Dirty Eden (20 page)

“I admit it,” the Devil went on, though he suddenly looked more discouraged than proud, “I influenced some of the greatest man-made catastrophes the world has ever known: the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, Hiroshima, the Black Plague. I whispered in the ears of Manson, Dahmer, Gacy and Jack the Ripper—Now, Belle Sorenson Gunness and Nannie Doss were more difficult than I expected, but that was only because they were women.” He laughed quietly in thought. “Funny how women seem so frail and soft, but they often turn out more cunning and brutal than most men.”

“You’re sick, you know that right?”

“Ah, that’s what your mother said, too.”

“My mother?” I was paying more attention now, and getting madder by the second. “What does she have to do with it?”

The Devil shook his head under that odd top hat. “You know how she was before she ‘found God’?”

“Yeah, she was rebellious and liked Vodka and cigarettes too much—hardly puts my mother in any of your little categories, now does it?”

The Devil held up his finger and tilted his head. “What she
did
do and what she was
capable
of doing are two different things, and that woman, she was a disaster waiting to happen. Often the ones who find God can be the most dangerous. It’s the balance of things, like something, or some
one
...” he looked upward again, “is pulling them back, interfering where He shouldn’t be, like He just can’t help it.”

“Of course He can’t help it,” I said, looking befuddled. “He’s supposed to do good.”

“No, that’s not what He can’t help, you cretin, He can’t help sticking it to me!”

I burst into derisive laughter.

“So, it’s all back to you again. It’s always all about you. I think we’ve lost track of the point again...no, wait,” I opened my mouth and my eyes widened, pretending to be shocked, “the point is you, you, you!”

“The point,” the Devil stopped me and he appeared goaded, “is that you’re here to face the truth, all of it, if your mind can handle it. Though, judging by that stomp off tantrum back there, you aren’t doing so well.”

I pulled up the collar of my coat and buried my face in it as far as I could. I turned my back on the Devil for just a moment. My cold breath crept up and around the corners of my coat like puffy wisps of smoke.

“You’ve come a long way,” the Devil went on, sucking on another cigarette which seemed never to shorten, “and I think you could just be the one to finally pull this off. In over one thousand years—really, I lost count—few have gotten as far as this, and they couldn’t face the truth. One couldn’t bear that it was his own mother who brutally murdered his younger brother at the age of three and left his body in their attic to rot. You see, his brother was born with Down syndrome, and his mother just couldn’t accept that she gave birth to a defect. After all, she grew up richly, never having to work for a thing in her life. She bullied girls at school who were less fortunate than she was, and made them believe they were the worthless scum of the Earth that they were. One even committed suicide three months after the Prom.

“But yes, he was one of few. He made his way to the comic book store, the one place he frequented more than any other place—like you and Lou’s Coffee—and he went through the same phases you’re going through now. He learned the truth about just about everyone he knew.”

“You may have no choice, my friend.” The Devil appeared somber as he looked out at the thick sky. “I may be who and what I am, Norman Anthony Reeves. I may be the Prince of Lies, Darkness and Evil. I may be the most notorious villain in the history of history, but even I can’t stomach a lot of what you people do, what you’ve resorted to and what you’ve become. Sure, I take pride in doing what I love, but evil is evolving.”

“It’s evolving out of your hands, isn’t it?”

“In a way, yes,” the Devil answered, but he looked more concerned than ashamed. “Things are happening that I’m not even influencing....”

I smiled. “For a moment there,” I said, “I thought you actually had limits. The only thing you can’t stomach is facing your own sort of truth, that there’s something out there better at your job than you are.”

The Devil had no rebuttal.

“Walk with me,” he said suddenly with the wave of his hand.

I was willing, but also very reluctant. Maybe the Devil had bewitched me, I didn’t know, but I realized I could not be mad at him anymore even though I tried my damnedest to be as I walked with him away from the coffee house.

“Where are we going?”

There was a pause, but the Devil kept walking, his hands clasped together behind his back.

“To Hell,” said the Devil.

And before I could protest, or run like...well...the Devil reached up and brushed his hand across the sky, and then everything went black.

BLACKNESS. NO LIVING SOUL can comprehend the true meaning of it. To understand it would be like trying to understand the origin of the Nothing. And as I walked with the Devil through this infinite darkness, I could only wait for it to recede. It was the strangest feeling to be here. I felt as though every one of my lingering human emotions had been instantly sucked from me, yet curiosity had been left behind in shards. My mouth was dry, yet full of saliva, which tasted unnaturally salty as if it were sweat. I realized I had no heartbeat, yet there was breath emitting from my nostrils and it felt thick like humidity. But most of all, I felt empty, metaphorically and literally. My body felt light as though made of nothing but skin, but instead of feeling I might float into the air, I thought that at any moment I would fall like a feather into the blackness beneath me.

