by Heide Goody
“Where's Bernard?” asked Stephen.
“Pfff. Lazy oaf’s having a lie-in,” said Huey. “I gave him a shout, but he was out cold. Is it true they might have been plague victims?”
“What?”
“The skeletons.”
“Where on earth did you get that idea?” asked Stephen.
“Those students were talking,” said Huey. “The ones from Bangor. They said that there might have been bits of ... body that went down the drain in the dishwasher. They said that there might be smallpox, anthrax, plague or anything.”
“Bastian made sure Manfred cleaned the dishwasher out with bleach afterwards.”
“But it makes sense with them all being jumbled together like that. It must have been a plague pit, surely?”
“That’s a bit far-fetched,” said Stephen. “But I've been planning to have a good look through the old records in the library, see if I can find any clues about the bodies. I'm sure there'd be some record if the Black Death ever came to Bardsey. In the meantime, maybe we should be careful about starting rumours.”
Huey pursed his lips and mopped on with the expression of someone who had decided how things were and wasn't about to change his mind.
Bastian sighed and beckoned to Manfred as he entered the room.
“It's had three million views,” said Bastian, pointing at the screen. “Three million! If I refresh the website, you'll see the count going up.”
“We're talking about the YouTube video made by our young visitors?” asked Manfred.
“Midget Monks v The Pit of Mud Zombies, what else?” said Bastian. “You should see some of the comments. The ones that are coherent, that is.”
Manfred leaned over his shoulder to read.
“Check out the div in the helmet at 8:34. Oh, that's me! Do you think I should say hello?”
“No, definitely not! Never mind that. Look at all this discussion about plague pits!” said Bastian. “We’ll never shake off this sort of damage. We need an emergency plan for putting the lid on all this somehow.”
“That’s a bit dramatic, Bastian.”
“You know that the television networks are picking up this story now?”
Manfred stared at the screen, deep in thought.
“They do say that there's no such thing as bad publicity,” he said. “I think we could work with this, make it into something positive.”
“This I have to hear,” said Bastian. “A positive spin on a plague pit? I'm all ears.”
“Forget the plague pit,” said Manfred. “As long as nobody dies, that will soon be forgotten. But those bones are lovely and clean now. No, what I was thinking about was an ossuary.”
“An ossuary?”
“An ossuary. There’s that lovely one in Rome.”
“The Capuchin Crypt.”
“And the catacombs in Paris. They have all the different bones arranged ornamentally,” said Manfred, leaning across to open up another browser window on Bastian's computer. “Take a look at the way they have worked so effectively with the medium to show a powerful yet still reverential image.”
He clicked through some images, and stopped on one that he jabbed at with a finger.
“This skeleton here represents justice, reminding people that they are all alive for just a short while, and they will all be judged by God when they die. See the scales he's holding, all made from bones!”
“So, you want to do something like this?” asked Bastian like someone approaching a lit firework.
“Something like this, but perhaps we can bring things up to date a little bit,” said Manfred, rocking back on his heels thoughtfully. “Show the younger generation some of the classic scenes from the bible.”
“If it doesn't have mind-melting Jedis or zombie transsexuals, I don't think it's going to speak to the sort of young people we hosted the other day,” said Bastian, but he saw that Manfred was elsewhere, visualising works of art made possible with bone. He returned to the YouTube screen and pressed refresh with an angry scowl.
Rutspud had slipped into the habit of taking his work back to the cave. He found that several of the damned enjoyed knowing what he was doing, and if they could help him to shine in front of his new colleagues, he was all for it. Tesla, in particular, had been very busy. With whatever parts Rutspud had been able to smuggle out of the lab, or gather from elsewhere, he had constructed the device that Rutspud now weighed in his hand. It was vaguely gun-shaped, but where Rutspud expected a pointy bit for bullets to emerge from, there was a bulbous trumpet-shape, which made Wilde titter inexplicably and say it reminded him of a young man he knew in Chelsea. Cartland had quilted the hand-grip for it, and had to be tied onto the snooker table again to stop her making a little cosy for when it was not in use.
