Satan Loves You (5 page)

The doctors said there was no permanent damage to Sister Helen's spine, but she had, nevertheless, lost the use of her legs. It still amazed Sister Mary that a three-foot fall could paralyze Sister Helen from mid-thigh down, but the doctors had pointed out that she had landed funny. Now Sister Helen lay in bed most days, watching the DirecTV that Sister Mary had gotten installed for her by way of penance and, over time, she had found that she was actually enjoying herself for the first time in her life.

“What are you watching?” Sister Mary asked.

“These young women claim to have had children with these young men, who are denying it,” Sister Helen said. “The young men claim to have had children only with the young women they are currently in relationships with. Maury is doing DNA tests and revealing the results on air.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“One woman has already torn off another woman’s weave. Oh, no. Look at that. Claudius’s baby isn’t his.”

Sister Mary looked at the screen where a young man was weeping while a woman walked around him shaking her finger and screaming things that were bleeped out. Sister Mary couldn’t follow any of it.

“Sister,” she said. “Are you comfortable?”

“Mm-hm,” Sister Helen said, opening a bag of Hydrox cookies. She had been eating a lot of them since losing the use of her legs.

“Something has happened to me,” Sister Mary said. “And I need to talk with you about it.”

Sister Helen froze, and looked at her with horror.

“You haven’t been
...
praying for me, have you?”

Sister Mary felt her heart clench into a fist as she realized that she was now and always would be a Prayer Leper to her Sisters. She tried to find acceptance in her heart. Instead, she found an unexpected fragment of cruelty.

“Would you like me to pray for you?” she asked.

“No!” Sister Helen said, recoiling. And then, more calmly, “Save your prayers for when they are truly needed.”

“But you still don’t have the use of your legs.”

“The feeling is coming back. I’ll be up and around by next week,” Sister Helen said.

“Then I won’t pray for you,” Sister Mary said.

“Good,” Sister Helen said.

“Sister, I’ve come because something is disturbing me.”

“What is it?” Sister Helen said, her attention wandering back to the TV.

“This,” Sister Mary said and she put an Early Pregnancy Test wand on Sister Helen’s TV tray. There was a blue plus sign in the middle of it.

“Ah!” Sister Helen recoiled. “That has someone’s urine on it, sister.”

“It doesn’t have
someone’s
urine on it,” Sister Mary said.

“It does have someone’s urine on it, because it’s giving a positive reading,” Sister Helen said. “You may not know how these things work – ”

“It doesn’t have
someone’s
urine on it,” Sister Mary repeated. “Because it has
my
urine on it.”

Sister Helen turned pale, but she quickly got a hold of herself. If there was one things nuns understood it was unwanted pregnancies.

“Obviously, it’s an inaccurate test. A false positive. According to Maury they happen all the time.”

Wordlessly, Sister Mary put a second EPT wand on Sister Helen’s TV tray. It, too, displayed a blue cross.

“Those tests sometimes pick up things like poppy seeds, and egg salad,” Sister Helen said.

Sister Mary put a third EPT wand next to the first two. By now, Sister Helen’s face was turning red and splotchy.     

“Stop putting your urine on my cookies!”

“Sister, I’m pregnant.”

As Sister Mary had suspected, saying it out loud just made her feel worse. She slid out of her chair and onto her knees and tried to bury her face in Sister Helen’s lap. “Please, sister,” she cried. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Who was it?” Sister Helen demanded.

“No one!” Sister Mary cried. “I’m a virgin!”

“No,” Sister Mary said. “Someone must have gotten you pregnant. Was it a homeless? Was it Randy Funkers or his unemployed father? Who was it?”

“No one,” Sister Mary cried out in despair. “Please! I swear, Sister, I am a virgin.”

With her head buried in Sister Helen’s lap, she didn’t notice the sister’s bright red face, or the cold sweat that had broken out across her forehead, or her shallow and labored breathing. She felt Sister Helen stroking her hair and that just made her cry harder. Actually, Sister Helen was trying to punch her in the head, but the pain shooting down Sister Helen’s left arm was making her feeble.

