Hell Can Wait
by
Theodore Judson
E-Book Edition
Published by
EDGE Science Fiction and
Fantasy Publishing
An Imprint of
HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.
CALGARY
Notice
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This book is also available in print
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Hell Can Wait
Copyright © 2010 by Theodore Judson
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by
Edge Science Fiction
and Fantasy Publishing
An Imprint of
HADES
PUBLICATIONS, INC.
P.O. Box 1714,
Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7,
Canada
In House Editing by Richard Janzen
Cover Illustration by Michael Oswald
Model: Matus Valent
Photographer: Tom Cullis
e Book ISBN: 978-1-894063-55-5
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EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing and Hades Publications, Inc. acknowledges the ongoing support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Notice
Details
Dedication
Prolog
The Sons of Pride
In A Distant Land
Born of Mars and Suckled by the Wolf
Through Many Lands and Many Peoples
A Child, Beloved of God
We Gaze at the Stars, but They Don't Gaze at Us
But the Memories Linger On
Foxes at the Goose's Trial
Timid Love is Not Love
One Never Gets to Heaven Alone
Dedication
For my brother Trent
“The negligence of the public administration was betrayed soon afterwards [in 186 A.D.] by a new disorder which arose from the smallest beginnings. A spirit of desertion began to prevail among the troops; and the deserters, instead of seeking their flight in safety or concealment, infested the highways. Maternus, a private soldier, of a daring boldness above his station, collected those bands of robbers into a little army, set open the prisons, invited the slaves to assert their freedom, and plundered with impunity the rich and defenseless cities of Gaul and Spain. The governors of the provinces, who had long been spectators, and perhaps the partners of his depredations, were, at length, roused from their supine indolence by the threatening commands of the emperor. Maternus found that he was encompassed, and foresaw that he must be overpowered. A great effort of despair was his last resource. He ordered his followers to disperse, to pass the Alps in small parties and various disguises, and to assemble at Rome, during the licentious tumult of the festival of Cybele. To murder Commodus [the emperor], and to ascend the vacant throne, was the ambition of no vulgar robber. His measures were so ably concerted, that his concealed troops already filled the streets of Rome. The envy of an accomplice discovered and ruined this singular enterprise, in the moment when it was ripe for execution.”
— From Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, book one, chapter 4.
I
The Sons of Pride
He had not fully roused himself from the profound depression he had known during his centuries inside his darkened cell on Level 7A when the attendant demons who had taken off his chains brought Maternus into the eye-aching brightness of the fully illuminated chamber. Wonders are appreciated only by those with the capacity to wonder, and his capacity was great after so much deprivation and so much pain. A twenty-first century man would have immediately recognized the lines of desks and cubicles and delivery boys scurrying about, and would have identified the scene as a modern office — albeit one manned by horned devils dressed in blue and brown business suits. To the veteran Roman soldier, everything his senses drew in — even the instrumental version of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” blasting over the office’s sound system — was a miracle.
“Have a chair, Mr. Maternus,” said the demon sitting behind the desk. “Hot enough for you? I know. I know. They tell us all to use cornball stuff like that during our morning meetings. ‘Sure,’ says the boss, ‘of course we use clichés. You’ll find worse things down here, you know.’ Sit, sit, take a load off.”
“What is that tongue you speak?” asked Maternus, and reflectively touched his mouth when he heard himself. “What is this I speak?” he asked. “Why do I understand it?”
“It’s English, old sport,” said the demon, as he busily searched through the scattered piles of papers for something he could not find. “Nobody uses Latin any more. This is what has, so to speak, taken Latin’s place. The language of the new empire. Not even a current scholar of said dead tongue could decipher the legionnaire’s lingo you spoke among your mates, old sport. Here we are,” he said upon locating the file he wanted.
“It sounds like something spoken beyond the Rhine,” said Maternus and sat heavily in the chair the demon had indicated.
He looked down at the bloodstained tunic and the knee-high trousers he was wearing; they were the same clothes he had been wearing when he died in the Circus Maximus. Other lost souls, dressed in the costumes of their eras, were filing through the large office to meet with other demons at other desks. Maternus was momentarily distracted by a Mongol warrior, an arrow still in his back, who took his place at the station immediately to his left. A beautiful blonde woman in a gold lamé dress, whom Maternus would have recognized as a famous Hollywood star of the 1930s, had he lived at that time, was seated in front of the desk to his right and stroking a lap dog while she chatted up the minion of Lucifer who was handling her case.