“Why is the end part like this?” asked Rutspud. “It looks all wrong for making things go where you want them.”
“We're firing rays,” said Tesla.
“Rays.”
“Yes. And we want to make sure that we get the coverage needed. If you are to condense an entire person, then the rays must cover the whole of their body or they might end up with a huge pair of feet that didn't shrink.”
Rutspud's eyes lit up with delight at the possibilities.
“We could make something a little more targeted,” Tesla continued, “in a chamber perhaps, if you would permit me access to the lab.”
“Not going to happen,” said Rutspud firmly. “We need to pretend that I made this, at least for now. So, if we fire this at one of the damned, we can make them smaller. How much smaller?”
Telsa shrugged.
“Let’s find out.”
Shortly afterwards, Rutspud placed the box onto Belphegor's lap with a hopeful smile.
“See? We can fit all six of them into a small box. Lewis made them some new living quarters in the cupboard where we keep the leftover demon body parts. Think of the space we can free up! It gives us a brand new way to deal with Hell's capacity problems.”
Belphegor nodded and put a hand on the box that was moving around, as if the contents were greatly agitated.
“The device that you used, what's the technology?” he asked.
“Rays. It uses rays,” said Rutspud, hoping that he could keep his eyes from looking too shifty and hoping the Belphegor didn’t ask what ‘rays’ were.
“You built it yourself?” asked Belphegor.
“Yes, of course. Well, mostly,” said Rutspud. He had a feeling that Belphegor wasn't fooled.
“This is interesting. Really interesting. Tell me, how you did you decide on these particular subjects for your first test?”
“Musicians?” Rutspud said. “Obvious, isn’t it? Most people seem to think that all pop stars are tiny and, in real life, you know, stars of the ‘small screen’ – whatever that is – so it's not such a shocker when you see them. But open the box, and you'll see the added bonus.”
Belphegor lifted the lid to reveal five angry-looking figures staring up at him.
“They look pretty healthy, these guinea pigs of yours,” he said.
“You the man?” squeaked one of them.
“I'm in charge of this lab, yes,” said Belphegor, lifting him out on his hand. “No need to pitch a purple haze.”
The squeaker didn't bother replying but stamped a diminutive foot by way of protest.
“Man, you believe this shit?” he said. “We sound freaky and not the good kind of freaky. Music is my religion, man. We wan' our voices back.”
Belphegor opened his mouth to reply but another voice joined in.
“Fuckin' Smurfs! That's what we sound like!”
Belphegor, eyed the tiny speaker with the spiked hair and bondage trousers. “Yes, I remember the Smurfs. One of our finer contributions to earth's cultural milieu, I always thought. So is it a problem, young man? Your voice very much matches your size now, surely?”
“Aw, c'mon,” said a woman strolling forwards and striking a languid pose. “It's not so bad for Karen h
ere, she sounds just the same as she always did, but the rest of us have lost all of our fucking grit. We're supposed to sound rough goddammit.”
“Right on, Janis.”
“Fascinating,” said Belphegor, dropping Jimi Hendrix back into the box and closing the lid. “There's a psychological side-effect in play here. You've found a new way to apply torment, lad. The boss will be very pleased. Take them off and show them their new quarters while I go and have a word with maintenance about the temperature in this place.”
Rutspud could barely contain his glee. He suspected that Belphegor knew he'd enlisted the help of Tesla, but hadn't they all said that they valued his laziness? They probably expected him to delegate his work to the damned. The trial of the new device couldn't have gone better, so Rutspud was hopeful that he could enjoy a blissful, if brief, hiatus from the constant worry of how he was going to demonstrate improvement in the next round of evaluations.
Rutspud eyed the demon before him. Hodshift the engineer bristled with ears. Where a human might have a covering of hair on the upper extremities, Hodshift had layers of ears. They varied in size, shape and species of donor, so the overall effect was chaotic, but what each had in common was a pencil tucked behind it.
