by Donna Hosie
“He’s asleep,” says Medusa fondly. “We should have gotten him some coffee before we came.”
“I’ll have a hot chocolate while you’re at it.”
“Get your own, hive boy.”
“Ah, the sounds of young love,” says a deep voice. Septimus pulls off his mask and stretches.
“Ugh,” we both reply, although I notice that Medusa’s cheeks are suddenly red. I resist the urge to stick my finger in one of her dimples.
Septimus starts chuckling. “Mitchell, thank you for coming in this—” He stops speaking and looks at his wristwatch. “Is it the morning after, or the evening after before the morning?”
“Uh . . .”
“I think Mitchell left his brain in the ballroom, Septimus,” says Medusa, throwing a punch toward my kidneys.
“Well, while you work that little riddle out,” says Septimus, winking at Medusa, “how about we have a little chat about my plan?”
“You seriously think you can stop the dead from getting into Hell?” I grab a chair and wheel it over to Septimus’s desk.
Septimus shakes his head. “We’ll never be able to stop the dead, Mitchell, and I apologize if I gave you that impression. The Bloody Mary cocktails were aiding and abetting my imagination last night—I’m sure that frightful woman puts something illegal in them. Alas, if there is one guaranteed event in life, it is the impending arrival of death.” Septimus exhales a long sigh, which has nothing to do with tiredness. “However,” he adds quickly, “I do believe that with the correct tools, we can stem the mass migration to these particular transcendental shores, and together we can start leveling the playing fields of death once more.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“You were lost years ago,” quips Medusa.
“Don’t you have something important to do?” I ask, unleashing an elastic band in her direction. “Girl things, like doing the dishes, or cleaning?”
“Are you sure you two aren’t married?” drawls Septimus. “The pair of you sound exactly like my wife and me, before the joyful release of death finally separated us once and for all.”
“I would rather marry a skunk,” replies Medusa. “Better hygiene.”
“Hell will freeze over before I get married.”
Why am I feeling hot and shaky? It’s probably because I haven’t had any breakfast. I forget that Septimus has asked me here for a reason, and I start to mentally plot my day around meals. It immediately makes me feel better.
Septimus stands and stretches. “I know it’s your well-earned annual day off, Mitchell, but I need you to collate a list for me.”
I push thoughts of corn dogs out of my head.
“What kind of list, boss?”
“Responsible devils. People we work with on a daily basis who can be trusted absolutely. Don’t go for CEOs, they’re all corrupt. Start with department deputies, or even better, their executive assistants. Preferably devils who have been dead for at least two hundred years. They won’t have the same longing as the newly dead.”
“Longing for what?”
“What do you know about the Viciseometer?” asks Septimus. My boss isn’t just looking at me, he’s staring so hard it’s as if he’s seeing through me.
And I realize he knows that I know.
Medusa answers before I get a chance. “It’s an urban legend,” she blurts out, her eyes darting between me and Septimus.
“Most legends have their foundations in a truth, Medusa,” says Septimus.
“Are you saying it’s real?”
“As real as you or I,” replies Septimus. Medusa whistles through the gap between her two front teeth. “The Viciseometer has been used to go back in time to introduce the wheel; fire, of course, to the cavemen; and even the recipe for Coca-Cola. Alas, it has also been used to reveal the secret of atomic fission, and it was also responsible for sowing the seeds for cabbages—truly the most heinous use ever recorded.” He shudders. Septimus hates vegetables.
“Back to this list, Septimus. How many names would you like on it?” I ask. As much as I adore Medusa, I’m the one Septimus called in to help him.
“I think a shortlist of twenty names should suffice,” says Septimus. “Now, if you will both excuse me, I need to check on our lord and master. He is usually rather delicate the day after the Masquerade Ball and that does not bode well for anyone.”
“I’ll e-mail the list to you, boss.”
Septimus pauses by the door. He has a strange look on his face. I get the impression he wants to say something long-winded, like a warning, but all I get is, “Thank you, Mitchell. I won’t forget this.”
