“Tell what?” I could smell the faint odor of his decay even in this gray nowhere, the musty, nauseating sweetness of something that had spent a long time dead and undiscovered.
“Tell it why you go back. Why you help little thing. Why no run, save you.”
It took me a while. In my defense, may I remind the jury about the thousands of hours of sadistic torment I’d undergone. Anyway, at last the astonishing truth dawned: this horrible creature wanted to know why I’d gone back to save Gob. He had watched the whole thing, it seemed, not just Riprash’s meeting but what happened afterward.
“Why did I go back? Because it was my fault the kid was there in the first place.” It had suddenly occurred to me that maybe Stabby McMurder-Mummy was now searching for Gob too, so I tried to make the kid seem less important. “I forced him to come with me in the first place. He didn’t want to leave Abaddon. I was just trying to help him . . .”
“No!” It was the first time I had ever heard anything like anger out of Smyler. Ordinarily he was as weirdly cheerful as one of those old grandpas who don’t speak any English that you see sitting in the back of Chinese grocery stores watching the news in Mandarin. “No,” he said a little more calmly. “You no help. Angel help. You devil. Keefs tell me. Devil in angel clothes.”
“Keefs . . . ?” It sounded weirdly familiar. Again, it took me longer than it should have. “Wait a minute—Kephas?” Sam’s mysterious benefactor. The angel who had made the deal with Eligor and used the golden feather as a marker. “You know Kephas?”
“Keefs . . . Kephas so beautiful. Beautiful like clouds and silver.” And suddenly the thing smiled, a full display of those ugly little bottom teeth as well as the few nubs in its upper gums. “Kephas tell it, do my words, and it will be an angel too.”
“What will be an angel? What is ‘it’?”
Smyler pointed the knife at his own chest. “It. It will be an angel if it do everything right. Kephas says it will.”
Oh my sweet God, I realized. He thinks he’ll get to be an angel by killing me.
“I am an angel,” I said, slowly and carefully. “I’m Doloriel, Advocate Angel of the Third House. Are you saying that Kephas told you I was . . . some kind of devil? It wasn’t Eligor who sent you after me?”
Smyler tipped his head to one side like a puzzled dog. For the first time I realized that he was as naked as I was, but whatever external features he’d once had, like genitalia, were gone, just more ruined, dead flesh. “Eligor?”
“The big old demon who owns this place. The one whose prisoner I am. You weren’t working for him, but for an angel?”
“It loves angels.” The corpse-puppet head bobbed up and down. “It will be angel when it’s done.”
I don’t like these “everything you know is wrong” moments when they happen to me in the course of absolutely ordinary life, but I like them even less when I’m a prisoner in Hell, taking a little break between bouts of indescribable punishment. What was going on here? This monstrous thing, this gibbering killer, didn’t belong to Eligor and maybe never had? Now that I thought about it, the grand duke’s reaction when I mentioned Smyler’s name had been a bit strange, a bit . . . noncommittal. But why would Kephas employ such a creature? Wasn’t Kephas hiding his or her identity from the rest of Heaven precisely because Kephas thought the Highest was too rough on the souls of the dead? How did that gibe with sending a serial murderer after a perfectly blameless angel? Who was the real villain here, Eligor, Grand Duke of Hell, or Kephas, supposed heavenly idealist? Neither of them? Both of them?
“How did you meet Kephas?” I asked.
Smyler stared hard at me, perhaps sensing some of the unhappiness behind my words. “Kephas came. Kephas spoke. Showed it Heaven. Showed it the light. Told it Papa Man and Mama were wrong. It wasn’t bad, it was made for . . . something else.”
“Papa Man? Mama?” Smyler had been alive once, so of course he must have had a family, or at least a mother, but it had been a long time since I had thought of him as anything other than a force of supernatural evil. “Were those your parents?”
“It was their cross to bear. Mama always said. It was borned because Papa Man had the sin of pride. Because he tried to make a baby at her when she was blessed by God to stay a version.”
“A . . . virgin?”
“Yes. Version. But Papa Man put the dirty in her. He made it inside her, and when it came out she saw it was ugly bad. That was what she said, what Mama said.” Smyler was getting worked up again, his voice getting monotonous and rushed as though the words were carried along on a river of feelings too fast and deep to be reached or even looked at closely. “Dirty thing, dirty thing, and Papa Man left it behind like dirt on the floor. Like mud on her dress. Can’t beat the dirty out of it, that’s what Mama said. Can’t make it die because God has reason for it. God wants it in the world, no matter how ugly bad. No matter how ugly bad and mean and wrong . . .”
I almost wish I’d never asked. It had been unpleasant enough just knowing it was out there and wanted to find me, this vile thing, this monster that had killed so many innocent people. Knowing how it had become such a monster was worse. Much worse.
It told me its story in bits and pieces, in strands that at first seemed to have no connection but later proved to be bits of a larger web. In some ways the tale was depressingly familiar, the dreadful story of so many sociopaths and religious psychopaths, a child treated like an animal or worse, the name of God used as the excuse for torture, an existence with no safe place, no kindness, no love. It was almost like Smyler’s vicious, dreadful parents had done their best to make something even more terrible than themselves, and they succeeded.
But every time he had killed, at least during his mortal life, Smyler had thought he was sending something beautiful to Heaven, a gift for the angels. Even the name he had given himself, the name he had left at the scene of so many brutal crimes, was not meant to evoke Chaucer’s “smyler with a knyfe,” but because when she had finished beating him, or puncturing him with sharp things, or burning his fingers or toes or face with a hot iron, Mama would always tell him, “Stop crying. You’d better smile. Remember, God loves you.”
And that was how he thought of himself, how he still thought of himself, no matter how deep the blood and madness. He was God’s smiling little soldier.
The story trailed off at last in confusion, because Smyler himself still didn’t know what to make of me. His tunnel-vision idea of the world, the same crazy focus that had set him to murder and driven him to follow me all the way to Hell, was not able to easily absorb new information, and the new idea that I wasn’t some kind of demon pretending to be an angel had left him baffled and uncertain of what to do next.
“It has to think. It has to pray. God will tell it what to do.” Smyler revealed the hand that he had kept hidden since he entered the gray space. It looked no different from the other, until first his fingertips began to glow, then the fingers themselves, then his palm too, until I could see his bones through the skin as though they were made of blazing phosphorus. His hand was so bright it was hard to look directly at it.
“What . . . ?” I blinked. If I could have raised my hands in front of my eyes I would have, but I was still helpless below the neck. “What are you doing?”
“Hand of Glory. Kephas gave it the Hand. To do God’s work.” Smyler swiped the glow at the gray nothing that surrounded us. The nothingness tore, leaving a ragged, smoldering edge and more nothingness beyond. Then Smyler climbed through the hole.
“Wait!” I cried. “Don’t go! Don’t leave me . . . !”
But it was no use. He was gone. The gleaming wound healed over in an instant and vanished. The gray was empty once more and I was alone.