Tempus Fugitive (26 page)

Tamar had never been to Hell, but she had a pretty shrewd idea of what it was going to be like; it made her nervous in a way that she was entirely unfamiliar with.

If the punishment was fitted to the crime, then what the hell was
she
in for?  An eternity of having her every wish fulfilled?  Ugh, horrible. Still, if Denny had managed to get out … Anyway, there was no other way. 

Eugene had surprised her; it really was a pretty good idea, one that she herself would never have thought of, being inclined to over-think things.  Eugene, on the other hand, apparently took the simple route through life. And sometimes the most obvious solution was the best.

That did not make her any happier about it though. 

Eugene himself did not seem all that worried about it.  He had, after all, got the most powerful being in the world beside him.  Besides, as he said, ‘I never signed no contract with the Devil either.  And I certainly ain’t dead.’

Tamar knew that this was oversimplifying matters a bit too much. Hell is full of sinners, not poor fools who signed away their souls for a mess of pottage – whatever that was.  Still, if it kept him happy.

The problem now was how to get into Hell.  Denny had ended up there by accident, and although Tamar knew how it had happened, she was not sure whether it would work again.  Denny had been thrown clear of the filing system and had landed in Hell.  She and Eugene might end up anywhere. It seemed a bit hit and miss to her. 

The alternative was to find the actual file for Hell, if there was such a thing.  Technically, hell was not part of the world. 

 Where to start looking? – Admitting that central files was out of the question. 

Hell is another world, but not an alternate reality, which would just be another version of this world.  There are also many different hells, from what she had heard.  Denny had been to the Christian Hell.  Although all hells surely would lead back to the world, just as all hells are accessible
from
the world. And suddenly she knew how he had done it. 

She grabbed Eugene by the hand and giving him no time to argue, said ‘Close files.’

When she found herself in the nothing between the worlds, she almost panicked.  She could almost hear the echo of Denny’s last words when he had been in this place ‘Oh Hell!’ she repeated.

Nothing happened; her voice made no sound. ‘Oh Hell,’ she said again.  ‘Hell?’ then she heard a voice from above her head.  ‘Not another one; where the Jesus are they all coming from?’

 ‘Two this time,’ moaned the devil.  His Dark Lordship’s going to have an aneurysm.’ 

‘Not dead?’ asked another one.

‘Not dead. Not on the list. Not supposed to bloody well be here.  What are we going to do with them?’  

‘Let’s kill them.’

‘It won’t make any difference,’ moaned the first devil.  ‘I tell you, they’re not on the list. Alive or dead, we can’t keep them.’

‘I like killing things,’ sulked the other devil.

‘How would you know?  You’ve never done it.  They’re always dead already when they get to us – well usually.’ He looked irritably at Tamar.  ‘No, the only thing to do is to get them out of here as fast as possible and hope that He doesn’t find out.’

Tamar heaved a silent sigh of relief. 

‘Come on youse two,’ snarled the devil turning on his heel. ‘This way to the river Styx, keep quiet, keep your heads down and no arguing.  I don’t suppose you brought any money with you?’

* * *

‘Agggh!’  Stiles was still suffering stoically.  Living proof that lightning
can
strike more than once in the same place, particularly if it is guided by a very vindictive and pissed off god, who thinks he is being screwed around.  Stiles was smoking gently from the ears like the wily coyote after he has just swallowed a stick of dynamite.  It is pretty fair guess that he felt like it too. 

‘If you do not desist,’ said ‘Hecaté.  ‘I will do no more.’

‘Fine,’ said Askphrit.  ‘I’ll just kill him then shall I?’

‘Ooh, let me,’ said Peirce. 

‘Do so,’ bluffed Hecaté.  ‘Then, where will your leverage be?’

 Hecaté had forgotten that Askphrit was totally insane.  He called her bluff. 

