Beelzebub apparently didn’t want to hear my confession of ignorance, because he wrapped one of those face tentacles around my neck and lifted me up to stare into his maw. The remains of some meal or another still twitched in there, and I looked away before I recognized it. The damned sank lower in their chairs. I caught sight of Malachi scampering away to hide in a cubicle, the papers from Zqqerrty’fll’s talons clutched in his little claws. Not for the first time, I wished I’d been spawned as something simple like an imp.
“Hell needs a special investigative demon,” Beelzebub said, his spittle burning my skin. “Hell does not need a failed special investigative demon.”
“But I’m sure I can figure it out,” I said. “It may take me a few minutes, though.”
“Say my name three times when you have found the murderer,” Beelzebub said, dropping me and glowering at the damned huddled behind their computers. “But do not punish them yourself. Save that for me.”
I almost felt sorry for the damned. Almost.
Beelzebub left us then, tearing open a hellmouth in the wall to a level of Hell I didn’t even dare gaze upon. Thankfully, he pulled it shut again after stepping through. I didn’t need all the things on the other side looking over my shoulder as I worked.
I sighed again as I looked at the damned in their cubicles.
“I don’t suppose anyone is going to own up to this?” I asked, but they all kept their heads down. I would have done the same thing.
I studied the damned. There were only a witch’s dozen of them. A manageable list of suspects. I could have gone back to the Department of Admissions and Exits for some information on them, but the only clerk there, Baal, had gone missing again. Well, not exactly missing. We knew where he was. He’d disguised himself as a sinner and was hiding out in the vast crowd in the waiting room. He’d left behind a note in the form of another sinner crucified to the wall with shards of bone ripped from the sinner’s own rib cage. The sinner wailed that Baal wasn’t coming back until we found him some help filling out the Books of Blood. Baal was tired of inscribing all the names of the damned in the Books by himself, and he was even more tired of chasing down sinners to carve new pages for the Books out of their flesh.
But there was a spawning freeze on, so there would be no help for Baal. The crucified sinner suggested we invest in a computer system, and I told him that was a good idea and he should bring it up with Beelzebub. He stopped wailing after that.
So here I was, a dead demon at my feet and an office full of damned I didn’t know anything about. Some eons it doesn’t pay to get out of the lava pits.
At first glance, the damned in Infernal Office 272B didn’t seem different from any of the other damned in Hell. They had the thousand-year stare. They stank like mortals tended to stink after ages of not being able to bathe or put on deodorant and perfume. They wore the same clothes they’d died in, which was the only way I could tell them apart.
Most of them typed idly at their keyboards now that Beelzebub was gone. They couldn’t help but keep working – that was the nature of their damnation – but they obviously didn’t see any point in trying hard to finish whatever it was they were doing.
Three of them, however, worked at a frantic pace, typing as if their lives depended on it. A man whose hair was impossibly well groomed, and whose tie was perfectly knotted. I decided to call him Pride. The other man wore a golf shirt stained with blood from stab wounds. He didn’t look like the type to get into knife fights, so I figured him for the fatality of an affair. I named him Adultery. Then there was the woman who wore a ripped business suit with a corset showing underneath and rope burns around her neck. Lust.
They were my suspects because ... well, I didn’t really have a good reason other than they kept working hard. But that was enough in Hell.
Malachi wandered back out of the cubicle. He was munching on the papers he’d taken from Zqqerrty’fll’s talons. I snatched them away and shoved them into my shoulder spines for safekeeping in case they were evidence. Malachi shrieked at me, but he was always shrieking at someone. Maybe someday the spawning demons would provide me with a translation demon so I would know what Malachi was shrieking about.
I was so lost in glowering at him that I almost didn’t notice when one of the damned spoke up. A fat man wearing a housecoat who barely fit in his cubicle. Gluttony. All the sins looked to be represented here in this office.
“He just collapsed,” the man said. “Like he had a heart attack.”