Some of the ears had no natural grip for a pencil, so Hodshift's hands spent a good deal of their time catching pencils that fell from his head and attempting to secure them.
“So you're saying that the rise in temperature's because of us shrinking these six souls?” Rutspud asked.
Hodshift nodded, causing a cascade of pencils. Somehow he caught them all.
“It's yer basic gas laws. Learn them early on in Infernal Engineering. Pressure of a gas is direckly proportional to the temperature.”
“But this isn't gas, it's ... souls,” said Rutspud.
“Same difference,” said Hodshift. “Make it smaller, it gets hotter. Goes for anything.”
“But just these six caused the temperature to go up everywhere?”
“What yer dealin’ wiv is a delicate e-co-lo-gy,” said Hodshift, sounding out the last word carefully. “S’like a rainforest.”
“What’s a rainforest?”
“No idea. There's consequences if you mess with this stuff. Consequences. No offence, squire, but I fink you need to see what us engineers're up against,” he said.
Hodshift led Rutspud to the wall of the Infernal Innovation cave, just to the left of the store cupboard where the tiny pop stars were exploring their new home. He held up an electronic pass to a place on the cave wall and, with a beep, a door swung open.
“I didn’t know that was there,” said Rutspud.
“You, mate, are about to go be’ind the scenes. Not many demons get to see this.”
Hodshift ushered him through. Rutspud found himself in a clean, concrete conduit that led far into the distance in either direction. Metal pipes and coloured wires took up most of the space, but there was room enough for two demons to walk side by side.
“What is all this?” he asked, pointing at the dozens of pipes, some as thick as a man's waist, others much smaller.
Hodshift pointed at the pipes in turn and reeled them off.
“That’s yer basic lava. That’s the liquid fire for the lakes. The smaller ones are, let’s see, brimstone, steam and marsh gas. Wires are fer the electrics and the communications.”
Rutspud put his hand on a red screw valve.
“So you look after these things? Make sure it all keeps, er, flowing?”
“Yes,” said Hodshift, taking Rutspud's hand and removing it pointedly from the valve. “Dangerous work, you might say. Bleeding air out of the lava pipe isn't for the faint hearted. You need to listen carefully to tell when the lava's about to blow, or you'll be blasted to buggery. Well, you would if we weren’t already there, yeah.”
Rutspud looked at Hodshift's enormous crop of ears and acknowledged with a small nod that he was the person for the careful listening job.
“We're always having to balance things,” Hodshift continued. “S’posed to be a closed system, you see. Trouble is, we have to keep everything going as it is, and there's always something comes along that upsets the apple cart. Not saying that everyone's doing that shrinking thing you got there, mind, that's new. Still, there's always something. Mostly it's just the influx of new souls.”
“Surely Hell expects new souls though?” Rutspud asked.
Hodshift gave a small bark of laughter.
“You'd think so, wouldn't you?” he said. “It don't stack up on the engineering side though. You take a closed system like we've got here and you keep on adding more energy and mass in the form of new souls. Leads to overheating like you wouldn't believe. Basic design flaw in my opinion. And don’t even get me started on the problem of dealing with entropy in a set-up that’s s’posed to last fer all time!”
“Entropy?”
“I said, don’t get me started, sunshine!”
They walked along the corridor to a section where it widened out. Bays set into the walls held dials, levers and racks of equipment. Rutspud eyed the spares that were piled up on metal shelving and wondered what Tesla could conjure with access to these supplies. Hodshift gave a low whistle as he scanned the displays.
“Look,” he said, pointing to a dial that showed a needle trembling into the red section. “We've got a situation right now. The outlying lava pools in level six are boiling over. Pound to a penny, that's part of the temperature spike you've caused down here. I'm going to have to get over there with an emergency crew. Here's a spare pass that will let you through the doors, you can find yer own way back, can't you?”
Rutspud nodded.