“No problem, boss.”
“And I’m sure I don’t need to remind either of you that discretion is paramount.”
“Absolutely,” I reply.
Once Septimus has gone, Medusa skips over to my desk and sits down on the edge. Her skinny legs dangle over my wastepaper basket. I have a sudden urge to dunk her like a basketball, and the thought makes me laugh.
“Can I help you with the list?” she asks.
“If you want.”
“What about Dominic in banking?”
“He’s a moron who gets lost in his own department.”
“What about Patrick in the legal department? I’ve worked with him and he’s very diligent.”
“Patrick has the IQ of a peanut.”
“Why are you writing Patty Lloyd’s name down?”
“Because she works in the library, so she must be smart.”
“And the fact that she looks like Marilyn Monroe has nothing to do with it?”
Medusa and I continue to bicker for another fifteen minutes. I’m so weak from lack of food I can barely grip my pen.
“I hope Septimus lets us see the Viciseometer,” says Medusa. She was playing with the combination of the safe; now she’s spinning in a circle in Septimus’s chair. “Just imagine all that power. You could do anything.”
“It does sound seriously cool. I wonder what Septimus is going to do with it.”
“What would you do with it, Mitchell?”
“Get myself a plate of fries and a triple cheeseburger. Then I’d go back in time and repeat the order a million times.”
Medusa throws an empty soda can at me. She’s a lethal shot, especially when I’m the target. It bounces off my nose and then lands in the recycling bin.
“Pack it in, Melissa!” I yell. I rarely call her by her real name, but I’m getting annoyed. I can feel my shoulders starting to seize up with tension, and my head aches from where I’ve been grinding my back teeth. Another hundred years and I’ll have magenta eyes and dentures.
“You have no vision, that’s your problem, Mitchell,” says Medusa. She jumps off the chair, grabs my pen, and writes down fifteen names in quick succession. They’re inspired choices and exactly the kind of people Septimus is looking for. Medusa is wasted in the kitchens. I don’t know how I got this job ahead of her. She’s so smart, sometimes my head hurts just trying to keep up.
“Thanks,” I mumble.
Medusa grabs my hands and pulls me up. I’m at least a foot taller than she is, yet sometimes I feel really small in her company. Today is one of those days. My hands are hot and sweaty and covered in ink. Totally gross, but she doesn’t seem to mind.
“Do you know what I would do with the Viciseometer?” Medusa asks. She isn’t meeting my eyes; her concentration is fixed on interlocking our fingers in some kind of game.
“Go back in time and get stretched out on a rack to make you taller?” I suggest.
It was meant to be funny, and she does smirk. I still get a punch to the stomach, though.
“I would do what every devil would do, stupid.”
“And what would every devil do?” I ask.
She lets go of my hands, although I find I don’t want her to.
“I would change my death, of course.”
4. The Peasant and
the Warrior
Medusa helps me finis
h the list of twenty names, but now my head is buzzing. Is it really possible to change your death? Or even better, go back in time and stop your death completely? Now, that’s a thought I’m not going to shake easily.
Everyone looks without seeing in Hell. It’s just the way it is. Every steaming, dark corridor is a crush of people. Some are crying; some are screaming. Most are silent, and that’s just as depressing. Everyone is trying to get somewhere, all the while knowing they can’t ever leave. Devils are buffeted and jostled as we search for our next source of food, our one reminder that we can do something other than work. I don’t even like the burger bar that Medusa and I are now heading toward, but it’s the nearest food stand to the CBD. Because I’m young and tall, I can push my way through more easily than most. Medusa follows in my slipstream, holding tightly to my T-shirt so we don’t get separated. Back on earth the same distance would take five minutes; less than two on my skateboard.
Here in Hell it takes over an hour.
“So tell me more about the Viciseometer,” I say as we fight our way through the crushing crowds. We’re meeting our other two friends, Alfarin and Elinor. We’re running very late, which means there may not be any food left after Alfarin has been let loose on the place. A cause for concern if ever there was one.