“Demons can’t die of heart attacks,” I said. I looked back down at Zqqerrty’fll. I didn’t think we could, anyway. What would the odds be of all his hearts stopping at once?
“Maybe it was a stroke then,” Gluttony said.
“Or an act of God,” one of the others said, now that the silence had been broken. A woman in a hospital gown with an IV bag draped over her shoulder. Pestilence. She turned back to her computer when I looked at her, realizing her choice of words hadn’t been well thought out.
“What was he doing when he collapsed?” I asked.
Gluttony shrugged, and his body rippled and shook. Malachi circled his cubicle, crooning at him.
“He was just reading the report,” Gluttony said, his eyes flicking to the papers in my shoulder spines.
The report. The damnation of these sinners was they had to write a new report for Zqqerrty’fll each evening. The truly fiendish part of the damnation was they didn’t know what kind of report he wanted. It could be anything. Cost-benefit analyses of adding a new speed to windshield wipers. The chemical makeups of the gases given off by Ikea furniture. A quarterly report of a fictional restaurant. They never had any idea. Only Zqqerrty’fll knew. And he never told anyone what he wanted until after the reports were written.
The ones who guessed the correct subject were rewarded at least. Zqqerrty’fll gave them a pass from having to work overtime for a shift. But every one of the damned who submitted the wrong report was forced to work overtime. Overtime in this office meant time was actually stretched so it made everything feel like it took longer to do. It doesn’t sound that bad until you’ve lived a few centuries of it.
I knew the chance of coming up with the report that Zqqerrty’fll wanted in any given shift was about the same as finding an innocent sinner in Hell. Most of the damned didn’t bother. They couldn’t help but work on the reports – they were bound to their fate just as much as we demons are bound to our bodies – but many of them simply typed random words into their computers or created random graphs and charts. This had resulted in a few interesting accidents, such as the time one of the sinners had written the sequel to Hamlet without even realizing it. Zqqerrty’fll had laughed about that one the last time I’d run into him at the lava pits. He’d tried to describe the sinner’s expression when he’d realized what he had done and Zqqerrty’fll had ripped up the report and eaten it in front of him, but it was one of those things where you had to be there.
So why were Pride, Adultery and Lust working so hard to finish their reports, especially now that Zqqerrty’fll was dead? There was something going on. I just had to figure out what.
“I’ll give a day off to the first damned who tells me what really happened to Zqqerrty’fll,” I said.
It was unthinkable. None of the damned in Hell ever got a reprieve like that. What would be the point of Hell if you got to escape it? Also, I wasn’t sure if I had the authority to authorize such a reward. But this was an extraordinary circumstance, so I felt justified in making such an offer. Besides, who would they complain to if I didn’t honour the offer?
Equally unthinkable was the fact no one answered me. They all looked at each other but didn’t say anything. No one knew what had happened to Zqqerrty’fll. No one except the murderer or murderers. Whoever had killed Zqqerrty’fll had managed to do so in a way that the others hadn’t noticed.
I looked back at Zqqerrty’fll for clues. There was nothing unusual about his appearance, except for the fact he was dead. If th
ere were no signs of struggle on or around Zqqerrty’fll, then how could he have died?
I clasped my claws behind my back and paced around the body. It was something the mortals did to help them think. Malachi did the same behind me, gibbering quietly to himself.
Could Zqqerrty’fll have been poisoned? The water cooler by him was empty, but that didn’t mean anything. The water cooler was supposed to be empty. Another way to torture the damned. Perhaps it was something Zqqerrty’fll had eaten?
I went into the break room and looked around, but I saw only the usual things. A vending machine stocked with potato chips and chocolate bars. A fridge with nothing in it. A microwave with a cup of cold coffee on the tray. I dunked Malachi’s face into it and made him drink some. He coughed and squealed but didn’t die, so I figured it was just Zqqerrty’fll’s forgotten coffee. The damned weren’t allowed such treats as hot coffee, after all.
