by Heide Goody
Nerys gave a low whistle. “Hang on, let me check the number of zeroes. I make that thirty-seven billion pounds you need to cough up, Ben.”
They all stared at each other.
“I wonder how much currency we actually have,” said Ben.
“What, all together, with the extra that we’ve all added when people weren’t looking?” asked Clovenhoof.
Ben nodded. “I don’t think we have anywhere near that.”
“Not to worry. Give me everything and I’ll take an IOU for the rest,” said Clovenhoof. “Or you could make part payment in grovelling recognition of my greatness as King of Hooflandia.”
“Hooflandia?”
“My little empire,” said Clovenhoof, gesturing to all he owned and wallowing for a moment in the prospect of having his own country. “I’m struggling with the words for my national anthem though. What rhymes with Hooflandia?”
“Please!” said Narinda, as loudly as a polite person could. “Are you all so wrapped up in this crazy game that you’ve forgotten you have some real-world problems to deal with? This here is a letter from a debt reclamation company. Bailiffs. They’re coming any day now to repossess everything you own.”
“But I’m about to strike it rich here,” said Clovenhoof, casting his hands at the almost indecipherable expanse of The Game playing board.
“Strike it rich with real money?” said Narinda.
“Well, no.”
“How much money do you actually have? Real, accessible and physical money.”
Clovenhoof patted his pockets and frowned. “Well I thought I made some, and I don’t remember spending it on anything enjoyable. Actually that normally means I’ve spent it on something enjoyable, but I’m not sure I’ve had time.”
Narinda shook her head. “You need to do more. This is really urgent. What could you sell?”
Clovenhoof cast his eye over the board and a small idea blossomed in his mind. “Actually, there might be one or two things. Have you got a pen?”
He took Narinda’s pen, jotted some notes on the back of his miracle card and pocketed the pen.
She held out her hand. “You’re not selling my pen, Jeremy.”
Clovenhoof grinned. “No, I have bigger plans in mind.” He turned to Nerys. “I could set this up right now with a little help. Nerys, would you mind? I’ve got a couple of hours before my gigoloafing gig and I’m sure Ben and Narinda can manage without us for a few minutes.”
Nerys gave an ostentatious wink. “Great idea. Be good, you two! Not too good though.”
She followed him out and shut the door.
“Jeremy, you surprise me sometimes. Well played!” she said.
“What?” he said, leading the way to his flat, and more specifically his computer. “Oh the honey trap? Well it might work, I suppose, but I thought of something else. How do you feel about fraud?”
“I don’t think I quite share your moral flexibility,” she said thoughtfully.
“And that’s why you fail,” he said. “Who was it that said, ‘When you sell a lie, you should sell the biggest lie possible?’”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I suspect he wasn’t a nice man.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Joan of Arc was in Hell.
She wondered if it was any consolation to the Burgundian nobles who’d burned her at the stake that she was now, at least temporarily, in the place they’d hoped to send her. She supposed that any number of them might be down here somewhere and momentarily wondered if she should seek them out and say ‘hi’ and then dismissed the idea as probably unhelpful and potentially cruel.
The Infernal Innovation Centre overseen by Belphegor occupied several sub-basement levels beneath the ruins of the Fortress of Nameless Dread at the heart of Hell’s capital, Pandemonium. Rutspud asked Joan if she could find her own way there as he apparently had some small farewells to make before their trip to earth. Fortunately, Hell had lots of helpful signs pointing out where things were. Unfortunately, it had even more unhelpful signs that declared useless nuggets such as ‘If door does not open, please do not enter’, ‘Warning: No context for next five miles’ and ‘The edges of this sign are sharp. You’re welcome.’
Eventually, after climbing down through the ruined fortress and passing through a foundry of belching furnaces and billowing smoke, Joan found herself before a cavern with the words Infernal Innovation Programme above the entrance. Rutspud was already there, waiting. He passed a paper bag to her.