“What’s going on, Mitchell?” asks Medusa thickly. She’s chewing four pieces of gum. Her first attempt at a pink bubble ends when I pop it all over her face.
“I just want to do a thorough job for Septimus, and I think it’s important that I know everything there is to know about the Viciseometer, that’s all.”
“Kiss-ass.” Medusa is annoyed at me because now she has gum in her hair. Her curls are wild today. The humidity and heat of Hell wreak havoc on everyone’s hair, mine included. Even though my blond hair is cut short, there are times when I look like an albino hedgehog. Today Medusa’s hair makes her head look ten times bigger than normal.
Alfarin and Elinor are already sitting down at a table in the burger bar. It’s littered with empty boxes and greasy wrappings. Their gleaming red eyes shine across the room as they wave us over. When I think about the amount of food we consume, I have to thank the Highers for decreeing that the dead don’t gain weight. Can you imagine how much worse Hell would be if everyone was fatter? We’d be in a state of permanent sweaty gridlock, although Medusa could stand to gain a few pounds, especially on her elbows. A nice bit of padding for when she punches me.
Alfarin, son of Hlif, son of Dobin—new introductions always get the epithet—has been dead for a thousand years. He’s a Viking prince. He’s shorter than me, about five feet ten inches, but his bulk almost matches his height. He’s also younger than me in alive years because he died during his sixteenth winter, but everyone thinks he’s older because he’s like a man-mountain. Alfarin has this funny accent, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator movies, and half of his face is covered with a long, golden beard that Medusa and Elinor like to braid with beads. And he totally lets them! Alfarin worships Elinor with a passion, but as clingy as she is with him, she just wants to be friends. The phrase every guy loves to hear.
Elinor Powell died in the Great Fire of London in 1666 when she was nineteen. While official records placed the number of deceased in single figures, the truth is many of the dead were simply incinerated as the medieval city burned. There were no bodies left to count, and Elinor became one of the forgotten dead. There are a lot like her here. Every disaster, natural or otherwise, causes a flood of dead refugees. Terror in life just becomes terror in death. Elinor is the eldest of six children. Two of her brothers are also in Hell: Michael and Phillip, although they don’t bother with Elinor much because she’s a girl. Their loss, my and Alfarin’s gain. We assume the other three siblings—John, William, and Alice—went Up There, but Elinor never stops looking for them. She was killed on her nineteenth birthday after the blazing roof of her home collapsed on top of her.
That has got to suck. It’s bad enough dying when you’re young, but to croak on your birthday is just sick. We get to the table. Medusa and Elinor immediately hug and giggle. Alfarin and I bang knuckles.
“Dude.”
“My friend.”
I think you’ll agree our greeting is cooler. It has nothing to do with the fact that if Alfarin were to hug me, my bones would be pulverized into mush.
I grab the last remaining burger on the table and cram it into my mouth.
“We saved it for ye, Mitchell,” says Elinor. She lowers her voice and leans forward. “We had to. They’ve run out of food.”
“What!” I exclaim. “What do you mean, they’ve run out of food?”
The food in Hell is sourced from the living, by any means necessary. The Devil sees nothing wrong in the living going without to keep order in Hell. Famine and plague are not acts of Up There, as some people and insurance companies would have you believe, but instead are acts of The Devil.
And Hell never runs short.
Medusa shushes me.
“The kitchens are having problems with their sourcing,” she whispers. “There are just too many devils to feed, so they’re delivering fewer supplies and meals to the rest of Hell. . . .”
“So much for everything ending when ye die,” says Elinor sadly.
I stare at her. The oldest in our group doesn’t look well. Elinor’s skin is pale and it has a greenish tinge. She is so pretty, though. Long red hair falls all the way down her back, and she has a smattering of freckles around her nose. Like those of all of the devils who have been in Hell over four hundred years, her irises flame with a bright red fire. When Elinor is not biting her nails, she will nervously paw at the base of her neck. She’s doing that now. The back of her neck is like her security blanket.