But then I went back into the office and caught Lust taking a sip of hot tea from her mug. She put it down hurriedly when she saw me, but not before I noticed the steam rising from the mug. The look on her face told me she knew she shouldn’t be drinking a hot drink. Yes, something was definitely going on here.
I wondered if one of the damned had managed to smuggle in some sort of secret weapon from the mortal world. Maybe this was another new phone incident. I stomped over to the cubicles and tore out the desk drawers of the damned in search of a secret technology capable of killing a demon. But I didn’t find anything other than staplers and rubber bands and Post-it Notes and the usual office supplies. Nothing that could have reduced Zqqerrty’fll to the pitiful shell of the demon he’d once been.
Malachi kicked over the garbage cans while I worked, emulating me. He threw crumpled balls of paper at the damned with screeches of rage or maybe glee. Then he stuck his head in an empty chip bag hidden near the bottom of one can and started licking the inside of it.
Wait. An empty chip bag? The damned shouldn’t have been able to buy chips. The vending machines were supposed to be locked down with wards that kept them permanently out of order to anyone but demons. The same with the microwave. Temptations that could never be realized. But these office appliances obviously didn’t have wards. Either that or the damned had found some way around them, which was impossible. Just as impossible as Zqqerrty’fll’s death.
I went through the garbage in the office and found more empty chip bags in the cans belonging to Pride, Adultery and Lust. So my initial suspicions of them had turned out to be accurate. But I was no closer to solving the murder.
“Almost done,” Pride said. For a moment I thought he was talking to me, but then Adultery and Lust nodded. I glanced at the clock on the wall to see how close they were to finishing their shift, but there was no clock on the wall. There was just a circular patch of paint a different colour where the clock had hung. Brown instead of the cubicle grey the walls now were. The custodial demons had cut a few corners the last time they’d painted. But I guess they had a lot of Hell to cover.
I looked around for another clock, but I couldn’t see one anywhere in the office. Just more brown circles.
I scratched my head with my tail again as I pondered. So many clues, but I didn’t know how to put them together ...
And why would Pride announce he was almost done? Was there something special about his report? Was he writing a murder confession? I looked at his monitor but the words on it didn’t make any sense. They were nonsense, gibberish in a made-up language, accompanied by a few strange shapes and doodles.
I went around the other cubicles, looking at all the monitors. Everyone’s report was meaningless: Pestilence was writing some sort of diary about her life in Hell. A man in a T-shirt and ripped jeans I decided to call Sloth was just holding down the A key and watching the letter repeat itself. Gluttony was using his mouse to draw a picture of the office, complete with a stick man representation of me and a little stick man Malachi. The real Malachi screeched at the sight of his double and attacked the monitor.
Then I looked at Adultery’s monitor. His report was written in the same strange language as Pride’s, and repeated some of the odd shapes. He typed even harder as I looked over his shoulder. As did Lust. And her monitor showed the same thing. They were all working on the same report. And hurrying to finish ...
Why would the three of them be working on the same report? I was so intent on the question I barely noticed Malachi drag Gluttony’s monitor to the floor and start biting it.
I pulled the papers from my shoulder spines to see what sort of report Zqqerrty’fll had been reading when he’d dropped dead. But it wasn’t a report. It was a memo summarizing all the things that had gone missing around the office.
The clocks on the walls.
The locks on the restroom doors.
The pentagrams and wards that were supposed to seal off the vending machines and microwave.
The office time sheets.
That was all I could make out because Malachi’s saliva had melted the rest of the words. But that was all I needed. The missing items had one thing in common.
They were all related to binding and imprisonment in the office.
I slapped my head with my tail. Now I understood.
I looked at the damned again as Malachi threw himself upon Gluttony with a screech of delighted rage. Or maybe raging delight. Gluttony screeched himself. But I didn’t pay attention to him or Malachi. I was looking at Pride and Adultery and Lust.
“I know what you did,” I said.
