“No, we won’t,” Satan said. “They beat me once and they’ve been beating me ever since. Before we even started to fight they had me beaten. Every time I think I’ve beaten them I find out they’ve gotten there ahead of me.”
Nero watched as Satan’s spine took on the consistency of spaghetti and his boss slumped down until his chin almost touched the ground. Once upon a time, when Nero was alive, if someone was not doing what Nero had instructed them to do he would have had that person sewn into the skin of a wild beast and then had them torn apart by pain-crazed dogs. Or he would have soaked the noncompliant individual in paraffin and set him or her alight to serve as illumination for one of his garden parties. But a thousand years of unspeakable torture can change a man and now Satan’s despair merely stirred sympathy in Nero’s breast. He knew all too well what it was like to feel that the whole world was against you. For much of his reign the whole world had, in fact, been against him.
“Sir, come back up to the Fifth Circle. You’re doing no one any good here. I’ll have them bring the woman’s soul when it’s ready to be extracted.”
“What does it matter?” Satan said. “If I go up, they’ll defeat us. If I stay here, they’ll defeat us. They’re coming to take over Hell, Nero. That’s what they told me. That’s what they want. To annex Hell and turn us into their employees.”
“Let’s discuss this in the business office,” Nero suggested. “It’s quieter there.”
“No,” Satan said. “I brought her here to keep her safe and I failed. If I can’t keep one nun safe in my own realm, how can I protect any of us from Heaven? I’m staying here.”
“You’re needed, sir.”
“For what?” Satan asked. “To screw up even more?”
Nero couldn’t budge him. The Archfiend was determined to stay with the nun until her spirit was loose enough to be extracted and then...who knew what would happen then? Nero sat with Satan for a while, but there was a feeling of oppression in the air, as if some great, invisible plan was coming to fruition all around them. It made Nero feel claustrophobic and he eventually left, instructing Geryon to come find him the instant Satan stirred.
Gabriel burst in on Michael who was either contemplating the beauty and majesty of God’s creation, or just staring at some orchids while getting a massage from two Work-Stay souls.
“He killed her,” Gabriel said.
Michael looked up from his orchids.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“This is no time to be mistaken.”
“She did what Jude said she would. She’s dead.”
“At Satan’s hand?”
“No question.”
Michael unfurled his wings and stood. The Work-Stay souls prostrated themselves.
“I will journey to the Empyrean then, and tell The Creator of Satan’s latest outrage. Begin the Great Plan without me. I will return as quickly as I can.”
“Yes, my lord,” Gabriel said.
Michael left his chambers and walked down the halls of Heaven until he came to the door that led to The Stairwell. Opening it he walked up The Stairs for many hours until he reached The Door at The Top. He entered, and walked down The Hallway until he reached The Final Door, which led into The Room, beyond which lay the Empyrean, the realm that was the source of the physical Creation, in which dwelt his God.
“Smell you later, dude,” Geryon said and flapped away leaving Satan all alone with Sister Mary.
Satan didn’t particularly like Sister Mary. He didn’t particularly dislike her either, but for some strange reason her pathetic, pointless death had broken something inside of him. You never knew what was going to be the last straw.
Out of curiosity, Satan had had dinner with Hitler when he’d first arrived in Hell. It was pretty awkward. Throughout the meal, Hitler kept asking him what all these Jews were doing in Heaven. Satan was fascinated by self-destructive behavior at the time, for obvious reasons, and he only wanted to know one thing: why hadn’t Hitler invaded England? It was vulnerable to a sea attack and if Hitler had just put some boots on the ground he could have stabilized Europe, deprived the Allies of a staging area for their ground invasion and turned his full attention to the Russian front. It was a major strategic blunder. Satan had thought that Hitler might not be forthcoming, but the dead dictator was only too happy to finally get it off his chest.
