The first thing to do was call Lucifuge Rofocale at headquarters and report the result of his experiment.
“Interesting,” Lucifuge said. “They left in a hurry?”
“No real turkey vulture could get up that high that fast.”
“So what is it vultures have that angels don’t, or is it the other way around?”
“I have no idea,” Orabas said.
“Neither do I. But we have experts who might know. I’ll get back to you if I find out anything.”
Orabas followed as the 205 was carried outside, with Balam and Nitibus under the tip, Gaap holding up the base by himself. They laid it down on the loading dock without going past the roof overhang, closing the shop doors when they went back in.
Orabas watched through a peephole as Zagan opened the outer gate for the truck from Parker Transport and Erection and it backed up to the loading dock. The 205 was one of their broader models and demanded a wide-load truck. Soon the men from Parker winched it aboard, red flags were attached, the demon in receiving (always in human shape) signed a form on a clipboard, and the truck was off to join its escorts waiting beyond the gate.
“Lucifuge called,” Gorgo announced when he entered the office. “Wants you to call back. Says he’s got news.”
Lucifuge’s receptionist put Orabas through right away. “Gorgo says you have news.”
“Learned something that may explain all this angelic surveillance. Seems a Holy Roller church in Arkansas tried to exorcise its steeple.”
“What denomination?”
“Assembly of God.”
Assembly of God—could it be? “Where in Arkansas?”
“Town called Pevely.”
“Afraid that rings a bell,” Orabas said. “Pevely, Arkansas,” he told Gorgo. “Look it up.”
A moment later she handed him the file. “I’m looking at our record right now. Eligor went with that steeple six months ago. He was very enthusiastic.”
“Maybe overenthusiastic,” said Lucifuge. “We’ve got to get him out of there.”
Orabas was speechless for a moment, and then it came to him. “We can do it with a bang—might as well take out the steeple at the same time.”
“How do we do that?”
“Our steeples are shipped with lightning protection—aluminum air terminal, heavy aluminum cable down. What we don’t advertise is that the grounding cable has a hidden charge that can cut it in an instant. Get the word to Eligor, send a thunderstorm over to zap the place, and he hightails it during the fireworks.”
“Clever,” said Lucifuge. “I’ll get right on it. And I know just the storm demon—Ribesal’s an artist with thunder and lightning. He’s done a few churches already.”
“Then our steeple should be a pushover for him. Built to fail if needed.” Before hanging up Orabas asked his superior if he’d found out why the angels had fled that morning.
“Not yet, but I’ll let you know as soon as I find out.”
Because he dreamed of lightning that night Orabas woke knowing the problem in Arkansas had been taken care of. As long as Eligor was home free—though he doubted that would end things, because Lucifuge had said the angelic watch was everywhere.
Except maybe here. Had the angels come back after their panicked departure?
Orabas went out to the loading dock and looked at the sky. He sighed—there they were again. But when the two birds started down, he realized they were genuine turkey vultures, doing what buzzards did. No chance of them snubbing the pig Zagan had laid out. He couldn’t imagine what had sent the two angels rocketing upward yesterday.
Orabas ate his breakfast of centipedes and habañeros with renewed gusto and would have flirted with Gorgo when he went to the office, except she and Toglas seemed to have reached an understanding. Orabas was never one to interfere with romance.
Everything was fine on the shop floor. When he came back, Orabas put his hooves up on his desk and decided to relax. Then the phone rang, and Gorgo signaled him. It was Lucifuge.
“We’ve found out why your angels left in such a hurry. Ethyl mercaptan.”
Orabas was baffled. “I don’t know the lady.”
“Be serious,” Lucifuge snapped. “It’s a chemical compound, not a person. Given off by dead things. Vultures home in on it.”
“I thought they just had very good eyes.”
“They do. But they have good noses too. Ethyl mercaptan is a sulfur compound. It seems angels can’t stand the smell.”
