He wandered this so-called ‘developed’ world in numerous guises, watching with quiet satisfaction the creeping spread of casual hatred and contempt across civilization, unremarked and unchecked. As a corpulent politician he nonchalantly stole from his electorate, tempted the powerful to use that power for the corruption of boys and young men, fomented discrimination against anyone unfortunate enough to be different. As a young son of sons who had never had a job, and whose fathers before them watched the world go by from the inside of a bottle, he abused strangers, smashed or stole the few belongings of others, and ranted in the street against those who were robbing him of his birthright, whatever that may have been.
If his intervention in the western world was purely for his own enjoyment, outside it, in the emerging nations, he could not have been more pleased that it all happened without any help from him at all. When would he have had the time to create the monsters who sucked the wealth from their peoples, wandering the gold-leafed corridors of their palaces as those they ruled were looking up at the barrel bombs descending upon them from the air? Why had he never thought of creating the cluster bomb, whose cargo looked like toys to be plucked from the ground by children before exploding in a spray of muscle and blood? He was bad, and good at it, but could he really have dreamed up Mugabe, Assad, Amin?
He had sat beneath the North African moon, a breeze whipping up the sands stretching away from a desert road, listening to the soft crump of shellfire in the distance, pummelling already shattered buildings into yet more dust. He knew that his own capacity for evil knew no bounds, but he didn’t even need to get involved in this. What made his satisfaction in this destruction even greater, drew a warmth into what passed for his heart, was that the men in the black scarves with the black flags conducting this war, the ones slicing the heads off innocent bystanders and stealing their children, subjugating their women, were doing it in the name of God.
‘You have to laugh,’ he thought, ‘when you think how many people he has running around spreading His word, and they do this. And I have the bloody Exorcist and the Rolling Stones.’
Busy hands, though, make work for an idle Devil. The promise of other eras remained unfilled. He had held high hopes for Saddam, Hitler, Genghis, any number of Bushes. It was going well, he knew, and for that he barely had to lift a finger. No time for complacency, fix the roof while the sun shines, and other platitudes. He stood, hitched down the jacket of the D&G suit, shot his cuffs. There was a little of his gimlet still in the tricorn glass on the table, and he slipped the tiny straw between his lips to suck the vestiges, the lime having taken over the gin, so that his face pursed for a second. A young woman came from the bar to stand in front of him, and he set the glass down on the table, stared at her, the pupils of his eyes entirely black, face deadpan. She was lovely, but he wasn’t in the mood to ruin an individual’s life, having come to the realization that most people didn’t need any help on that front.
“Can I help you?” He said.
“I’m sorry to bother you…I guess you must get this all the time?” Not really, he thought.
“Only, aren’t you Simon Cowell?”
2
Marcel felt a burst of relief when he walked into the room. Sure the air was hot, dank, and sulphurous; okay, there was something oozing and quivering in the corner that he had every reason to suspect might be the corpulent black imp he had studiously ignored in the waiting room, and yes, he could hear agonized screams from beyond the rear wall. The figure in the chair behind the desk, though, was not The Devil, and as small mercies go, this was a very big one indeed.
Marcel ran a finger around the collar of his shirt, feeling perspiration already beginning to swell both from the pressure of the occasion and the humid heat of the room. It was dark too, and he shuffled slowly towards the desk, the floor feeling slippery beneath him, shifting. Eventually the figure glanced up, a look devoid of any emotion or recognition, then back down at a sheet of paper in front of him.
Marcel looked around for a chair, but there didn’t seem to be one.
“Can I sit?” He asked, peering once more into the dark corners of the room. The figure behind the desk glanced up, shook his head, returned to scrutinizing the piece of paper.
“Do you know who I am?” Marcel felt piercing eyes upon him. The character opposite must have been very tall, because even though seated his eyes were level with Marcel’s.
