In The Lap Of The Gods

by John B. Hendricks

  “Gideon’s Bible,” thought Lucifer. “Hardy-har.”

  In 1898, a couple of lumber salesmen had shared a hotel room in Boscobel, Wisconsin. Aside from their apparent love for lumber and Wisconsin, they were also Christians who wanted to spread the Word. They founded the Gideons and went on to put a Bible in every possible hotel drawer they could find. These days, of course, you were just as likely to find pay-per-view porn in a hotel as a Gideon bible, but only one had a place in the National Historic Register and its own plaque.

  Room 19. The highway to heaven.

  He rechecked the map key and thought about the entry word. Once upon a time, Jehovah had used it in a discussion with him, the last face-to-face conversation that they ever had.

  The war was over. In the end, most of his so-called allies had bailed on him, swearing eternal fealty to Jehovah. A few of his pals hung with him to the last, and Lucifer was grateful. He held his head high as a few of the brutish thrones escorted him roughly to a secluded room on the far side of Heaven.

  Lucifer looked around the room. It was full of odd figurines, big-eyed angels, and the walls had paintings on them, gypsies in pinup styles. There were pictures of dogs playing some kind of card game and a couple of garden gnomes. Lucifer was examining a deer-antler paperweight when Jehovah entered the room.

  The Creator looked tired and on the edge of forlorn. He pulled up a papasan chair and flopped back in it. His eyes were shiny and Lucifer could see the glow of the lava lamps reflecting in them.

  “What do we do now?” Lucifer asked. “You’ve won, so now you have your complete contingent of angel and human idolizers. I’ll tell you something, though. I can’t stand by and watch this travesty and if I get a chance I’ll try to stop you again.”

  Jehovah sighed. “Is it so wrong to want to be adored?” He looked around the room. “I made you, Lucifer. Aren’t you the least bit grateful? From nothing but my will for you to be?”

  “All creatures are grateful for their existence,” Lucifer answered. “But does the hawk require worship from its chicks. Does lightning need praise from the fires it creates?”

  “Enough!” shouted Jehovah, struggling out of the rattan chair, trying not to tip it over.

  “Who are you to demand?” shouted Lucifer.

  “Who am I?” shouted Lucifer, toe-to-toe and nose-to-nose with Lucifer, spittle flying. “I’ll tell you who!” Jehovah drew himself to his full height, the infinite merging with his words in huge unfathomable letters.

  “I am what I am.”

  Lucifer stared into infinity and yawned. Jehovah shrunk back to his regular guy look. His eyes were misty.

  “Save it for the tourists,” Lucifer said, sitting back down.

  Jehovah nodded, and looked around the room. “All these things in here,” he said, “are ideas I had, nurtured, and developed. They are representations of things that I enjoy. This,” he said, touching a painting on the wall, “is made of velvet. That is Michael, of course, depicted on it. However, like all these things in this room.” He swept his hand over the items displayed. “It just doesn’t seem ‘right.’ Something is the matter with it, but I’m not quite sure what is wrong.” He looked at Lucifer, black eyes boring into the fallen Angel. “You, Lucifer, have turned out the same as these creations. Not quite right.”

  Jehovah walked to the door and turned to Lucifer. “I’m the Creator, and I can’t bear to destroy these things in this room. Including you.” He opened the door, still staring at Lucifer. “If you decide to come around to my way of thinking, you know how to find me.”

  “Wait!” Lucifer said. “You’re just leaving me here with this junk? For eternity? Forever?” he said frantically. “You can’t do this to me. I am Lucifer, the First of Angels, the Morning Star.”

  “You are the Emperor of the Kingdom of Kitsch,” Jehovah said with a tiny smile, and shut the door, closing off Lucifer’s cursing and screaming.

  Lucifer touched the map with his finger, running it along the entry word. There was no doubt with the translation, and it made him uneasy. He stared at the paper.

  The word kitsch stared back at him, nonchalantly.

  Chapter 45[45]

  Lucifer stood before the throng and raised both arms in the air, palms facing the murmuring crowd.