“Hold this,” he said and placed the sin detector he carried onto a little cradle gizmo by the door. A display flashed up.
Battery level 70%. Charging. Ejecting waste materials.
Pipes and pumps wheezed and hissed above the cradles.
“What’s it doing?” she said.
“Getting rid of sin particles that it accumulates when taking a reading.”
“And what happens to that sin?”
“Dunno,” he replied. “Gets turned into something, I suppose. Jelly baby?”
She frowned. “The sin gets turned into…?”
Rutspud pointed at the bag he’d passed her. “Jelly babies. You want one?”
“Where did you get these?” she asked. The sweets, in a little white paper bag, looked like they’d been picked up from an old-fashioned corner shop. Joan suspected there weren’t many of those in Hell.
“From a friend,” he said. “I was saying goodbye. Come on, let’s see what Belphegor has for us.”
“But…” she said, pointing at the mysterious hissing pipes.
“Don’t question Hell’s proprietary tech,” said Rutspud.
“Why?”
“It just spoils the mystery.”
He beckoned her through to an open plan office where a strangely unsegregated workforce of demons and damned souls beavered away at draughtsmen’s boards and holographic projection images.
“We’re going to the creativity hub testing centre,” said Rutspud, cutting through the busy design room. “A lot of the equipment Belphegor’s sending us with will be experimental.” He gave her a conspiratorial look. “Chances are, the reason we’re being given it is because it is experimental and in need of a field test.”
“Dangerous?” said Joan.
“Here’s hoping,” said Rutspud.
A damned soul in a black roll neck sweater approached Rutspud with a complex schematic in his hands.
“Mr Rutspud, sir, have you had a chance of speaking to Lord Belphegor about my suggestion?”
“Is this the ‘extra circle’ thing again?” said Rutspud tiredly.
“It’s time Hell entered the digital age, sir, and –”
“Hell has entered the digital age, Steve. What you want for reasons known only to yourself is for Hell to go metric.”
“Ten circles of Hell each divided into ten zones of high efficiency torment, sir.”
“And what’s this?” Rutspud poked at the schematic. “The Pit of Open Source Coders? The Pit of Microsoft Executives?” He sighed. “I’m not showing it to him, Steve. We don’t need a tenth circle.”
“You’re just blinkered,” the soul called after him as Rutspud walked on. “Hell needs an upgrade. They’ll be queueing around the block to get in once it’s installed.”
Rutspud led the way through a bustling, spark-filled workshop. “That guy had better start pulling his weight,” Rutspud said to Joan, holding the door for her. “Hell demands technological innovation and I don’t think he’s got what we need.”
Joan looked critically at the machinery and gadgetry around them. “I am sure none of it is really needed.”
“Oh, really?”
“What about the purity of honest labour? One of the glories of God’s creation is that he made us all capable of so much, and yet I see that technology can encourage a certain indulgent sloth.”
“Thank you,” said Rutspud, emphatically. “It’s nice to see our efforts recognised.”
“I wasn’t trying to be complimentary.�
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“Many of our proudest achievements encourage sloth, Joan. We worked hard to nudge forward the invention of the car. Then when people realised they were becoming fat and lazy we helped them invent exercise bikes. We realised at that point that circular, self-defeating technology was the way forward.”
“Self-defeating technology?”
“We operate a television channel on earth as a testing ground for our new ideas, like labour-saving kitchen devices that cut vegetables into bizarre shapes and injure your fingers. And then there’s a type of watch that winds itself when a human wears it. That’s one of mine.”
“But that actually sounds like a useful thing,” said Joan.
“It is a useful thing, if you only have one,” said Rutspud. “So we made them collectable, and now people need little cabinets to rock the watches they’re not wearing.”
“Oh,” said Joan with a frown. “That’s… that’s stupid.”
“Isn’t it just?” Rutspud nodded happily. They passed through a pair of swing doors into an altogether quieter and more science-y looking space.