We pressed on for hours, or maybe only seconds. No words were exchanged. No glances or acknowledgments. There were no sounds; not even our shoes striking against the invisible floor. No echo in a place where it seemed the tiniest sound would surely stir one.

It was the place of nothingness, yet we were there, the Devil and I, like two particles of dust that might some time in many billions of years evolve into something more.

But then suddenly the Devil turned and held out his hand, his fingers pressed together softly as if there was something minuscule between them that he meant to show me. I looked down, barely curious, and saw a tiny black cloud. When I raised my eyes to Lucifer again, Lucifer and I were standing in a desert-like wasteland. Somehow, I knew the tiny black cloud was the infinite blackness that we had walked through before. Even still, I was not intrigued; no part of me wished to ask questions about that blackness as the Devil carefully placed it between his lips and swallowed.

Feeling more human now, I reached up and roughly scratched my face, now hidden behind a long, gray beard. My bones ached and the skin on my hands was shriveled and dry and covered in liver spots. I reached into my coat and retrieved Vanity’s Mirror, peering into it at an old man that looked very much like me, but how could that be? It must be a trick, I thought, but as I looked deeper into the eyes of the strange face staring back at me, I knew they were my own. The eyes never change; they are immune to age. I felt a knot in my stomach. How long had we walked through the blackness? I tried to think back to those seconds before, but I could barely remember, as if it happened so long ago in my young age. Did I ever really walk through the blackness at all?

I hid the mirror away, fumbling for the secret pocket with my now arthritic hand.

The wasteland was vast and endless like the Field of Yesterday, but there were hills and caves and rocks and dead trees here. It was completely bright, but neither hot nor humid to my relief. And there was not a cloud in the sky...but then there was something odd about that span of yellowish space above us that gave me a feeling it may not be a sky at all.

It hurt to walk, but I did so with my back hunched over slightly and the need to stop and rest every now and then to catch my breath.

“I can’t go any farther.” My voice was old and raspy.

“Oh,” said the Devil, “it’s just up ahead.”

“Hell?”

“No, no,” the Devil shook his head, “you’re already in Hell...well, sort of.”

“What do you mean ‘sort of’?”

The Devil looked at me from the side. “Hell has two phases: the First Phase—this one—is
before
the Judgment, where each damned soul spends its time in waiting for the Second Phase. Here, punishments are given according to an individual’s sins, and no punishment is the same. Everyone you see here is being punished in his or her own private Hell, day after day, century after century. It begins and ends the same way as it will until the Judgment comes and the Second Phase begins.”

“And when does the Second Phase end?” I asked worriedly.

“It doesn’t,” the Devil said.

It suddenly occurred to me that there were no people here, only the two of us. “But I don’t see anyone,” I said, looking all around me, as much as my aching back would permit.

The Devil looked genuinely forgetful. “I do apologize,” he said. “I sometimes forget that I can see things here that others can’t.”

He added, “But you’ll see them soon enough.”

“I really would rather not.”

The Devil just smiled, and I knew without him having to say it that it did not matter what I would rather do, or not do.

We walked several more long minutes, me barely keeping up and too occupied with the handicap to attempt taking in the surreal environment. Even my mind had fallen victim to old age. But out ahead, I did notice a little makeshift hut and a fire burning under a black kettle where a figure walked back and forth in front of it. I stopped cold, though at first I was not sure why. My chest suddenly filled with alarm, like something had reached inside me through my back and wrenched at my insides. The Devil urged me to follow, and I did against my better judgment.

We stood in the presence of the Hermit
—
all know him when they meet him just as a man knows Death when his time has come
—
whose face was wretched and cold. He wore a dusty black robe that dragged the dead earth behind him, the hood pulled over his head leaving his long, coarse hair to fall down from within it and over his shoulders. He grinned up
—
for he was quite short
—
at me and the Devil, one eye as blue and majestic as the earthly sky, the other as black and lifeless as the place we dared not speak of.

“Brought one in yourself I see,” said the Hermit, his voice hoarse and frightening. He glanced at me and went back to his kettle, poking at the fire underneath it with a twisted, black stick. Cinders cracked and popped and broke free from the burning wood.

“Not quite, old man.”

I had to sit down; I just had to. Like an old man that had earned his right to fart in public, I was more concerned with my comfort. It only mattered a little that the Hermit was likely the one about to take me to my own personal Hell. But once I made myself comfortable on a rather uncomfortable rock, I came back to my senses.

The devil, however, sat comfortably in a wooden chair, but I hadn't the strength to protest.

“So then this one isn’t ready?” said the Hermit. “Perhaps you’ve come for a visit then. Ah, yes, a visit is acceptable, but you most of all know that there’s a hefty price for my company. You most of all know that I do nothing and I say nothing unless I know it will benefit me. Is this one here your form of trade then?” The Hermit leaned in to examine me and to my shock and disgust, he stuck out his old black tongue and licked me across the face. “Oh! A
live
one, I see!” The Hermit became animated suddenly with frightening excitement.