He thrust out his hand. “No I don’t,” he said, his voice carrying a steadiness and certainty he didn’t really feel, “I’m Marcel. I don’t believe we’ve met.”
The hand was ignored.
“I’m Beelzebub.” The voice was deep and mellifluous.
“Very nice. I thought that was just another name for The Devil.”
“Common misconception. I didn’t get any of the publicity budget, did I? I’m the chief lieutenant of Lucifer, in case you’re interested.”
“I thought that was just another name for The Devil, as well.”
“Wrong again. Don’t know much, do you?”
Marcel pulled a face.
“I know about quite a lot of things, actually. I’m just not entirely up on the management board of the Antichrist. Where is he, anyway?”
“Did you really think he’d waste time on you? With all he’s got to do? Not that I don’t have my own responsibilities, come to that.”
“What sort of thing?” He felt the eyes lancing into him.
“Loads of stuff. I stoke up unrest and murder in cities, I have a particular responsibility for generating lust in priests…”
“Blimey. That’s all going quite well, then.”
Beelzebub sniffed and tutted.
“Yeah, like that stops me from having to waste my time on this sort of shit. As you say, I’m doing bloody well at my work, better than anyone. And I’ve got particular responsibility for one of the Deadly Sins. I’m bloody good at that, too.”
“Pride?” asked Marcel.
“Got it in one.” There was a strikingly loud shriek of pain from beyond the wall, then the sound of sobbing.
“Is that the-“
“-last one in? Yes. Made a few mistakes. Won’t be making any more for a while.”
Marcel felt the sweat kick in like a running tap. He almost lurched, as if the ground were shifting beneath his feet. He glanced down. It was. Snakes of all shapes and sizes were slowly slithering, intertwined, all around him. Something black with a green stripe moved casually across the top of his Gucci loafers. He wished he’d worn waders.
He realised the massive prince of the demons had said something, looked up from the movement underfoot and saw the piece of paper being held out to him.
“Sorry, I didn’t-“
“Read this” said Beelzebub
“Why?”
“I can’t read.”
Marcel stared.
“Don’t look at me like that. It never seemed that important, since all I was ever going to do was be accursed. Besides, Literacy clashed with PE, and I had dreams of getting on in basketball.”
Marcel took the piece of paper, turned it around and cast his eye down the lines of print.
“Just by the by,” he said, “when did all this start?”
“Annual Performance Review? Some Management Consultant got into his horny head, didn’t he? Apparently his whole organization has been behaving in a ‘pre-historic’ way, and we’re never going to bring about the downfall of the Heavenly Host if we don’t bring ourselves kicking and screaming-“ there was a perfectly timed blood-curdling cry from behind him, “-into the Twenty First Century.”
Marcel had no desire to be dragged kicking and screaming anywhere. He knew that The Devil and all his workers tended towards literal interpretations. It was best in their presence to veer away from phrases like ‘You get under my skin’; or ‘Bugger me!’
He looked at the paper. There was a series of questions to be marked on a sliding scale where ‘1’ was ‘Terrible’ and ‘5’ ‘Really Re
ally Really Really Terrible’. It was difficult to discern which of these might be the mark that saved you from the kind of punishment being meted out to the previous interviewee. None of it made any sense, although at the very bottom, in a box labelled ‘FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES’, someone had written ‘NUN’, crossed this out, and replaced it with ‘NONE’. For Marcel, given the predilection for taking things literally, this seemed like a narrow escape in two ways. The first was that, although at one time he would have seen the opportunity to be let loose in a convent as a positive boon, he had little desire to do so in coarsely woven undergarments and a wimple. Second, if he had no opportunities in the future, he could continue doing forever what he did now, and that suited him just fine. He was co-manager of The Afternet, the most powerful and important computer system ever devised, and was utterly satisfied that this gave him no transferable skills whatsoever. The pointy shard of literalism burst that balloon of relief.
“That looks fine.” He said.