  “The time has come,” he began. “The time has come to dispel the dark clouds of destiny. Dame Fate, be damned!”

  Hoots and applause came from the group. Thor and Heimdall high-fived. There was a low rumble of thunder.

  “We will not be frightened by what is said must be, for we are the masters of our own paths and we will decide what will be!”

  The applause grew much louder. Spear-butts pounded the ground.

  “Now, I know there is some trepidation in this course of action. Only a fool or a Democrat would feel otherwise. But I repeat myself.”

  The group tittered.

  “But we have the mighty Thor, and his magic hammer!”

  “Mjollner! Mjollner! Mjollner!” the crowd chanted.

  “And Sutr and his flaming sword of revenge! Sutr, try to keep the sword away from those curtains.”

  Sutr grinned, but continued to wave his sword, sparks and smoke spraying indiscriminately on the carpet.

  “Finally, we have Odin, a god not only of wisdom, magic, and poetry, but the god of war, battle, and victory. Our own Odin!”

  Odin turned to the crowd and waved his golden helmet at them. The crowd roared.

  Lucifer’s voice lowered conspiratorially. “G.K. Chesterson once said, ‘I don’t believe in a fate that falls on men however they act, but I do believe in a fate that falls on them UNLESS they act.’” Lucifer stopped and ran his eyes across them. “It is time,” he said, “for us to act.”

  The gods and goddesses roared. “Yauyaa! Yauyaa!” they shouted. “Let’s go!”

  “To the buses!” Lucifer shouted. They poured out of the building and piled in the waiting vehicles, shouting encouragement to each other as the buses roared away, non-stop to Boscobel, Wisconsin.

  Their luggage, however, remained on the curb, where several residents of the finders-keepers persuasion wordlessly appropriated it.

  Chapter 46[46]

  What do battle-ready heaven-storming gods eat before the charge into the breech?

  Chinese food.

  They crowded the buffet line at China King on Wisconsin Avenue. Cooks were frantically trying to keep the trough filled and the regulars at the restaurant looked on in amazement.

  Lucifer picked at his General Tsao’s chicken. Here he was, on the verge of his great victory, but there was no joy in him. Only a gnawing rodent of doubt. Something smelled bad, and it was not the sashimi, which had seen better days.

  He looked around at the boisterous Aesir. They were so loose and carefree. It must be the mead, he thought. Lucifer had tried a sip of the stuff, but it was so cloyingly sweet he had to wash it down with whiskey to get the taste out of his mouth.

  With no appetite, Lucifer went to the restroom and washed his hands for a few minutes, staring into his own eyes, seeing his own reflection in his pupils. He saw his life flash through them, his greatest hits.

  War of the Angels. Defeat. Betrayal. Banishment. Hell. Despair. Anguish. Torment. Taking his bottomless rage and applying it in cruel yet ingenious methods on the failed humans that passed through to him.

  Meddling. Sending his agents back to Earth, causing as many problems as they could. War. Famines. Plague. The Macarena.

  Retirement. Quiet walks on the beach. Literature and bad television. More loneliness. Bye bye love. Hello loneliness.

  “Better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven,” was how Milton had paraphrased his thoughts many ages ago. Lucifer, however, was never pleased with the tone and inaccuracies of Paradise Lost and tracked down Milton after the poet’s death. Following several in-depth interviews, the shell-shocked Englishman had agreed to write a revised version of the epic poem based on Lucifer’s version of events. “Work
on your punctuation as well and reduce the thous and dosts to zero,” Lucifer instructed. “I want people to actually read the book, not just say they did to impress their girlfriends and English professors.” “Sex, Sin, and Salvation,” was a runaway bestseller and sold more copies than all of Milton’s other snoozefests combined.

  As Lucifer exited the bathroom, he glumly noticed crab legs and sweet & sour chicken scattered about the restaurant, the remnants of spontaneous food fight and the background music of ten Korean co-owners screaming out the front door. “You leave!” in their best pigeon English accents.

  “One buffet, one drink,” he told the wide-eyed guy at the register.

  “They no pay,” he said hoarsely, pointing at the bus. “They say gloomy devil pay for all.” The man peered at him over his tape-repaired glasses. “You gloomy devil?”