Orabas snorted at the idea, never having met a sulfur compound he didn’t like. Angels were wimps.
Lucifuge continued: “Your little experiment paid off. So we’re going to scale up: I’m going to have dead animals laid out around other churches and steeple factories—randomly chosen, so there won’t be any visible pattern—and for good measure we’ll douse other sites with the straight chemical and see how that works by itself. Already buying half a ton of the stuff.”
“Ship some my way,” Orabas said. “I can keep it in reserve.”
“I’ll send a liter. More than enough, because a little goes a long way.”
Afterward Orabas grinned in satisfaction. He hadn’t told Lucifuge what he’d reserve the stuff for. If any angels with flaming swords ever showed up they’d get a fine surprise when Couching and Portal went down.
Orabas drove Toglas back to Atlanta International Sunday afternoon. Both of them watched the churches they passed. There were no vultures above the first steeple. Soul’s Lighthouse had three, which meant they were real buzzards: like Mormon missionaries, angels always traveled in pairs.
“Looks as if it’s working,” Orabas said.
“The randomness helps,” Toglas said. “They don’t know what’s going on. So much for omniscience.”
“It doesn’t reach down past the top. And nowadays He’s mostly an absentee landlord.”
“Good thing,” said Toglas.
“Gorgo is going to miss you.”
“I’m going to miss her too. But my job here is done.” He shook his head in admiration, repeating what he’d already said more than once. “Her books were perfect, especially the fake ones. Real attention to detail.”
Orabas smiled. “Told you so.”
When he let the accountant off at the airport Toglas wished him good luck with the Reverend Simpson’s plant visit.
Just as long as that preacher calls ahead, Orabas thought as he pulled away.
Returning, he watched for vultures but saw nothing out of the ordinary until the drive leading to the plant, where he saw two shapes circling very far up.
“Are the angels back?” he asked Zagan when he stopped at the gate.
Zagan flared his enormous nostrils wider, testing the air, and finally shook his head. “Can’t be sure. They’re too high to smell.”
“Keep your eyes peeled. And when it’s really dark, go see how much of the pig is left.”
If those soaring pinpoints really were angels, why had they zeroed in on the factory again? Orabas was sure nobody here had made a mistake, not gone outside in their natural form, released sulfur in the daytime, anything on the list. He’d even given another security lecture after Zagan alerted him.
Could be they’d found out where the Arkansas Holy Rollers steeple came from. Or maybe it was because they’d been the first to set out carrion and brought real buzzards to show up the angels. There was even a chance it was just a fluke.
But Orabas went to the shop floor for reassurance. The crew was off for the night, and he was alone with the steeples.
There the mercaptan was, attached to the central ceiling girder, with a bursting charge taped to it that Orabas could trigger with a garage door opener. The carefully packed liter bottle had been delivered late Saturday, by a person who might have been an actual FedEx driver—though Orabas suspected otherwise.
Gaap had been able to put it up without a ladder, while Balam had wondered what it was for. All Orabas told him was, “Think of it as the equivalent of a spr
inkler system.”
Reverend Clyde Simpson called to let them know he’d be arriving in the afternoon, so they had plenty of time to get ready.
The whole place was wrapped in illusion. In the office the mummified hand Gorgo used for a paperweight had turned to a millefiori glass hemisphere, and Orabas’s huge throne with the hole for his tail seemed just another Aeron chair.
Perfecting the look of the factory floor was more complicated. The graffito GOD = DOG had been rendered invisible, the rat-on-a-stick skewers thrown into the trash. Orabas and Gorgo went around with checklists—fire extinguishers and location signs for fire extinguishers, safety warnings, motivational posters—with Gorgo especially meticulous because she read all the OSHA literature.
They gathered round Orabas for final instructions before they broke for lunch, with Gaap still towering above the others, even with everyone in human form: “You all know what to do already, but let me repeat. Keep busy without faking it. I’ll try to do all the talking—though if he stops and asks you a question give sensible answers. Smile and be polite. And remember, it can’t last long. It’s not like this preacher wants to know the details.”