“We’ll give you a bit of time just to sort things out, clear your desk. Slaughter a few million passing innocents. Whatever it is humans do.” Beelzebub buzzed softly, vomited into a bag of pretzels and began stuffing them into his mouth.
“Sorry? Sort out what?”
“Well, according to the Management Consultant, it’s called auto-redundancy.” He looked at Marcel as if this would solve everything, was rewarded only with a bewildered shake of the head. Beelzebub placed the paper on the table, flipped it round so that it was the right way up for Marcel, and ran a pointed finger sprouting thick hairs down the line of scores.
“You’ve been averagely appalling at everything, but here…” the bony digit tapped the paper, “…you’ll see that you’ve achieved marvellously at completing the task. The Afternet is working. Millions are going to their earned eternities. It’s a machine Michael.”
“Marcel”
“Yeah, that. It’s a machine. It doesn’t need you. Put your collection of gonks and your cactus in a box and we’ll whip you off to forever-land”
“But I run it! Someone has to run it!”
“Who is the IT expert?”
“Well, Mary. But I’m picking it up really quickly, then we’ll be able to let her go.”
“So we’ve got someone who knows how to do it, and someone who is gradually learning how to do it (although there is actually no evidence of that), and we should get rid of the one who knows what they are doing?”
Marcel shrugged, spread his hands, palms up. “Hey. That’s business.”
“Not round here, it isn’t. This consultant has convinced the top man that we need square pegs in square holes. Bizarre, given that we’ve been forcing people into spaces significantly unsuitable for them for donkey’s years, but there you go. We move with the times.”
“Do we have to?”
“Apparently. Look: they could have someone trying to learn how to be me. I could be vulnerable, ready to be put into demonic landfill, no longer bad, like wanking and the arms trade. But then, would my apprentice be able to do this?”
Beelzebub changed, in a picosecond, into a fly. That sounds easy, and to be fair, he made it look that way, but it is in fact a rare talent unless you are a maggot. In less than a blink he went from a very tall, seated, blond man to a seven foot insect which had fallen onto the floor due to a lack of buttocks. He buzzed as he righted himself. Marcel stared. Each compound eye was as big as his head.
“What’s the date?” Beelezebub’s voice sounded like a speaker system with a tear in its cone, Dave Davies on You Really Got Me. The question seemed a little incongruous, but Marcel set his mind to work.
“1st of April” he said.
“Zzzzz. Ok. You’ve got. Zzz. ‘Til the 15th. Two weeks, that’s reasonable. God, I’m starving. And horny.” The compound eyes slithered to Marcel’s face, the proboscis seemed to quiver with expectation. He didn’t argue, turned and stepped his way across the writhing floor as quickly as he could. He knew there was no point arguing; demons had very little mind to change. As he reached the door he heard a strange clicking noise behind him, like wind bursting through a cornfield. He turned, hand on the doorknob in case it was the sound of a seven-foot fly heading towards him, and exhaled when he saw that Beelzebub was stuck on one of the walls, inching towards a spider’s web at the heart of which was an arachnid the size of a dinner plate.
“You dirty rat.” Said Beelzebub, “inching towards his lunch, “you killed my brother.”
Marcel slammed the door behind him, shutting out the sound of clicking wings and pain and death.
3
The souls left stranded by the overloading of The Afternet, its logic gates befuddled by the illogical mass deaths of the 14th Century plague, occupied a singularity, a space so large that the billions could, and did, wander for centuries without arriving back at the same place. Whatever they may have expected when they were alive, it wasn’t this. It brought together unimaginable combinations of people and peoples. If a fisherman from fifteenth century Mexico sat on a rock and waited, there was every chance he would get the opportunity to pass the time with Cardinal Richelieu, Charles Dickens, or bits of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Strangely, the people who had actually been there the longest didn’t even meet their end during the centuries when The Afternet stumbled and the hordes of unprocessed burgeoned every day. They had, in fact, been hiding from judgement for a millennium by the time the Plague took its toll.