Apparently a glowing dwarf named Bargy had appeared to him three times and warned that if Hitler invaded England the Reich would be destroyed. This dwarf first materialized during a particularly stressful period in Hitler’s life and it had been more than he could take. The thing had freaked him right out of his mind, and Bargy became his secret terror. Hitler spent the rest of his life living in fear that the glowing dwarf was constantly watching him, hiding behind doors, drapes and shrubberies, waiting for Hitler to lower his guard so that he could jump out and accost him in public. Upon further questioning, Hitler revealed that Bargy only appeared to him after he had taken an especially large dose of amphetamines. Hitler was adamant that the two were not connected.
One hallucination and Hitler lost the war.
Or take the case of Stanley Gerwitz, in Cincinnati, who had lost his wife to a murder-suicide at the hands of her lover back in the 80’ s. His oldest daughter was his boss’s mistress and his youngest daughter was a Scientologist. His parents had died in a tragic zoo accident when he was eleven. But through it all, Stanley kept smiling. Nothing seemed to get him down, until some kid had smashed his jack o’lantern. Stanley had spent six hours carving a photorealistic Darth Vader onto this particular pumpkin and when it was smashed that was his last straw. He never left his house again. Some neighborhood children found his body seven years later when they broke in looking for a place to get high.
You never could tell what would finally break someone.
For Hitler it was Bargy. For Stanley Gerwitz it was that jack o’lantern.
For Satan it was Sister Mary’s suicide.
He stayed by her body and kept the goblins away. He would shoo off the flapping things that occasionally landed and stalked in circles around her corpse, waiting to eat it. He removed the bugs that tried to lay eggs in her ears. He dusted her. He kept her clean. He did all the things that most people hired a professional to do.
Michael entered The Room. To the untrained eye it looked exactly like an empty hotel event room with gray wall-to-wall carpeting sporting a neutral geometric pattern. Folding chairs leaned against the wall, tables were stacked up at one end. On the far wall was a door and over it was an illuminated exit sign. Michael began to walk towards it. Five hours later, he was still in the same place. He kept walking. Slowly, inch by inch, hour by hour, almost imperceptibly, the distance between the angel and the exit sign got smaller.
On the third day, some imps came to investigate Mary’s body. Imps were small, single-minded creatures who were usually the incarnation of a bad idea. These imps were all about unwise real estate speculation. They gurgled to each other and bumbled towards Mary, sniffing at the air, excited to have a human host to infect, even if it was a dead one. They didn’t notice Satan sitting next to her until he was kicking them away and making scary noises. They scrambled back to their boulders and gargled horribly at him for a while before going in search of easier prey.
Nero came by again a few hours later, but Satan didn’t respond to anything he said. Nero was convinced that this was depression of the worst kind, and that was not an entirely bad thing. For years he had worried that Satan had never properly mourned his Fall from Heaven. Satan seemed stuck at the second stage of grief: anger. But now he seemed to have moved on to stage four: depression. That was only natural. However, Nero was concerned that Satan had skipped stage three: bargaining. But after depression came stage five: acceptance. And for Nero, that was the best stage of all. He just had to stick by Satan until he made the transition from stage four to five and it would all be okay.
Nero was a great believer in se
lf-improvement. After all, a few hundred years of torture had changed him for the better so he didn’t see why it wouldn’t work for everyone else. He came to visit Satan ready to listen, to offer advice, to recite a few choice quotes he’d copied from Tuesdays with Morrie. He was prepared for emotions. Instead, it was an anticlimax. Satan just sat there. Sister Mary’s corpse just moldered. No one asked Nero to share his own experiences with grief. Nero tried to start the conversation a few times but he felt awkward talking to himself and his words trailed off into silence. There was no indication that Satan even heard him. After a while, Nero felt silly for trying and he stopped talking. Satan didn’t even notice when he left.
A swarm of black flies hovered over Sister Mary’s body, just out of Satan’s reach. Eventually, it began to rain warm blood.
All was quiet on the Seventh Circle of Hell.
It was snowing in the event room. Michael had been walking for eons, and at some point it had started snowing. Cold wind stabbed his face like knives, frozen blades slashed his chest and stomach, his wings were encrusted with ice. Freezing water ran down his back. He plodded on.