A little after two Zagan alerted Orabas with a high-pitched whistle undetectable by the human ear. He ambled out to the loading dock, to see Zagan opening the outer gate for Reverend Simpson’s car. He glanced at the sky but couldn’t tell whether there was anything up there. He’d worry about that later.
Orabas went down the stairs at the end of the dock and was waiting in the receiving yard when the glossy black Lincoln pulled up beside him. Simpson came out like a jack-in-the-box and pumped Orabas’s hand enthusiastically. He was a tall, wide man in a white suit and pale blue tie, with mobile eyebrows and impressive gray hair. He had tons of charisma, though more from testosterone than pneuma.
“So good of you to let me see your plant. Michaelis said you were the best.”
“We try,” Orabas said. Though kickbacks help too.
The reverend didn’t want to wear the hard hat with the cross decal, but Orabas insisted, tapping his own for demonstration. “It’s a safety regulation. We like to think of it as the whole armor of God.”
“If it’s a regulation,” Simpson said, putting the helmet on crooked. Doesn’t want to mess up his coiffure, Orabas realized.
The pastor blinked as they went in out of the sunlight, then looked around the factory, neat and bright in its phantasmal form. Balam and Nitibus were deburring the edges of the Four-Square spire, and a buffer was chuffing at the far end. “Like a church,” Simpson murmured.
Orabas nodded solemnly. “We try to keep it that way. Because what we do is God’s work too.”
The tour went well. Every demon on the shop floor behaved properly, and Orabas was showing Simpson the paint room with its huge exhaust fans when there was an inhumanly loud roar from outside: Zagan shouting a warning. A second later a flaming sword smashed through the skylight, and the angelic raid was on.
The Reverend Simpson stared and screamed as Orabas and the others assumed their true forms. Angels cascaded from the shattered skylight, a chaos of wings and fiery weapons. Orabas waited till they were almost upon him before triggering the bursting charge on the mercaptan, gleefully watching the perfect, righteous visages writhing in disgust and horror. Beside him, the preacher was bent over, retching.
Time to go home. Orabas sank through the floor, dropping into the dormitory of demons in reserve. Wakened by the noise above, they were sitting up in their bunks. “It’s a raid,” he shouted. “Time to go to hell.”
Then everyone was homeward bound, sinking through clay and slate and the darker, denser strata. Things became pleasantly warm.
Orabas hugged himself as he went down. He had no regrets—except not being able to carry on longer. But twenty years of stealth and subversion might be a record. The tales they’d tell when they got home.
And there were still lots of steeples with resident demons.
But best of all had been the expressions of the angels deluged with mercaptan. Maybe they wouldn’t be so eager in the future. Attack a devil, expect a stink.
For Sale
DAVID SAKMYSTER
Featured Home of the Week:
666 Nevermore Trail, Kingston, MA
I. Property Summary
A classical nineteenth-century Victorian with a mansard roof, wrought-iron cresting around a beautiful stained-glass cupola, dormer windows and ivy-ensnared walls. Eight thousand square feet of interior living space1 comprising three gorgeous, if perennially dusty, upper levels and including a substantive wine cellar/dungeon. Other beneficial features unique to this property include a network of adjoining caverns,2 a conservatory still stocked with unusual (if a tad overgrown) fauna, a sublevel apothecary and a soundproof science lab.
And did we mention gargoyles?
One clinging to each cornice, these stone sentinels can be thought of as your own private security force. Neighbors (when there used to be some) would complain that these stone features were actually inclined to detach and go flying around in the night, often abducting (and consuming) their fluffy pets, then spitting the bones out over the lawn.3
Main levels are in excellent condition considering the lapse in ownership. Just some stubborn traces of gore remain, but otherwise this house is move-in ready, just waiting for that lucky new owner (which might be you—so don’t dawdle, visit today! Open House midnight–four A.M.).