A group of Visigoths, slaughtered by the Romans in the early 5th century, got into a major argument on the stairs to Heaven and never made it as far as St Peter. By the time the system was automated they were by no means a priority. The emergence of millions of others, condemned to this interim world rather than inhabiting it by choice, was a positive boon to them. It provided rich potential for warlike behaviour, exposure to what seemed the wonders of sixteenth century scientific theories (most of which turned out to be wrong), and always company, wherever they wandered.
Their sixteen centuries’ residence had been particularly enlivened in the most recent, briefest slice. For thirty years they had passed their time in the company of Ron and Ethel, a middle-aged, middle-class, Middle England couple whose existence was rubbed out in a traffic accident whilst travelling to their holiday. There was no chance that they would ever forget the mode of their end, since Ron would forever, or at least until his number came up, carry the steering wheel of his Austin A40, not with his hands, but embedded into his chest so that the wheel sat in front of him like the control of an airlock.
In the garden of a seaside pub in England, this would have drawn stares and comment, but in the maelstrom of the billions of dead, it was nowhere near the most amazing thing to be seen protruding from a chest. One of the Visigoths, Franzel, waddled around for centuries with a sword protruding from his buttocks. The young Roman boy Lucius, who had died with them in a desperately unlucky case of mistaken identity, carried his head under his arm. The majority of those wandering the Afterworld had died of natural causes, but large enough numbers carried the scars of battle or terrible accident to make a steering wheel in your chest or a sword up your rectum relatively unremarkable. Only after judgement would they be returned to their natural state, bereft of these unasked for adornments, heads back on shoulders.
In recent months, Ron and Ethel and the Visigoths had felt the urge to lay off the wandering for a while and put down some roots. The early Germans were at heart a nomadic bunch, to some degree because they were extremely unpopular everywhere they went owing to a proclivity for bloodletting and destruction of their environment. Eternity can change the habits of a lifetime, however, as they had discovered when they happened upon hundreds of dead Bedouins who had forsaken canvas and camel trains for some rather neat bungalows in a small town. Ron admitted, under the influence of some potato-based liquor, that he felt the need to stay somewhere and rest, and after 1600 years of aimless wandering the Visigoths huddled up, discussed their options, and decided to help in the
construction of a caravan park.
In truth, the project hampered in its conformity to the modern definition of ‘caravan’ by the lack of wheels. There was a random distribution in the Afterworld of what might be generally referred to as ‘stuff’, but this didn’t, at least within the general area Ron had selected for his venture, include any sign of pneumatic tyres.
“What’s a caravan park, Ron?” asked Adrael, another of the wanderers who wore his cause of death on his sleeve, or in his case through his chest in the form of a large spear.
“It’s a grassy area, particularly one susceptible to minor flooding, where people go for their holidays.” The years together were Ron’s opportunity to spread his wealth of knowledge. He had been lucky, in the Visigoths, to find friends who knew even less than him. Now, for once he really knew what he was talking about. He had already familiarised them with the concept of the ‘holiday’, which they had generally come to understand as a break from warfare. They didn’t really understand the point of that, but went along with it anyway in the interests of harmony.
“Usually, a caravan park is located on the coast, the seaside being one of the major attractions for people who spend all year working. It does, though, have to be far enough away from the actual sea that taking all of the requisite kit to spend time there is a major operation; requiring planning, forethought, and at least two more arms than the group actually have between them.”
“Or needs more than one trip.” said Ethel.
“And a caravan?” asked Guntrick, the leader of the Visigoth company.
“It’s like a little house, usually made of aluminium, so that it is freezing when it’s cold and boiling when hot.” He smiled to himself and shook his head in fond memory of the sheer discomfort of the English summer. “And it’s on wheels, so that you can move it to different places, like fields next to main roads, or swamps. Mainly, though, they just stay where they are.”
The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet) Page 63