“I accept,” the Hermit went on, “Indeed I do. You’ve outdone yourself this time, Lucifer.” He rubbed his hands together greedily. His jagged black teeth pressed so sharply into his bottom lip that the flesh broke apart, though a little bloody pain was not enough to shake his attention.

The Devil crossed one leg over the other. “No,” he said so calmly, “this one is mine, but I have brought you fair enough trade.”

The Hermit gritted his teeth.

“You
dare
bring me something I would most desire to have and dangle it in front of me, only to tell me that it won’t be mine?”

“Of course I do,” the Devil said, relaxing his back against the chair. “You work for me, remember? So calm yourself, old man, and look at what I’ve brought you.”

The Devil reached up and took off his top hat, turning it upside-down in his hand and then he reached inside. When his hand emerged there was a tiny naked woman dangling from his fingertips by her long, red hair. I did a double take and then, like the Hermit, leaned in closer to get a better look. The tiny woman kicked and screamed, though her voice hardly raised above the sound of a squealing mouse. Her face contorted with fear, and little tears streamed from her eyes.

“And what is her most notable sin?” said the Hermit. “What great Hell shall I conjure for her?”

“Then you’re pleased, I take it?”

The Hermit made a displeased, but accepting movement with his lips and answered, “Hardly, since she’s no different than all the others that come, but I’ll take what I can get, I suppose.”

“Right you will.” The Devil winked at the Hermit, but the Hermit disagreed silently.

“This one,” the Devil began, still holding the woman high in the air, “Was a prostitute.”

“A prostitute?
Another
prostitute! I have too many of those already, Lucifer. Not very diverse are you?” The Hermit shook his head angrily and turned his back on the Devil.

“So you don’t want her then?” the Devil taunted. “Very well, I’ll have no choice then but to send her back to Creation where she’ll have another chance to redeem herself and you risk never having her for yourself.” He went to put the tiny terrified woman back into his hat.

“Give her to me!” the Hermit grunted, snatching the tiny woman from the Devil’s fingers.

The Devil appeared pleased.

The Hermit shuffled over to a carved tree stump that he appeared to be using as a shelf of sorts, and took down a Mason jar with a golden lid. I noticed that there were several jars placed about and each one contained other tiny naked humans. One man in a jar nearest me aggressively shouldered and head butted the glass.
Ping!
Ping!
Until he fell backward and picked himself up and did it all over again. After tossing the tiny woman inside the empty jar and sealing it, the Hermit thumped against the lid of the jar where the aggressive little man was. “I’ll deal with you soon enough,” he said to the man.

The Hermit turned his attention back to me, looking upon me with bushy brows and matching nose hairs that I thought for sure I saw move in a way not merely stirred by breath. In fact, when my old eyes adjusted at the right angle, I saw that the Hermit’s skin and hair, eyelashes and even his sores seemed to be moving. I looked away quickly and then felt that sense of doom, danger and despair that I had felt when I first saw the Hermit from afar. But I also felt drawn to look, to see what it was that made me so afraid.

There was a voice. “Are you listening?” But I could barely hear it, or understand from whose lips, the Devil or the Hermit, the words came. Something wrapped around my mind, something heavy and diverting and I found myself peering into the Hermit’s face. I saw closer as if looking through a microscope. I heard the voices of the Devil and the Hermit talking, but they were not speaking to me.

There were bodies; living, screaming bodies in the pores of the Hermit’s face. People were reaching out; some were huddled with others, weeping. People made up the Hermit’s hair, from root to tip. His wrinkles, the open sores around his mouth and ears, the warts on his chin and his fingers...every part of him was made of microscopic humans, people damned to suffer.

I looked into the Hermit’s blue eye.

There were scenes of strange horrors and sinister predicaments. A man, wearing a bloodstained loincloth was shackled to a wall by his wrists and ankles, while another figure under a dark hood steadily cut his flesh away and dropped each thin strip into a wooden bowl. A level down near the nostril, a woman was being drowned over and over again in a bathtub full of blood. A figure under a dark hood held her by the back of the throat until her struggling body went still, and then the scene started all over again. To the right, near the Hermit’s ear was a scene with two black-haired men; one forced to impale the other.

“Norman,” said the Devil, waking me from my stupor, “If you don’t choose, he’ll choose them for you and you probably don’t want that.”

I, still a bit out of it, turned slowly.

“The cards, Norman,” the Devil went on, pointing to the ground in front of the Hermit. “Choose three cards and you’ll get to visit someone else’s own private Hell.” The Devil said this as if it were a treat.

I looked down. While I had been lost in the strange daze, apparently the Hermit had produced a deck of what reminded me of Tarot cards, and placed them face down on the dirt in front of me, spread out in a half-moon.