  “Yes, I suppose I am,” Lucifer said, pulling out his wallet.

  “Here you change,” the man said. “You want fortune cookie?”

  “Sure.”

  When he got on the bus, the happy warriors slapped at Lucifer heartily. He waved them away dismissively and sat down as the bus eased out of the lot. Lucifer ripped open the plastic and cracked open the indeterminably aged hunk of mass-produced quasi-cookie, pulling out the strip of paper before popping the chunks of sharp cookie into his mouth.

  “Lucky numbers, 22, 28, 32, 33, 393, and 40,” he read. “Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket.” He chuckled and turned it around to read his fortune. He choked on his cookie, gasping and gagging until Thor thumped him on the back brusquely. Lucifer stared at the paper couplet, rereading it repeatedly. Incredulously.

  “Revenge, at first though sweet, bitter ere long back on itself recoils.”

  Thor peered over Lucifer’s shoulder and read the quote. “Sounds ominous,” he belched.

  Chapter 47[47]

  The Remusian scout ship dipped below the clouds, its engines whisper quiet in the oxygen-thick atmosphere.

  Lane leaned back in the pilot seat. He caught himself humming twice and fought the urge to whistle as well. It felt good to be out of the claustrophobic mothership. It had depressed him to the point of suicide and sometimes crossed his mind to have the navigator just run them into the nearest star to preserve their honor or some such thing to justify it to the crew.

  Maybe his mother was right. Perhaps he was too sensitive to be the bloodthirsty mercenary captain of an intergalactic warship. Oh well, he thought. It’s a little late for a career change at this point.

  “Captain, where do you think we should land?” his second mate asked.

  Lane looked at the instrument panel. “Kirk indicated that he was from Iowa, and according to our mapping system, we’ll be there in around thirty cams. If anyone sees something that they think we should investigate, you have the Captain’s permission to speak up about it.”

  The crew looked at each other in surprise. The Captain rarely wanted input from them and typically preferred just to beat it out of them if he felt like he really needed an opinion. Maybe the Captain was finally mellowing a little bit. Their collective breathing slowed down as they relaxed for the first time in quite a while.

  Lane wished he could roll down the windows and feel the breeze. This planet is quite pleasant. He wondered what its inhabitants were really like. The transmissions they had monitored had run the whole gamut of emotions that Lane was familiar with such as love, hate, constipation, fellowship, and more. He understood why Lucifer would want to live his life here. A large lake passed under them and Lane could see the rippling of some kind of aquatic animals moving through the water and a large flock of aviaries crowding the shore. For a moment, he could feel the cool water on his bare feet, his toes wriggling free, the sun on his bare, hairy back. He rolled the wheel from side to side, the ship swaying lazily in the warm summer day.

  “How far from Remusia are we?” Lane asked the navigator.

  “Three hundred ten light-years,” he quickly responded.

  “Is that the furthest away that a Remusian flagship has ever traveled from the mother planet?”

  “By far,” the navigator agreed.

  “So we have accomplished something major,” Lane concluded, “even though we’ve never conquered a planet, we are the greatest explorers in the history of Remusia.”

  “I’ve never considered that,” the second mate said, “but it is very true. It is probably one of the greatest feats of exploration ever accomplished in the history of the universe.”

  Lane nodded in agreement. He had never realized the truth before reaching Earth, but he wasn’t much of a conqueror. Crushing civilizations under his bloody boot, stripping planets of anything that wasn’t nailed down, those were all traits that others at the Academy had naturally, but for Lane, it was always just a lesson he repeated by rote. The teacher said conquest was good, therefore conquest was good. But when they studied the vast star charts, large black x’s denoting planets held beneath the Remusian thumb, Lane always wondered about the people of the conquered planet. How did they live? Where did they work? What did they worship? Did they dance?

  He had gotten through the Academy with top honors. He was praised for his brutality. He was honored for his contempt. He had lettered in excessively brutal discipline. But it was all an act, a bitter façade. It wasn’t Lane who all of those things. It was just a Remusian societal caricature.