“Ah, Rutspud,” said Belphegor. His wheelchair was slotted into an ergonomic workbench at the centre of a semi-circular rack of tools and supplies. “I’m just finishing work on an essential piece of your equipment.”
He reversed out of the workbench and held up something the size and shape of a paperback book.
He was interrupted by a muffled monstrous roar from within a giant metal tank.
“Quiet, Boris!” Belphegor yelled. He handed the device to Rutspud. “Currency printer. Simple to operate. Feed in a sample of the local currency here,” he pointed at a narrow, flat aperture, “and then you can print as many copies as you need.”
“Useful,” conceded Joan. “I guess we will need money on earth.”
“This is a prototype,” warned Belphegor, “so we haven’t yet fitted it with a reset button. You will be equipped to reproduce one note only, but that shouldn’t pose a problem.”
“And what’s this?” said Joan pressing a button on a not-dissimilar device on the end of the workbench.
“PERSONAL TORTURE SEQUENCE INITIATED. SCANNING…” The automated voice rang out from the small device.
“Ah,” said Belphegor. “This should be interesting.”
“VICTIM HAS 100% FUNCTIONALITY IN NERVE FUNCTION AND COGNITIVE RECOGNITION. SETTING PAIN DELIVERY TO MAXIMUM. INITIATING KNIFE FLAIL TO REMOVE FIRST LAYERS OF SKIN AND SUBCUTANEOUS –”
“It’s going to what?” said Joan, backing away. As she moved, it did two things. A set of tiny rotors emerged from the top of the casing and it rose into the air, following her. From the sides, dozens of flexible arms tipped with scalpels wormed free and bristled in the air, giving the whole thing the appearance of a shiny flying gorgon’s head.
“It’s doing exactly what you’d expect if you requested a personal torture session,” said Belphegor conversationally.
“I didn’t request a personal torture session!”
“If you pressed the button then you did,” said Belphegor.
“It’s going to torture me?”
“Yes.”
“And you think that’s ‘interesting’?”
“Absolutely. Not nice for you obviously. But definitely interesting.”
Joan drew her broadsword. “Well I don’t want to be tortured. Turn it off!” She brandished her weapon at the device, but it ducked and bobbed in the air, evading her swipes with its hummingbird manoeuvrability.
“We build a backdoor shutdown sequence into all of our devices,” said Belphegor. “Can you remember what it is for this one, Rutspud?”
The device swooped forward and clattered along her gleaming breastplate, leaving scalpel sharp nicks in the metal as it sought out soft flesh.
“I didn’t work on this one,” said Rutspud, as Joan swung a wrench off a nearby workbench in the hope that it might be more effective at stopping the thing.
“It’s on the tip of my tongue,” said Belphegor thoughtfully. “Bagpipe sensibility. Bagpipe solitude.”
Rutspud grabbed a manual from the bookshelf and flicked through. Knives clicked right in front of Joan’s face, and nothing she could do would swat the thing away.
“Bagpipe sorcerer,” said Rutspud.
The knives stopped and withdrew back inside the casing. The device steered back to the workbench and settled back into place.
“SEQUENCE ABORTED.”
Joan put down the wrench and glowered at Rutspud and Belphegor.
“What?” said Belphegor. “You were the one who pressed the button.”
“I was merely curious,” she said.
“And what did curiosity do to the cat?” said Belphegor. “Killed it.”
“Effing murderlised,” grinned Rutspud. “But it’s probably best if you don’t press any more buttons.”
“Now, the key to your investigation on earth is identifying instances of priestly forgiveness,” said Belphegor. “We’ve fast-tracked something that will help you to identify who is gaining absolution.”
His wheelchair puttered over to another table and he picked up a wedge-shaped device.
“Obviously we needed to disguise this for you, so we consulted our film archive and we chose a Geiger counter. We believe they are fairly commonplace, so you shouldn’t stand out. It clicks in the presence of absolution, and it’s directional, so you will hear the clicking speed up when you approach the source.”