“Grrr,” said Maternus’s demon in regard to the blonde woman the ancient warrior was eyeing, “I’d love to get her in my own private hell. Heh, heh. Well, don’t laugh, then. After a fella who has heard ten thousand ‘private hell’ jokes down here, I guess they’re not that funny to you anymore.”
The active, yet amused and nearly ebullient manner of the demon in the strange blue suit jacket and the long cravat was unnerving to Maternus. The other demons he had encountered during his eighteen centuries in the afterlife had beaten him with scourges or tossed him into pools of burning camphor while they mocked him in his agony. This cheeriness, this lightness this demon showed was something quite new and somehow inappropriate.
“You don’t know the
trouble we had finding your records,” said the smiling demon, still fussing with the various mounds of paper in front of him. “They were, of course, in the old filing cabinets, and those babies are bigger than Utah! Just big mountains full of boxes of paper these days. Not that you’d know anything about Utah. Or would want to. We’re finally getting computers in here — they’ll be analog for the first five thousand years or so, of course — but we haven’t entered any data on you in them yet. Had to send a whole squadron of former telemarketers just to ferret out your papers. Your records are so old they’re on vellum. Hello, can you say antiquated? You’re a tough audience, Matty. Don’t laugh much, do you? Okay, let’s start from the beginning, as my old cosmogony professor used to say. Heh, heh. I kill myself. Get it? Cosmogony … beginnings…?”
He hesitated for a moment and playfully bounced his eyebrows up and down, but got no response from the stolid Maternus.
“Moving right along then,” said the demon and coughed into his hand. “What exactly is your full name, Matty?”
“Maternus,” said the soldier.
“No, no,” said the demon and shook his head. “I’ve handled enough of you Roman chaps to know you each had three names: a praenomen — your regular first name, what your friends call you; a nomen — your family name, which in your case would be Maternus; and a cognomen — your clan name or your family connection or, in some cases, a nickname.”
The demon rolled his hand as he narrated this, as though he were explaining this to Maternus for the first time.
“Decimus Maternus Celer,” said the soldier.
“That’s a name?” said the demon. “Forgive me for not keeping up on my Latin — like I’d want to become a priest or something — but your name would translate as something like ‘Tenth Maternal the Quick.’”
“I was born to a woman living outside the military station at Argentoratum,” said Maternus. “My father was a soldier; I don’t know which one. My mother was a local woman, and had no nomen, not like a Roman woman would. She was simply Lydia. When I turned nineteen and went into the ranks, the town magistrate told my centurion I was ‘from the mother.’ There was nothing more to say. I was the tenth of my mother’s children, so she called me that, and I was quick in battle, so my comrades called me Celer.”
“My, my, my,” chirped the demon, “your whole life, from the very beginning on, was nothing but brutality and rough handling. You never even had a proper name.” He pretended to play an imaginary violin. “It’s so sad and all of that pathetic nonsense,” he said and for a split second acted as though he were weeping. “But you see, we had such a hard time finding your file because we had only the handle ‘Maternus’ to work with. When we got the news of your appellate hearing, we didn’t know whether we were looking for Curiatius Maternus — he was a poet, a little before your time, and we of course have him down here, but then we have nearly all the writers; or for General Julius Maternus — he was a chap who made an expedition across the Sahara in your lifetime, but he’s up in the Elysian Fields, on Level One; or we thought we might be looking for the sophist Maternus, a fellow Domitian had killed — we have all the sophists, of course. Then there was this damned Maternus, the first bishop of Cologne, who was…” He glanced about to see if anyone in the office was listening to him. “He was a saint!” whispered the demon, and gave another little cough into his hand. “Some of the lads I put on the case in recent years thought you might be Julius Firmicus Maternus, who was an astrologer in the fourth century. We should have gotten our hands on him, dabbling in black magic as he did, but that Maternus wrote some damned religious book to please Emperor Constantine. It’s an angry, stupid little tome, but apparently it saved some souls, and so he’s…” The demon pointed upward and at the same time rolled his eyes in that direction. “So with all the confusion, and with the necessary paperwork every step of the inquiry demanded, we’ve actually been looking for you for the last one thousand eight hundred and nineteen years.”
“I don’t understand,” said Maternus. “I have been dead for at least that long.”
“Technically,” said the demon, “your hearing was supposed to take place the day after you got here. But, hey, you’re in Hell, pal. You’ve got to learn to deal with some delays in this neighborhood.”
The demon opened the manila folder marked “Maternus,” and put on his reading glasses so he could focus on the contents for a few moments.