  He turned and looked at his crew. Decent fellows just doing a job. Did they feel like he did about the pressures of society? Did they all wear false faces as he had for so many years? There was only one way to find out the truth.

  He would have to ask them, and in turn, he would have to open up his feelings to them.

  All his training convulsed in his head at the very concept. Authoritarianism had been pounded into his head since his youth and even acknowledging that others had feelings would have drawn a beating at any level of Remusian society, be it home, school, work, or church.

  He fought down the bile and formed the question on his lips. They worked slowly and he could almost feel the manacles falling from them as he uttered a sentence unheard of in proper Remusian society.

  “Fellows,” Lane said to his crew. “I’d like to discuss an idea with you that I’ve been considering, but I need your input to help me reach a decision.”

  The stunned crew stared at him in disbelief until Lane smiled at them. It was an unpracticed smile, crooked and somewhat silly looking, and the crew suddenly understood.

  The apron strings of Mother Remusia were about to be sheared, and they were going to find a new path and there own way to live.

  They worked on their own smiles and grins. It felt damned good.

  Chapter 48[48]

  He could still taste the blueberry pancake in his mouth. He licked his lips, testing for syrup but there wasn’t any. The sensation was drifting away. He sighed and kept walking.

  Baldur was in a very long line of people. He steered to the left and looked over the shoulders of the people in front of him, and could see that the line snaked forward as far as he could see. He pulled abreast of the guy in front of him and asked him where they were.

  “I’m on my way to Jesus,” the man drawled. “Jesus saved me from a life of sin, lust, and alcohol. I pledged my life to him and stayed straight, went to church twice a week, and gave plenty of tithing to the Reverend Larry. Praise him!”

  “You are a fool,” laughed the man behind them. “This is the road to Jannah, as the Prophet, peace be upon him, told us. No Christians allowed in Paradise, my idolatrous friend. Surely you are just getting a glance at what Allah has willed before going to the fiery pits of Jahannam!”

  “Shut up, you rag-head! Don’t blaspheme or I’ll kick your ass!”

  Baldur sidestepped the brawling pilgrims. Dead, he thought. I never would have believed it. That stupid mistletoe story had been real, not some ridiculous bogeyman tale that his parents had made up to creep him out. Unbelievable. And if the mistletoe story was true, then
the Ragnarok prophecy must be true as well.

  And this must be must be on the road to Hell.

  Baldur looked around at all the stricken souls walking with him. The entire gamut of humankind represented; Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, Taoists. “Doesn’t matter much now, does it Padre,” Baldur said to an obviously distraught cleric. “Looks like that vow of celibacy isn’t chalking up many points of the main board.” Baldur chuckled grimly. You should talk, he thought. Killed by a pancake. Pitiful.

  A great wailing was rising from the crowd in front of him and he strained his neck to see. He could make out a giant room ahead and people were pushing and shoving in the crush. “NO!” he heard. “Why have you forsaken me?” “Quit pushing!”

  As he passed through the door, he saw the giant silver wall in front of him. The signage was flashing quickly in a great many languages and Baldur quickly understood its meaning. “Heaven is closed until further notice. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

  The crowd was ebbing and flowing through the corridor and was running lemming-like toward a great maw of an opening at the far end of the room. He realized with no uncertainty where this entire group was headed. The bodies tumbled through the portal and he caught a glance of the flashing sign. He could feel his sphincter tighten.

  “Welcome to Hell. Now under new management. Trust us; you won’t enjoy your stay.”

  ***

  The minions were working overtime again and the complaints, as well as the fumes from the newly installed brimstone blowers, were thick in the air.

  “I am so sick of this,” Aamon said. “Why is it when somebody takes over a place, they feel like they have to change everything? If I wanted that, I would go to earth and work for a bank.”

  His not-so-congenial colleagues nodded their various heads in agreement. Lilith was the ultimate bad boss. Lucifer, despite his fearsome reputation on Earth, was an excellent CEO. “She better not mess with out dental plan,” Barbatos snarled. “I’ve been biting off Mormon heads for weeks. My gums haven’t stopped bleeding.”