Sister Helen was crushed. She saw everything she had worked for at the Poor Clares reduced to a farcical community theater production of
Agnes of God
with Sister Mary’s overly sensitive womb in the lead role. She tried harder to punch the young nun, to tell her to get out of town, to take a long bus ride to Texas or Mexico and to change her name and never come back and maybe be accidentally killed by human traffickers along the way. She wanted to say all of this but blood vessels were bursting in her brain like fireworks and all she could manage was a weak: “Hoo, hoo.”

“Oh,” she thought to herself. “I always knew Sister Mary would be the death of me.”

There was a perfunctory knock at the door and Sister Barbara entered. In one quick glance she took in the still-warm corpse of Sister Helen, the sobbing Sister Mary on her knees, the EPT wands on the TV tray and Maury on the television. Utterly beside herself, she picked up a copy of
TV Guide
, rolled it into a tube and began to beat Sister Mary with it like a bad dog.

“Oh, sister,” she cried out in despair. “Oh, sister, you’ve done it again. You’ve done it again!”

Satan had had a long day. First, he’d had to secure five thousand gallons of liquid feces, which he’d finally managed to find in a contaminated hog lagoon in Western Virginia.

“And that EPA comes down here to my business that’s been here for thirty years and they tell me that I’m killing my neighbors. What the hell do they know about my neighbors?” the owner of the hog lagoon that was, indeed, killing his neighbors, said. “If I was killing my neighbors, don’t you think somebody’d’ve said something by now? By the way, what the hell you want five thousand gallons of pig feces for?”

“We heat it to boiling and sort of put it in this big lake, then we take the souls of the damned and dip them in it for all eternity.”

The hog lagoon owner stared at him.

“It’s an everlasting torment,” Satan said. “For the damned.”

“And that’s your business,” the owner said. “You get the EPA meddling with you? No, sir, you don’t. But I do. Tain’t the America I grew up in, I’ll tell you that for free. You want a receipt?”

“Please.”

Then Maryland Sulfur and Steel, who sold him discount sulfur, refused his check.

“What do you mean?”

“The last one bounced.”

“This one won’t.”

“I’ve got a note from my boss right here. It says: DNAC. That means, Do Not Accept Checks.”

“Look, if you sell me this load of sulfur now I can pay you the balance we owe, plus the bank fee for the bounced check.”

“How?”

“With a check?”

Now he’d have to find some other source of sulfur. Maybe they could use rancid garbage instead. No, he probably couldn’t afford that either.

Depressed, Satan made his way to the nearest airport and then down the escalator to Hell. The escalator to Hell was one of Satan’s lesser ideas. He hadn’t been sold on elevators when they’d first come out and escalators had seemed much safer and more reliable. Also he had been worried that if he’d installed elevators it would only be a matter of time before people started calling them “Hellevators” and while he admired innovation he hated cute nicknames. So he’d had escalators put in. At the time, they had looked like the future but now, over one hundred years later, getting to Hell took forever. By the time Satan reached Hell’s Vestibule he was exhausted, he was irritable, he had no sulfur and the bank account for daily expenses was approaching zero.

Hell’s Vestibule was hot and noisy and huge, an endless cavern that lay underneath the planet’s crust. Occasionally an explorer would break through the ceiling and then scurry back to the surface to spread rumors about a hollow Earth, or a lost civilization deep within the planet’s core. But really, this was just the staging area for Hell, and it needed to be big because Hell was gruesomely inefficient.