“Too late,” Pride said with a grin and hit the enter key. Adultery and Lust did the same at their keyboards. They looked at me expectantly.
Malachi screeched again and fell off Gluttony. He shook like he was being electrified, which he normally enjoyed. But this time he gurgled a few times and then curled up on the worn carpet, as still as Zqqerrty’fll.
I sighed, and the smiles faded from the faces of Pride and Adultery and Lust.
“That didn’t exactly work out like you’d planned, did it?” I said.
They just turned paler shades of pale than the damned usually are in Hell. They knew they were in deep trouble. The deepest levels of Hell kind of trouble.
I looked at their monitors again. The words and symbols were glowing now, pulsing with power.
“We can make a deal,” Pride said.
“After you killed my imp?” I said and shook my head. “Beelzebub Beelzebub Beelzebub.”
The hellmouth opened in the wall again and Beelzebub crawled through from a place best not described. Screams rent the air and the damned put their hands to their ears. I guess they couldn’t appreciate the disturbing harmony.
Beelzebub snapped his face tentacles together and black liquid sprayed the room, splattering me and the damned. I chose not to say anything about it, but Lust began to silently pray. A little late for that.
“You have solved Zqqerrty’fll’s murder,” Beelzebub said. It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes and no,” I said, then quickly explained before he could choke me again. “Technically, I don’t think Zqqerrty’fll was murdered.”
Beelzebub looked down at Zqqerrty’fll’s body. “I see no signs of life.”
I pointed at the damned in what I hoped was a dramatic fashion. “A million monkeys typing on a million typewriters for a million years will eventually produce the works of William Shakespeare,” I said. The way Pride and Adultery and Lust sagged lower in their seats told me I was right.
“What does that Shakespeare seraphim have to do with this?” Beelzebub asked. “Did he murder Zqqerrty’fll?”
I tried not to sigh out loud. “No, the damned did,” I said. “Or rather, they figured out how to unbind him.”
“It was an accident!” Lust shrieked, which just told me it wasn’t.
Beelzebub turned to her and rubbed his tentacles together. She passed out, falling face-first onto her desk. That wouldn’t help her, either. Hell would still be here when she woke up.
I looked down at Pride. “My guess is you stumbled across a simple spell first. Something that broke the wards around the microwave and vending machine. Something that made the clocks disappear. Am I right?” Pride looked around as if searching for a place to hide. But this was Hell.
“That’s right,” Adultery said. “It was his idea.”
“I was helping you and this is how you thank me?” Pride said, glaring at him.
“You only told us because you couldn’t manage the unbinding on your own,” Adultery said, shaking his head. He turned to Beelzebub. “I’ll tell you everything in return for leniency.” He knew better than to ask for immunity.
“We were going to find a way to escape!” Pride said, then slapped a hand over his mouth, as he realized he’d said too much.
“There is no escape from Hell,” Beelzebub said.
“There’s never been a murder in Hell, either,” I said, nodding at Zqqerrty’fll.
Beelzebub stomped over to Pride’s cubicle to inspect his monitor more closely. He glanced down at Malachi as he went.
“What happened to the imp?” he asked.
“The latest ritual of unbinding,” I said. “I think they intended to use it against whoever replaced Zqqerrty’fll. To buy themselves some time while they figured out their next spell. They probably thought it was going to take me out, but I guess the ritual saw Malachi as the more immediate threat.”
“Next spell?” Beelzebub asked.
“The one that will teleport them out of Hell or make them invisible or summon an angel or whatever it will do. The one that will unbind them from Hell.”
The looks on the faces of Pride and Adultery told me I was right.
Beelzebub wrapped a tentacle around Pride’s face and lifted him from his chair. “Where did you send Zqqerrty’fll?”
“I don’t have a clue,” Pride cried around a mouthful of oozing black sucker. “All we did was unbind him. One minute he was here, the next he wasn’t.”
Has The World Ended Yet? Page 28