Rutspud took the device. As well as the clicking, it featured a needle that twitched back and forth in an arc, on a background that went from green on the left to red on the right. “When you consulted the film archive, did you go to fiction or non-fiction?” he asked.
Belphegor looked at him blankly. “I don’t dabble in the whys and wherefores, Rutspud. Obviously if you’d been here we’d have got you to do the research as our resident culture expert. Is there a problem?”
“No sir, not at all,” said Rutspud, but Joan caught a look on his face that made her wonder whether Geiger counters were all that commonplace on earth.
“Last couple of items are over here,” said Belphegor. “Up on the shelf, Rutspud. An invisibility cloak and a selection of fragmentation grenades.”
“Invisibility cloak?” said Rutspud, impressed.
“Grenades?” said Joan, concerned.
“The cloak is fusion tech. The latest light-bending technology we stole from the Chinese but coupled with basic imp invisibility.”
Rutspud fingered the entirely invisible material. “Imp skin. I thought it felt familiar.”
“Do we really need grenades?” said Joan.
“There’s a difference between need and want,” said Rutspud, gleefully snagging a couple of extra grenades and slotting them onto the bandolier. “Wouldn’t want to regret not taking them.”
“Right, that’s most of what you need,” said Belphegor. “There’s a couple of travel bags for you there.”
Rutspud wrapped the grenades up in the cloak for easy carrying and stuffed them in a bag. Joan put the currency printer and absolution detector in a rucksack.
“What’s all this other stuff?” she said.
“Standard field agent equipment,” said Belphegor. “Phone. Tablet. Travel plugs. Inflatable pillow. Beach towel.”
“The phone?” said Rutspud, waving the device at Belphegor.
“Uses the spiritual desire lines network.”
“Fine,” said Rutspud, although Joan had no idea what that meant.
There was another titanic roar from the vast metal tank.
“Shush, Boris!” said Belphegor. “They’re going now.”
“What is in there?” Joan asked Rutspud.
Rutspud shrugged. “Some sort of Armageddon doomsday project? We’re always cooking something up down here.”
“Come on, come on,” said Belphegor. “In here, you two.”
Belphegor herded the pair of them and their luggage into a small room with an iron door.
&nbs
p; “Where do we go from here?” said Joan.
The door slammed behind them. Joan turned. There was a peculiar sucking sound around the edges of the door, as though the door was trying to seal itself perfectly by giving the frame an enormous slobbery snog.
“Well, that’s an interesting metaphysical question,” said Belphegor’s voice from a tinny speaker in the top corner of the chamber. “Traditional symbolism would suggest the answer is ‘up’ but the spatial relationship between Hell and earth is complex at best.”
Through a glass porthole, Joan saw Belphegor press buttons on a keypad.
“Whatever. The shunter will take you directly to earth,” said Belphegor.
“I don’t want to be shunted,” said Joan.
“How do you know unless you’ve tried it?” said Rutspud casually.
“Nothing good ever happened involving the verb ‘to shunt,’” said Joan.
“It’s fine,” said Rutspud. “This is proven technology, isn’t it?” he asked Belphegor.
“We’ve used it several times,” said Belphegor proudly, “with no loss of mass from any of the test objects.”
“Test objects?”
Belphegor started to throw levers and set dials. “It will be very interesting to observe the results with both of you in there,” he said. “Rutspud?”
“Yes?”
“In the archives. There’s a film called The Fly.”
“Ye-es?” said Rutspud warily.
“Fiction, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh good,” said Belphegor and pressed a large red button.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Nerys sat opposite Clovenhoof on the train into Birmingham. She carried the rolled-up banner he had hastily created.
“So, it’s a crowdfunder you’re doing,” she said.
“In essence,” he said, tapping away on her laptop.
“You know that lots of people have done ‘pay off my debt’ crowdfunders. They only work if you’ve got lots of friends or are very charismatic.”