew hell was going to be awful, but nobody warned me it’d be chockful of clichés.

  There were pits of boiling oil, complete with screaming souls trying to do the breaststroke. There was the whole rolling-a-boulder-uphill-only-to-have-it-squash-you-when-it-rolls-all-the-way-back-down thing. (I guess this was also hell for dead ancient Greeks.)

  There were people getting whipped, burned, and shaved. There were people who fell, again and again, into pits filled with snakes, lizards, mice, gummy bears.

  There were people running, only to be run over by chariots, horses, tanks, RVs.

  There were people drowning and people being buried. There were people being attacked by wild dogs, bears, eagles, ferrets, whippets. Oh, and—gross!

  “Otters?” I asked, not expecting an answer. “Were those otters?”

  I expected to feel a lot of things in hell, but I never expected boredom. (Although the otter thing was sort of unusual.)

  It scared me, to be truthful about the whole thing. Seeing suffering and finding it anticlimactic. I hadn’t been a vampire long, but I was beginning to see how the old ones, the ones even older than my husband ... they were bored by everything; screams and pain and despair and horror left them pretty unmoved. They ended up causing tons of trouble because at least that was something different.

  I wasn’t scared to be in hell. I was scared that I wasn’t scared to be in hell.

  But I was here, and I vowed to pay attention and learn what I could. Then I could go back home and spend the next fifty years repressing this entire week.

  I pondered, then decided that was as good a plan as any. Pay attention, learn, get what needed to be done done, have the devil pay up what she promised, then get the hell, no pun intended, back home.

  That was my plan, and I was sticking to it.

  Yes, of course I didn’t think it’d be that simple. I’d never been a Mensa member, but that didn’t mean I needed to read the directions on a box of cereal to make my breakfast.

  Chapter 27

  Tell you what: hell was like a big evil torture-laden hive. If you stood back from it, you could see there were all sorts of chambers, going down and down and back and back, too many even to count, with something yuck-o or boring or stupid or terrifying or weird going on in each individual cell. As you got closer, you could make out faces and the like. If you pulled back, you couldn’t see anything specific but had the sense that lots and lots of stuff was going on all around you.

  Hell: nature’s other beehive.

  I could hear the Ant and Laura having a quiet conversation; I’d been so busy musing and looking around I’d dropped about twenty feet back. They must have thought if they kept their voices low enough, I couldn’t hear them over the screams and moans and bitching and tantrums of the damned.

  “Of course I jumped at the chance,” the Ant was saying. Laura’s head was bent attentively toward her birth mother; she had about five inches on the Ant. Laura looked almost protective as she walked beside her. “I had a chip, you know. The you-possessed-me-to-have-a-child chip, and in all this time I never played it. I never wanted to. But then I heard you were coming. That you were alive, I mean, and coming, and Lucifer said I could help show you around.”

  “Is she nice to you? Relatively speaking?”

  “Sure. It’s all hype, you know.”

  “I don’t, Antonia. Could you explain?”

  “Lucifer doesn’t spend all her time thinking up ways to torture the souls who come to her. Hell is—it’s almost a business. One she’s been running for tens of thousands of years, with no sick time or vacation days. Or holidays. Or even maternity leave.” And then she—did she? She did! She actually elbowed my sister, a sort of yuk-yuk elbow dig.

  I rolled my eyes. Boo-hoo. Poor Satan. All work and no dental benefits; sounded terrible.

  “Can you imagine?” the Ant exclaimed in what sounded like genuine sympathy. I couldn’t be sure, though. Since I’d never actually heard that tone from her, you’ll understand my confusion. “I thought the customs line at O’Hare was dreadful. That’s part of the reason you’re here, you know.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  The Ant shut up, in the way she alone shut up: she kept talking. “I, um, probably shouldn’t have—it’s not appropriate for me to be talking to you about this.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, look, there’s Ted Bundy being raped and strangled again today.”

  “Aaaiiggh!” Laura clapped her hands over her eyes. “Antonia, I don’t want to look at that! Please don’t call my attention to things like that. And now please finish your thought”

  What thought? I snickered but managed not to say it aloud.

  “I really need to finish this tour,” the Ant said, sounding rattled and nervous.

  “I don’t want you to get into trouble, so I’ll leave off it for now. But ... is that part of the reason you’re helping her? Is Baal ... this will sound so silly, but is Baal overworked?”

  “Not so much overworked as I think she’s lonely,” the Ant said after a long pause. Mother and daughter had lowered their voices more, and I ruthlessly decided not to mention I could still hear them. “She’s the only one of her kind, you know. And she’s been doing this for a long, long time. Ever since the terrible fight with you-know-who.”

  The building super? Her mechanic?

  “Yes,” the Ant concluded. “I’d say she was lonesome.”