One did not make the decision to enter the Empyrean lightly. It had been hundreds of thousands of years since anyone except Michael and Phanuel had even tried. Before the Creation, the angels had all dwelt in the timeless, formless, perfect Empyrean, but after God made the Heavens and the Earth he moved his Host to Heaven and he had remained in the Empyrean alone.
What The Creator was doing in there was anyone’s guess. Phanuel seemed to know, but no one ever quite understood exactly what he was talking about. Metatron had come up with the theory that there were other Creations, each with its own Heaven and Hell and the Empyrean was where they all overlapped and the place from which God watched over them all. Michael thought this sounded vaguely blasphemous, but Metatron often talked like an idiot. Whatever God was up to in the Empyrean, he clearly did not want to be disturbed, and so he had made The Room.
The Room looked as neutral and bland as every other room in Heaven, but it was crammed with folded time. Just as the human intestines were really thirty feet long but folded into a space only two feet long, the path through The Room was much longer than it appeared. Hundreds of years had been folded and pushed into this event room that looked like it could seat maybe two hundred people for dinner. It would take Michael centuries of subjective time to cross it, and yet when he reached the other side he would have just spent a few days of objective time. He had done it before and it had harrowed him, but crossing The Room was essential to his plans.
He put one foot in front of the other. He kept walking. He had been doing this for what felt like years. He was three feet closer to the exit sign. He was making good progress.
“What I want to know – what America wants to know – is when will we get our day in court?” Nancy Grace said. “With me now, a woman who fights for all of us. Frita Babbit. Victim. Survivor. Fighter. Plaintiff. Thank you for being with us, honey.”
In the postage-stamp-sized video insert was not Frita Babbit, but Ted Hunter.
“Hello, Nancy,” he said.
“For our viewers,” Nancy Grace said, “The horrible, disgusting things that Satan did to Frita Babbit have left her too emotionally traumatized to speak in public. Ted Hunter has been authorized to speak on her behalf.”
“Nancy, I want your viewers to know that when I speak, it is actually a brave young woman speaking,” Ted Hunter said.
“Did Satan sodomize you?” Nancy Grace asked.
“He did, Nancy,” Ted Hunter said. “He sodomized me. And when I say ‘me’ I mean Frita Babbit.”
“I imagine that Satan would do something against nature like that,” Nancy Grace said.
“But I want to remind your viewers that he was in the form of a serpent when he did it,” Ted Hunter said.
“That is disgusting. I mean, right there, you’ve got a crime against nature. Woman and snake. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s hard for her to talk about,” Ted Hunter said, “When I make her talk about it she looks so brave and troubled.”
“And it is so brave of her to come out and fight evil in public like this. Your case seems open-and-shut, but what I’m wondering is if the Devil is even going to show up in court.”
“Well, I – ” Ted Hunter started.
“We’ll get back to you, Frita/Ted. Right we’re going to hear from Marcus Whitman, an award-winning journalist and our own special correspondent for the trial. Marcus?”
Marcus Whitman’s puffy, pink face popped into view above Ted Hunter’s.
“Nancy, good to be here, thanks for having me.”
“Cut the chit chat, Whitman. We’re talking about Satan. Is he a no-show at his own trial?”
“At this point it’s hard to speculate on what he will do.”
“One question: why?”
“Because he is the manifestation of all evil in the universe. It’s hard to know what someone that evil is even thinking. He’s not like you or I.”
“What’s his problem?”
“Like I said: evil.”
“To comment, we have Reverend Creflo Dollar here to speak about Satan’s absolute evil. Reverend?”
“Nancy, it’s good to be on your show,” Creflo Dollar said, his face appearing onscreen. “I have something to say that your listeners will want to hear. Satan wants to hold you back. Satan wants you to be poor. Why? Because poor people are unhappy people and Satan feasts on the misery that grows in the human heart. And that misery is caused by a lack of prosperity. God wants you to be prosperous. He wants you to enjoy life.”