“That way back there,” Hodshift pointed. “Fourth door on the right, if you get to the boiler room, you've gone too far. Now, you'll make sure that shrink-a-ma-jig device gets put somewhere safe, won't you? If you want to use it again, there's a form you'll need to fill in.”
“Oh, where do I find the form?” asked Rutspud.
“Bottom of the lake of fire,” said Hodshift and ambled off along the corridor.
Manfred walked through St Cadfan’s with his sketch book and a pencilled list. He stopped Brother Clement in the corridor.
“Ah, brother,” said Manfred. “I am certain you will want to volunteer for this small improvement I'm proposing.”
“Is this about the biscuits again?” said Brother Clement, his rosary beads beginning to click.
“No, no,” said Manfred. “These are my plans for the St Cadfan's ossuary.”
“An ossuary? With bones?”
“Yes. It could turn us into a real tourist destination. These are the plans I've sketched out.”
He opened the pad and showed Brother Clement a page.
“See, this one is the feeding of the five thousand.”
“Five thousand skulls?” said Brother Clement looking at the image.
“Yes. We can hinge their jaws to show them eating.” Manfred cast an arm wide to show the scale and impact that the display would have. “This will be the unique selling point of the St Cadfan's ossuary – we will animate some of the displays, bring it right up to date.”
Manfred flipped the page.
“This one shows Jesus turning water into wine. I'm thinking of installing a little pump behind the scenes so that we can have actual wine flowing around a circuit. Well, coloured water anyway.”
“Hang on,” said Brother Clement. “You've only got twelve skeletons. How will you do all of these? They look as though they'll need hundreds.”
“Ah, you make an excellent observation, brother,” said Manfred, closing the sketch pad. “Which is where the volunteering part comes in.”
He pulled out a list with names.
“How would you feel about signing up here to donate your bones after your death?” he asked.
Brother Clement stared at him for a long moment while he processed the question.
“My bones? My bones!” he sputtered. “That's ghoulish and horrible and
I can't believe you're asking.”
Brother Clement scurried off, his beads clacking with nervous speed, like a holy Geiger counter. Manfred sighed and crossed out another name on his list. He scanned through the list and saw that the only remaining possibility was Brother Bernard. He hadn't seen him all day, so he went to the dormitories to look for him.
He knocked lightly on the door and listened for an answer. He heard nothing, so he gently opened the door and peered inside. The small window high in the wall still had its curtains closed, so there was only just enough light for Manfred to ascertain that Bernard was still in bed.
“Are you feeling all right, brother?” he asked, stepping forward. “It's past midday.”
Manfred opened the curtains and approached the bed. Bernard lay perfectly still with his mouth slightly open. Manfred's stomach did a small flip.
“Brother Bernard?” he enquired tremulously. “Care to wake up?”
He tapped the older monk’s shoulder firmly but Bernard was unresponsive. Manfred touched Bernard’s forehead. It was cold.
Manfred cleared his throat.
“Wait there,” he said, holding up an assertive hand. “Don't move! I'm going to fetch Brother Gillespie.”
He dropped his papers and ran from the room. Moments later he came back in, picked up the list of names, looked thoughtfully at it for a moment and put a question mark at the side of Bernard's name.
Rutspud was lost.
He'd spent a bit of time poking around the interesting-looking shelves, and trying to make a mental inventory so that he could ask Tesla what the things all did. Then he hadn't been able to resist taking a look further along the corridor. He found a great many doors, but was nervous of opening them without knowing where he was. He came to a door that was even thicker than the others. It was warm to the touch and had a window set within it. Rutspud peered through the grimed glass and saw a multitude of demons feeding a gigantic, towering furnace. The demons shovelled unidentifiable chunks from a huge pile into an access hatch. He peered up and saw that a similar arrangement was just visible on a platform above this team. Another access hatch and another team of shovelling demons. Rutspud wondered how far up and down this furnace stretched, with layers of demons constantly fuelling it.