Like settling vicious blossom with his streamers rippling up above him in Meccano colours, green and red, the devil touched down lightly on the sprung pine floorboards. He made a great show of setting Michael Warren safely back on terra firma in one piece, so that the infant would feel bad for ever having doubted his infernal benefactor’s honourable intentions.
“There! We’re right back where I found you, and without a blonde curl out of place. I’ll bet you’re starting to appreciate just what a decent fellow I can be. As well, I’ll bet you’re worrying about exactly how you’re going to pay me for the marvellous excursion we’ve just been on. Well, you needn’t fret. I’ve got a tiny errand you could do for me in mind. Then we’d be quits, like we agreed. You do remember our agreement, don’t you?”
The tot’s eyes were darting back and forth as he in turn considered and ruled out escape routes. You could almost see the miniature cogs turning in his head before he came to the discouraging conclusion that there wasn’t anywhere that he might run to where the devil couldn’t snatch him up before he’d gone three paces. With his gaze still fluttering about evasively, he nodded with reluctance in response to the fiend’s question.
“Yes. You said if I did you a favour sometime then you’d take me on your ride for nothing. But that wiz only a little while ago. You made it sound as if I wouldn’t have to pay the favour back until a long time had gone by.”
The devil smirked indulgently.
“I think you’ll find that what I said was you could do a favour for me further down the line, which is to say at some point in the future. As it happens, that’s exactly where my little errand’s going to take you. There’s a person living forty or so years due west of here, in the next century, who I’m not very happy with. What I’d be very much obliged if you’d arrange for me is to have this unpleasant person killed. Specifically, I want their breastbone smashed to flakes of chalk. I want their heart and lungs crushed into an undifferentiated pulp. Just carry out this simple task for me, and I’ll magnanimously cancel all outstanding debts between us. How’s that for a handsome proposition?”
Michael Warren’s jaw fell open and he mutely shook his head from side to side as he began to back uncertainly away from slinky Sam O’Day. The devil sighed regretfully and took a step towards the boy. Perhaps a livid and perpetual scar across his spirit-belly would convince him that there wasn’t really much room for negotiation here.
It was at this point that the sharp voice of the chestnut lady rang out from behind the demon’s back.
“Not that way, dear. You come towards me. Don’t let that old fright tell you what’s what.”
The fiend wheeled round indignantly upon the source of this ill-mannered interruption. Standing upright now beside her smoking brazier, the dream or ghost of the old biddy had pink cheeks and iron eyes that were fixed unwaveringly on the fiend. Dressed in black skirts she wore an apron that was also black, with iridescent scarabs and winged solar discs embroidered on its hem. The woman was a deathmonger, and something told the devil that her presence here did not bode well for his immediate intentions with regard to Michael Warren. She called out again, not taking her dark, beady eye from the arch-demon for an instant.
“That’s a good boy. You go round him and you come to me. Don’t worry, dear. I’ll see he doesn’t hurt you.”
From the corner of his red left eye he saw the child run scampering past in the direction of the brazier’s sulking glow. Incensed, the devil turned his most bone-melting glare on the old relic as he spoke directly to her.
“Oh. You’ll see that I don’t hurt him, will you? And how will you manage that, exactly, from the septic depths of my digestive system?”
The old girl’s eyes narrowed. Stepping timidly out of the shadows of the alley-mouth behind her were a gang of dirty and delinquent-looking children, possibly the ones he’d dive-bombed earlier when him and Michael Warren had been setting off upon their flight. As the deathmonger spoke again she did so slowly, in a tone of cold deliberation.
“I’m a deathmonger, my dear, and we know all the oldest remedies. We’ve even got a remedy for you.”
Taking one small hand from behind her back she hurled a fistful of some viscous substance on the greying coals. She then took from a pocket of her apron a small bottle of cheap scent which she upended over her night-watchman’s brazier. Stale perfume hissed upon hot embers where the rancid fish-guts were already cooking, and the devil screamed. He couldn’t … aah! He couldn’t stand it. An allergic spasm shuddered through his substance and his rags stood up stiff as he retched. It was the cursing conjuror in Persia, it was stinking Persia all over again and like then he could feel his very semblance starting to unravel. He boiled up into another body, an enormous brazen dragon with a bellowing three-headed man astride its back and snorting through his bull’s head, lowing though his head like a black ram and stamping, stamping until all the timbers of the timeless Attics shook like straw, like water. Down below him he could see the scuttling tartan form of Michael Warren as the toddler ran to hide in the deathmonger’s skirts.
He was swallowing his own volcanic spit, the nausea and wracking torment threatening to shatter him. He coughed, and down his human nose came burning snot, black blood and a confusion of exotic sub-atomic particles, mesons and anti-quarks. The devil knew he couldn’t hold this form together for much longer before it collapsed into a pyroclastic flow of rage and rue. He focussed all eight of his stinging, swollen eyes upon the cowering infant, and his voice was like an atom bomb in a cathedral, cracking five of the glass panes above the Attics of the Breath.
“WE HAD A DEAL!”
Both of his hides, the man-like skin and dragon scales alike, erupted into giant blisters that had surfaces like dying bubbles, swimming with a spectrum of slick petrol colours just before they burst. Rapidly losing an entire dimension, he leaked shape and modelling into the ether. Realising that he only had sufficient power left for a flat display, the devil squirmed into a monstrous borealis, shimmering spider-lizard curtains made of light that seemed to fill the stupefying whole of the emporium. For a few moments it was as though all the boards and rafters were on fire with him, and his bird-eating eyes in headlamp clusters glared from every twisting flame, now red, now green, fire engines and gas chamber doors.
Then there was nothing left of him save a few sparks, bowling along in a fish-flavoured breeze down the eternal hallway.
RABBITS
Oh, and weren’t they all the talk Upstairs, the Dead Dead Gang, their muckabout and mischief round the everlasting drainpipes, famous exploits that had dished out scabs for medals? They were much loved in the shitty gutters of Elysium, wanted for questioning in four or five dimensions and admired by boys and girls throughout the whenth and linger of this shiny, well-worn century. They were a pack of quick and dirty little animals and there were far too many of them, running up and down the world all day.