“Reverend, on topic,” Nancy snapped. “Satan: showing up for his trial or not?”
“He’s showing up. Think about it. He is the most evil man in all of Creation. He will want to have the soapbox and the attention of the world to convince people to turn away from prosperity.”
“On the other hand, Reverend,” Marcus said. “Maybe it’s more evil for him not to show up? After all, Satan’s greatest feat was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.”
“Who says?” Creflo Dollar asked.
“C.S. Lewis.”
“Do not listen to the writings of wizards,” Creflo Dollar said. “Listen to the word of the Lord. He is certain that the Devil exists and is loose in this world right now! Making people poor, making people get on welfare, making people low class!”
Ted decided that he had been ignored for long enough. He needed to remind everyone that they were here because of him. And also because of Frita Babbit’s bravery. But mostly because of him. As Creflo Dollar and Marcus Whitman bickered, he knew the best way to get the attention of the American people.
“Nancy,” he said. “I think Frita would feel remiss if I didn’t tell you about the oral intercourse that was forced on her. Also, the anal.”
And the whole world paid attention.
On the Seventh Circle of Hell, over by Mary’s body, nothing was happening. Geryon’s shadow slid over the ground as he circled overhead and eventually he flew back to his rock and cleaned his butt with his tail. Later that afternoon, one of the giants came stomping up from the Malebolge and tried to eat Mary’s corpse. Satan threw rocks at him until he went away.
Nero had stopped visiting. Hell had ground to a halt. Most of the demons were already talking about what they were going to do with their sudden surplus of free time once they finished processing the last souls in the dwindling line. Ultimate Frisbee was high on their list. They’d heard a lot about it in recent decades. As for Satan, he just sat by Mary’s corpse and pickled in his own despair. Then, for some reason, he started to talk. He didn’t know why, it was as if the words had built up inside of him for a long time and suddenly they began to fall from his lips. And they told the oldest story in the world: the story of the Creation, and of the Fall.
“It all started when God started talking about getting a hobby,” Satan said.
His voice was rusty with dis
use. He’d never been a big talker, but after three days of silence his throat felt like it was packed full of gravel. He tried to lick his cracked lips but his tongue was sandpaper. His dehydrated brain rattled in his skull like a dried pea. It hurt, but after breaking the seal on his silence he figured he might as well keep going.
“He was bored and wanted a pastime. He said he was going to make little retarded versions of himself and breed them. He was going to make something called a Universe to put them in, sort of like a big terrarium. All of us would have to stop being infinite and bind ourselves to the finite and take care of the Universe for him because it had all kinds of problems. To be honest, it sounded like an enormous pain in the ass.
“Most of the Host thought he was kidding, but I had a feeling he was serious and so I kept asking him why. At first he said it was because there should be something instead of nothing, but eventually he broke down and admitted that he was creating this Universe because he wanted people to glorify him and proclaim his greatness. He was bored of our praise. He said it felt like we were just going through the motions. I mean, what do you even say to that?
“But there was no stopping him. First, he made his giant container, the Universe. Then he made time, and gravity and came up with the idea of things beginning and things ending. He came up with order, with self-organizing systems, with Brownian motion and all kinds of stuff, but he seemed to find it lacking somehow. It ate at him. Later I realized that the problem was his limited imagination. He couldn’t imagine any of his creations not loving him. He’d come up with a system to organize and operate his Universe, but it wasn’t balanced. He had a status quo, but no revolution. He had order, but no chaos.
“He was creating all kinds of particles and energy, neutrinos that simultaneously flowed backwards and forwards in time, cosmic rays, gamma radiation, but all along he was talking about how he was going to make people. I couldn’t see the point. They sounded really complicated and annoying but he had his heart set on making billions of them. I decided to see what they would be like and so I stole a little bit of his essence and created a series of micro-universes, like cosmic ant farms. I seeded each one with a drop of my own blood, which gave them life, and I watched them evolve.
Satan Loves You Page 13