In the Vestibule, demons were rolled about on scaffolding towers that spired up for hundreds of feet to the rocky ceiling. Symbols were spray painted there, circles and crosses and arrows and squiggles, like something a road crew would slap on the pavement to locate power cables and gas lines before digging up the street. The demons clambered up their precarious scaffolding perches and argued over the symbols, occasionally slapping one another, sometimes shoving one of their brethren off, sending them plunging to the ground. The demons arguing on the tiny, swaying platforms would eventually reach some sort of consensus and then haul up powerful jackhammers and rip holes in the ceiling. Out of these holes they would pull the souls of the damned from their graves. The souls, rubbery and weak, would be tossed from claw to claw down the scaffolding towers, finally arriving, dizzy and confused on the ground where demons with clipboards and bullhorns would bully them into endless, slow-moving lines. The souls would shuffle forward, stop, shuffle forward, stop, taking months to get from one end of the Vestibule to the other. And at the end of their journey, when they finally reached the Gates of Hell, they would be processed. Most of them spent the entire time complaining.

“Those of ya with big ‘V’s,” Minos shouted into his bullhorn. “Unfortunately, you’re the violent and you’ll be spending eternity inna fast-flowing riverra blood.”

A grumble went up.

“I doan wanna hear it. Now come on, hold up ya
‘
V’s, if we can’t see
‘
em we can’t process ya. You wanna stand around in this cavern for another six weeks?”

“Yes,” some wag shouted.

“Who said that?” Minos barked. A few rough-looking demons dragged a young man out of line. “Nail his feet ta the floor. He’s gonna be in this room for eternity.”

“Excuse me,” a man in a very ugly sweater said. “Will we be given an opportunity to change clothes?”

“What you were wearing when you were buried is what you’ll be wearing for eternity!” Minos barked.

“But I hate this sweater,” the man said.

“Shaddap!” Minos roared.

The man turned to the woman standing behind him.

“My wife knew I hated this sweater. She did this to me out of spite. Who gets buried in a sweater?”

“I’m crying on the inside for you, really,” the woman said. She was naked and her skin was bruised and torn. “I went over to borrow an extension cord from my quiet neighbor who kept to himself and now I’m buried underneath his tool shed. No one ever found
my
body. And it’s freezing in here. I’d give anything for a sweater.”

“You can have mine,” the man said.

“No trades!” a passing demon growled, stabbing Sweater Man in the back of the head with a trident.

Satan tried to make it through the Vestibule without attracting any attention, but Minos suddenly sprang up out of nowhere.

“Hey, Boss,” he said. “Any sulfur? We’re running low.”

“It should be coming,” Satan said.“Later.”

“Not ta be cheeky, boss, but that means never, don’t it?”

“You’re just going to have to make do,” Satan said.

“That’s gonna be difficult. Because the only thing that smells like sulfur is sulfur. We’re known for our sulfury smell, and to get that smell we need sulfur.”

“We don’t have any,” Satan snapped. “If you want it that bad, then take up a collection and buy it yourselves.”

“Um, okay,” Minos said. “Also, um, we need ta get the gas lines cleaned. A lotta the fires been goin’ out.”

“Can’t you get a squad of demons to clean them?”

“Those lines’re pretty twisty. Ya need ta get in a professional.”

“We just had them done.”

“About two hundred years ago. They’ve got ta be cleaned out every hundred years, but fifty years is even better,” Minos said.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Satan said. “We don’t have the money so you’re just going to have to find a way to function with dirty gas lines.”

“But dat’s the thing we’re second best known for,” Minos said. “Our flickering hellfire. It’s pathetic for a buncha jerks ta come in here and the first thing they see is unlit caverns wid no flickerin’ hellish flames.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Satan said, and then he ducked through a crowd of damned souls and darted into a tunnel before Minos could tell him about more things that were falling apart.

On the way to his office, Satan was accosted at least a dozen times: was more liquefied feces on the way? When was the announcement going out about the “Flogging & Flaying: Important Differences for Field Practitioners” workshop? Could they devise new punishments for the suicide bombers to differentiate them better from traditional suicides? Rats? Why did the rats keep vanishing? Were the goblins eating them again? Or was it the giants, who loved squashing them with rocks? Who was going to tear the flesh of the faithless if they didn’t have any rats?