  Laura stopped short and glanced back at me. “Oh, look,” I said, pretending I hadn’t been eavesdropping. “Kenneth Lay is being buried alive in Krugerrands. Gah, that must hurt—look at the welts! They’re doing that to him naked? Oh, ew, did you see where some of those Krugerrands went? Hey!” I yelled. “How ‘bout in your next life, you come back as someone who doesn’t screw people out of billions?”

  “Don’t taunt the damned, Betsy,” the Antichrist chided. “Isn’t it bad enough they’re stuck here?”

  “It’s bad enough we’re stuck here.”

  “Stuck isn’t really the right word,” the Ant said. “No one is here against their will.”

  “What?” I gave up all pretense of pretending I couldn’t hear. “Not even him?” I gestured to Henry VIII, who w
as on his knees begging Anne Boleyn not to let a French swords-man cut off his head for witchcraft. Old Anne wasn’t looking very forgiving. “Because I don’t see an egotistical pig of that size—and that’s not a fat joke, although there must be Stair-masters in hell—signing up for hell of his own free will.”

  “But he did. We all did.”

  “But why?” Laura asked, and I admit, I was interested in the answer myself.

  “This isn’t a place,” the Ant began. She was speaking slowly, but I didn’t have the sense she was lying. Just trying to explain so we’d get it. Proof I was in hell: the Ant knew lots of things I didn’t, and had to break them down for my understanding. “Not a place like Africa or the Mall of America. You can’t get in your car and find it.

  “Hell is a zone, a plane, where spirits can visit. Any spirits. At any time. You two are special because you still have your bodies. We”—she gestured vaguely—“don’t anymore. In hell you’re only limited by your imagination ... just like heaven.”

  “I don’t get it,” I admitted, and boy, did that one hurt.

  To my astonishment, the Ant didn’t seize the opportunity to try and squash my ego or cripple my will to live. “No, I don’t think either of you can—not right now. It’s really, really hard to explain.”

  “Nevertheless,” Satan said, popping in from wherever, “I shall try. Thank you, Antonia, that’s all for now.”

  “Ma’am,” the Ant said, and blinked out of sight.

  “Wait! Shit.”

  “Have no fear nor fret, Betsy, you’ll see her again.”

  “Don’t you threaten me, Satan. I just had stuff I wanted to ask.” Why did she haunt me right after she and my dad died? Why did she quit? Why did she play tour guide? Where was my father? Why did she choose to have awful hair in hell? These were the questions beating against my brain for answers.

  “Is it true, Mother?”

  “Which, darling?”

  “Is my birth mother right? Are you lonely?”

  “Of course.” No denials. No sarcasm. Just a simple statement. I won’t try to deny it; I was impressed. Why couldn’t Satan be like this all the time? “I’ve lived long and long. It’s why I had you.”

  “What?” I asked, because Laura suddenly seemed afraid to say anything.

  “I want you to take over the family business,” Satan said to her, as if Laura had asked the question. “I’d like to retire.”

  Chapter 28

  Retire where?” I asked, because I couldn’t help picturing the devil buying a condo in Boca Raton. She could then go from angel to fallen angel to mistress of hell to retiree to snowbird to, inevitably, crazed nursing home resident.

  “I don’t know. But that’s the beauty of retirement.” Satan actually looked wistful. “Choices. You have choices.”

  “Mother, I had no idea.” Laura was looking at the devil with sympathy writ large all over her pimple-free, wrinkle-free complexion. “You must be ... I didn’t know.”

  “You’re not gonna be one of those stage mothers, are you? You know—they didn’t win Miss Teeny Miss Whatever, so they raise their daughter to be Miss Teeny—”

  “I wouldn’t force Laura,” Satan interrupted. “But I would ask. A mother can ask.”

  Now Laura’s big enormous anime eyes were filling with tears. “You poor thing!” she cried. “You poor, poor—”

  I interrupted again. Laura feeling sorry for Satan was not the plan. Laura taking over hell was soooo not the plan. I didn’t know what the plan was, but I was sure it wasn’t either of those. “But if you’ve been doing this for tens of thousands of years, how can—oh.”

  “What?” Laura asked.

  “That odd look on her face?” Satan asked. “She isn’t constipated. She’s realizing something for the first time.”

  “Shows what you know. I haven’t taken a dump since I died, so by definition I’m constipated all the time.”

  Laura frowned. “Uh, I’m not sure—”

  “How long do you expect Laura to live?” I asked, working to keep my voice level and nonshrieky. Because none of this had occurred to me before. “Will she be like you? Are you immortal?”

  “By my father, no.” Satan actually shivered. The thought of what could give the Lady of Lies the shakes was giving me the shakes. “Just long-lived, like all my race.”

  “Angels?” Laura asked.

  “Yes, for lack of a better word. We can be killed, certainly. But we never get sick and we age slowly.”