Still not decided? Read on—you won’t be disappointed.
Exterior: a delight for any true craftsman with creativity and vision. The condition of the walled perimeter allows one the opportunity to redesign the crumbling stone partitions to one’s own specifications.4
The views from the open balconies: breathtaking. The steaming swamp pits along Cemetery Ridge bathe the crumbling mausoleums in decadently swirling mists, while the perpetually bleak forest to the east creates a haven for young children to play in and explore. Every spring, the scents of decomposing flesh emanate from the ice, and bloated carrion birds take to the sky with wild abandon.
Municipal records reveal nothing about this property—as if someone has purposely erased the records. Likewise, a perusal of local atlases (and even Google Maps) finds no such home where this one rests.
Which is all good news for you, the prospective buyer. You know the old adage “There’s nothing certain but death and taxes”? Well, not in this case. One of the best features about this property is that taxes are almost nonexistent!5
II. Location and Home Defense
The typical axiom has never been more fitting than with this property: location is everything. A steep, winding road approaches from only one direction, and the turnoff to your street is all but concealed by prickly shrubs and thorny ferns of the carnivorous variety.
From the western approach: as mentioned, the pond. Bubbling all year round and never freezing, it’s the perfect spa, medicinal and invigorating—as long as you stay away from the northern end, where the submerged caskets and the glowing barrels are most prevalent.
In terms of home defense, the ramparts are more than adequate to dump scalding oil or other noxious refuse down upon unwanted visitors, and should any daring investigators or pesky ghost-hunter Travel Channel nuisances breach the front door, the foyer is equipped with a working trapdoor,6 leading to a (near as we can tell) bottomless pit.
III. Amenities and Features
Putting aside speculation about how the previous tenant could have failed to hold (and love) this home, it seems he left in a great hurry, forgoing the transport of even his most valuable personal property. Whatever remains in the house (everything you see here!) is included in the asking price.
The main living room, for example, sports an enormous emerald throne whose surface is so polished you can see your reflection.7
And within the central cupola, just above the master’s chambers, there sits this property’s prime attraction: an immense globe of utter darkness. Set in a golden co
ntainer, it spins endlessly, and if one peers too long into its depths, a certain ease settles upon the soul, stirring visions of unimaginable vistas and alien skies.
The black globe spins for a successor, we like to think. Someone with the inner strength to rule a place such as this.
Through the years, several other interested parties have visited during our infrequent open houses. But so far, none have been willing to pay the price, meager as it is.8
And of course, we like to believe in the old real estate truism “The house chooses its next owner.”
It could choose you.
But you’re not decided. Understandable. It’s a big step, and you’re concerned about maintenance.
IV. Staffing and Support
Unquestionably, the upkeep of such a large and enviable property requires a substantial body of employees.
If you’re a Necromancer, your task is significantly easier—as evidenced by the scattered bones strewn here and there about the grounds (and, most likely, in the pond). A major portion of your needs surely could be met simply by raising what your predecessor left behind.
If necromancy is not in your skill set, another steady pool of laborers exists down in the valley, unaware of this property’s existence except through occasionally disquieting dreams or bouts of unexplained irritable bowel syndrome.
Easy pickins.
V. Price and Closing Costs
Consider well this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Carefully reflect on all the intangibles. Think of all the fun your young ones will have exploring the forest, discovering the home’s secret passageways or just inviting their friends over to play with ancient torture devices.
And don’t forget those abysmally low taxes!
Consider too the mystery of the strange black orb, and yes—you must also consider the curious fate of the previous tenant.9
But don’t wait. Come and take the tour. Drive on up; just keep an eye out for that sneaky right turn or you’ll quickly get lost in the woods. And if you find yourself in the middle of a cemetery with a fair amount of open graves, you’ve gone too far.
Aftertaste Page 24