“My name is Absinthe,” said the demon as he read. “Not that it matters. You and I are hardly going to be hanging out together, if you get my drift. Now, to your file: you were, as you say, a bastard from a military station, an illiterate, and for twenty-two years a heaving brute in the Eighth Legion, the so-called ‘Augusta,’” said the demon, putting quotation marks around the word Augusta with his fingers. “Oh, this is good: it says here that you killed many, many men in the service of the Antonine Emperors. You killed many, many more when you led a rebellion in Gaul — we call that France nowadays, not that name changes necessarily improve anything — a rebellion against Emperor Commodus, who, by the by, was to have a permanent place down on the tenth level, a spot we reserve for those who were both willfully evil and willfully stupid. Back when Dante made his famous tour of the place, the tenth level was so small he didn’t even pause to look at it. In the last few centuries we’ve really had to expand the place. The True Believer suites down there are bigger than Utah. Three cheers for modern ideology, I say. Commodus himself was declared insane by the higher powers and has been in Limbo nearly as long as you were on 7A. I read here you died in a fit of characteristic rage when you failed to assassinate the emperor in Rome. Went down fighting, sword in hand. Frankly, I don’t see anything here that would keep you from joining our team on a permanent basis. Had you gotten the right sort of education, you could even have been managerial material.”
The demon read on and for the first time during the meeting, he frowned.
“Here it is,” he muttered. “You spared women and children when you could. Spared the ‘innocent’ in general. Killed only those you deemed ‘unjust’ and ‘too powerful.’” He put his finger quotation marks around the words ‘innocent,’ unjust’ and ‘too powerful,’ as they were terms he rarely included in his every day vocabulary and had only contempt for them. “You freed slaves, protected small land owners from the tax farmers, you made ‘friends,’ genuine ‘friends’ among your comrades in arms. Then there is this — this is why you’re getting a hearing,” said Absinthe as he read a particularly offensive passage. “On the second of September, in the first year of the reign of Lucius Anthony, the year we now call 182 A.D., you and your squadron stopped to rest at a villa near the city of Mogontiacum in the province of Germania Superior. You asked the owner of the place for water, and he sent out his slave girl, one Maria — we have no other names for her in our records, and you didn’t even know that much about her. A pretty young slave she was, though she limped when she brought the ewer of cold water out to you, because she had a twisted foot. Brute that you are, you ogled the maiden’s prime cuts, made some stupid remark about her breasts to impress your cloddish mates, but she — the minx — she wasn’t afraid of you. ‘My mother told me,’ she said, looking you straight into the eye, ‘only a man who has never touched a woman would let his first words to me be so vulgar.’ Your face reddened, you got tongue-tied, and your comrades mocked you as she smiled at you triumphantly and poured water into your iron cups. It gets worse. As she waited upon you, rather than crush her like a rotten gourd, as you would have done to a man who insulted you, you looked upon Maria with … a combination of…” Absinthe’s breathing became more labored, and perspiration ran off his previously undisturbed visage. “I mean to say, you felt … kindness…” said the demon and once more coughed into his fist. “You felt that … and sympathy … even admiration….”
The demon had to pause and coughed loudly several times as he struggled to clear his throat, for it pained him to pronounce these terms th
at were so seldom used in Hades. He inhaled a great, wheezing breath to discharge in rapid fire the things he had to say next. “You thought she was brave for how well she bore up in spite of her condition and her station. The image of the garden and her in it have ever since brought you great consolation and feelings of peace. You wanted to be with her, to know everything about her, to hear her voice and see her face again during your long and bloody career. You, in short, looked up to her with l — , l — , l —,” said the demon, nearly gagging on the ‘l’ sound he was making.
“I looked upon her with lust?” suggested Maternus.
“No, you fat-headed ape!” spat Absinthe, grasping his throat. “You may have felt that, but it was mixed up with these other feelings. You felt…” He took another deep breath. “You felt … love … for her.”
Seconds after he had spoken the forbidden word, Absinthe went into convulsions and hacked up an enormous blood clot. Other demons stationed at the other desks fell silent and looked at the commotion Absinthe was causing as he struggled to cease coughing. A particularly tall demon, one dressed in a crested blazer and sporting a class ring from a prestigious school of demonic management, approached Absinthe from behind and asked what was transpiring at this station.
“You know we have company rules regarding language,” said the tall demon and rapped his class ring on Absinthe’s desk top. “The subject is clearly spelled out in the 1823 upgrade of rule #536-1679R, sub-clause 18. The standards are as obvious as the tail on your backside … or does someone need to attend another motivational seminar, one with live ammunition to go with the usual concertina wire?”
“Absolutely not, Mr. Archevil,” said Absinthe and struggled to put a smile over his distress. “I was so angry at this mortal blockhead I let some bad words slip.”
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