  “I’ll say. You don’t look a century over eight thousand.” Of course, her stolen shoes helped keep her looking young, the hateful ...

  “When Father created us, he knew he would need helpers who had long life spans. A child can grow up in a decade and be dead not even ten decades after that” Satan snapped her fingers. “Like that! Poof. The light goes out.”

  “Yeah, the fruit flies of humanity,” I said. “That’s us. But why do you need to live long in the first place? Especially when the average life span these days is—uh—” Seventy-five? That sounded low. Ninety? Too high. Where was Marc when I needed him?

  “Seventy-five for men,” the devil supplied. “Eighty for women. Quite an improvement over, say, the Neolithic era, which was twenty. Can you imagine being considered a doddering elder before you could legally drink?”

  “Stop it!”

  Satan blinked. “Pardon?”

  “Stop being so helpful. It’s freaking me out.” A thought struck me, and for a moment I thought I was going to fall down. “Retire—so Laura—how ...” I tried again. “How long do you expect Laura to live? You yourself, you’ve lived for—”

  Laura seemed to pale before my eyes. “M-mother? Will I—will I be as long-lived as you?”

  Now, some people might be psyched to find out they could live for thousands of years. But Laura, who was occasionally a complete mystery to me, looked horrified. I could almost feel her counting up all the loved ones dying of old age, her parents, her friends, her future husband and children, and their children, and theirs, while she went on ... and on ... and on ...

  “I don’t know,” Satan replied, no screwing around, no smirky, mean grin. “I don’t know how long you’ll live, Laura. Nobody knows that, except maybe our father.” A ghost of a smile. “And he’s quite famous for hiding his cards.”

  Things were starting to make sense, but instead of liking it, I was becoming more uneasy. The devil might have a perfectly legitimate gripe and reason for getting me to bring Laura to hell.

  And she might not.

  Or it might be both. Either way, we were probably in huge trouble. If this was some big-budget movie, I, the intrepid heroine, would do something fabulous and heroic. But it wasn’t a movie and I wasn’t an intrepid heroine. I didn’t even know what intrepid meant.

  I turned to Laura. “Okay, so, we’ve had the tour and the devil wants to retire and it’s possible you’ve got the life span of Japan, the U.S., and France combined. Let’s retire back to earth and ponder. For years.”

  “Ah.” Satan cocked her head. “One moment, please, ladies.” Then she blinked out.

  “Great,” I fumed. “Stranded in hell. Too bad I didn’t see this coming. Oh, wait, I did.”

  “She wouldn’t strand us here,” Laura said, sounding pretty reasonable for a half-angel psycho with a murderous temper and a loathing for lemon bars. “If nothing else, she needs me, right? She wants me to take over. Is it true?”

  “Which part?”

  “Will I live for a long time? Tens of thousands of years?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m thinking about the Book of the Dead.”

  “Which predicts you’ll rule for five thousand years.”

  “That’s the one.”

  We stared at each other, surrounded by the damned, sisters who had no control over events or even, sometimes, themselves.

  “She needs me,” Laura ventured after a long moment. “So she has to be nice. To both of us.”

  “That’s true,” I
conceded. And it was probably why the Lady of Lies was being just sooo helpful today. “An awful lot has happened in a very short time.”

  “Par for the course, right?” Laura had a peculiar expression on her face ... she was trying to eavesdrop into the hell cells without the people in the cells knowing what she was up to. “I can’t thank you enough for agreeing to come.”

  “Chalk it up to brain damage. Ongoing brain damage, because I think I’m definitely in shock.”

  “Do you need to lie down? I guess I could ask one of the damned for a cot. Or maybe a quilt? Um, excuse me? Excuse me—sir? No, not you, sir, the one in the cell next to you having what looks like involuntary dental surgery ...”

  “Something’s fucked up severe,” I announced.

  Laura came close to me, her hands fluttering ineffectually. “Do you feel faint?”

  “Yep. Definitely in shock. Because I’m having trouble taking all of this in.”

  “It’s okay, Betsy.” The Antichrist patted my forearm. “It’s hard for both of us, I think.”

  “For example, Laura, you have sprouted enormous wings. I think I probably should have picked up on that earlier. Yep, definitely.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. I’m pretty sure I should have. Weird. This is a very weird day.”

  Chapter 29

  l’ve got what?”

  “Wings.” Laura hadn’t noticed, either. I felt less dumb.

  “Where?” Laura twisted from side to side, which had the effect of someone wearing a backpack trying to see their backpack ... every twist and turn just angled the item away. Which is how I ended up ...

  “Phhhfft!”

  ... getting a faceful of feathers.

  I waved her away from me, spitting flight feathers. (Who knew that report I did on migratory snow and blue geese in eighth grade would have a practical application in hell?)

  “Are they there? I can’t believe it! What do they look like? I didn’t feel a thing!” Whack, Whack!