“How was the ball?” asks Alfarin, changing the subject. “Did my Viking kin bathe in the entrails of the heathen Saxons?”
“It was all right, I suppose—”
“Oh, listen to you trying to be all cool,” interrupts Medusa. She leans over the table toward Alfarin. “Mitchell danced!”
Elinor squeaks like a mouse. I think she’s laughing. Alfarin just shakes his head as his bushy eyebrows join in a frown.
“Tell me it isn’t true.”
“Medusa made me.”
“Dancing is for the womenfolk. Men drink beer and fight.”
“Hey, you’ve been on the end of Medusa’s fists. It was either dance or end up in Hell’s casualty unit.”
“What was the music like?” asks Elinor, biting her thumbnail. “And what did everyone wear? Did they like yer dress, M?”
Medusa and Elinor have taken to shortening each other’s names. So Elinor is now El, and Medusa is now M. I keep waiting for them to shorten my name, and the second they do I will shoot them down in flames. You know my first name is Mitchell. Not Mitch, or Mitty, or, Hell forbid, Chell. My name is Mitchell. Mitchell Johnson in full. No middle name—my parents didn’t see the point.
I like my name; it’s succinct, strong, masculine. But I know it’s only a matter of time before Medusa and Elinor start calling me M.J.
Just the way my mother did.
She got everyone calling me that when I was little. I liked it at first, but after a while it started sounding babyish so I asked people to stop. And everyone agreed—with the exception of my mother. I was always her M.J.
Only now do I realize I should have appreciated that a bit more than I did.
So I never want to hear the name M.J. in Hell. That’s a part of me that will always live. In Hell I’m just Mitchell Johnson. Four syllables and nothing more.
My no maudlin thoughts policy isn’t working out too well. I think learning about the Viciseometer has put me a strange place. I’m now hovering between this new existence and the longing for what has been snatched from me. I try to force a smile at my three friends. Medusa is stroking my back; Alfarin’s face is so furrowed his bushy eyebrows are in danger of disappearing under the folds of skin on his forehead; Elinor has just gone
the color of raw rhubarb.
Is it always so hot in Hell? Of course it is; I see the heating bills. They’re one of the reasons Septimus is so worried. Hell is on the verge of bankruptcy, and with so many new devils arriving, the cost of running the Afterlife is insane. Right now The Devil’s moods swing from deliriously happy to just delirious. We’re approaching the end of the financial year, when The Devil goes through the budget with the finance team, and let’s just say the last time they met, the furnaces in Hell weren’t fired by wood and coal that day. Then all that melted dead flesh and bone ended up breaking the furnace and that just incurred more costs. Everyone on the budget team was put back together and healed, but it was a mess that made even Septimus puke his guts up. And now my boss is under pressure to stop the dead . . . .
And then it hits me. This is Septimus’s plan. He’s going to send a team of devils to the land of the living with the time-traveling device. They’re going to stop future devils from becoming . . . well, devils. With fewer dead, the costs will go down. It’s like downsizing, before a person is employed.
Septimus is a genius.
“Mitchell, Mitchell.”
Medusa has stopped stroking me like a puppy and has resumed slapping me between my shoulder blades.
“He looks very hot,” says Elinor.
“But not in a way that is attractive to the peasant women of Ye Olde England?” asks a nervous Alfarin.
“For the billionth time, Alfarin, El doesn’t like Mitchell like that. He’s way too feminine for her,” answers Medusa. Every word is matched with a thump on my back. “El wants a real man, with muscles, don’t you, El?”
Elinor is blushing so furiously I’m amazed she hasn’t combusted. She mumbles something about being thirsty and races off to buy some drinks with the few Hell coins left on the table.
“The peasant Elinor is as glorious in movement as one of the Valkyrie,” sighs Alfarin. “Why, if I were to steal but one kiss from those delicious red lips, I would gratefully remove one of my own arms and present it to Thor himself as an offering of my thanks.”