* * *

Charon was, predictably, not at all pleased to see them, but after some huffing and puffing, he agreed to let them cross.  ‘They’ll have to wait, though,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some incoming to deal with first.  They’ll have to keep out of sight, while I bring them across, it could cause unrest that sort of thing, if they see me ferrying people
out
.’  With that he turned the boat around and Tamar and Eugene were left on the shores of the river Styx shivering in the perpetual fog. The devils who had escorted them left without a word.  

‘Could have been worse,’ said Eugene, flapping his arms around him to keep warm, although there was no keeping warm in that place.   The cold seemed to be a part of your very soul.  ‘It was quite easy in the end,’ he continued, cheerfully. ‘Won’t be long now, before we’re out of here.  They seemed quite keen to be rid of us, didn’t they?’ 

‘Mmm,’ Tamar was thinking about something else.  ‘What do you suppose they meant “they’re not on the list?”.’

Eugene shrugged.  ‘That we’re not dead yet I suppose.’

‘No, that wasn’t it,’ she said. ‘And after all, why should it matter, this is a place where they keep your immortal soul.  Just because most people don’t arrive here until they die, doesn’t mean that it is a necessary pre requisite – apparently. The body isn’t the part of you that stays here anyway.  No, it’s something else. Something about – what did you say before? Jurisdiction.’

‘Yes, so what? I mean as long as they let us go, what does it matter?’

‘It matters, I’m sure of it.  I’m just not sure why.’

‘Well, perhaps it’s because we aren’t Christians,’ said Eugene. ‘This is the Christian Hell, isn’t it?’ 

Tamar looked thunderstruck.  ‘My God!’ she said. ‘Could it really be that simple?’

They were distracted by the arrival of Charon’s boat looming through the fog.  It was a chilling sight now.  Filled with hundreds of pallid ghost like figures, seeming to each take up no more space than a breath of air,  yet each one a distinct personality, or rather a distinct sin. Eugene grabbed Tamar and pulled her behind a rock.  ‘He said we have to keep out of sight.’ 

They hid, but they watched – could not help but watch, as the crowd disembarked and began a long forlorn procession along the dreary banks of the river up toward the caverns of Hell.  Tamar could not tear her gaze from them; they all looked so bewildered and frightened. On each face, was an expression of confused surprise. “This has to be a mistake.” “This is not for me surely?”  They tried to cling to one another for comfort, but found that they could not; they had no more substance than smoke. That would change when they reached Hell proper, and it would not be a change for the better.  Lost souls indeed. It was horrible.  Tamar felt paralysed with an inconsolable pity.  What had they done? If they had committed sins as great as her own, she would be surprised. And yet, here they were, and she was to go free.  ‘There but for the grace of God,’ she muttered.   Except that was wrong, wasn’t it, the wrong way round, it was by the grace of God that these poor souls were condemned.  Again, she felt that thought, curling its way around the edges of her mind.  This was important in some way.  But she could not quite catch hold of the idea that was forming in her brain.  Then all rational thought ceased, as her attention was arrested by a familiar face in the procession.

‘Jack?’ 

~ Chapter Twenty One ~

D
enny had, by Clive’s reckoning, erased his own existence and re-existed, seventy five thousand whole times and seemed set to go on until time itself ceased.  You had to admire his tenacity.

An hour later (from Clive’s viewpoint) he was not admiring him nearly so much.  An hour later still and he was not admiring him at all and was wondering how on earth to stop all this. 

He wondered where Denny had gone wrong.  Surely he had gone back to the day when his grandfather had died anyway, at the hands of Askphrit, too late to affect the future.  He supposed that it did not really matter, but out of curiosity, he checked the dates.  Denny turned out to have checked into the file a mere day earlier than his grandfather’s original demise.  More than enough time to make a significant difference, a conception is usually achieved in only one night after all.  The real question now was, had Askphrit planned it that way?  It was a masterly stroke if so. A masterpiece of timing and finesse.  Or was it a just a monstrous coincidence?

And if Askphrit
had
planned it, how the hell had he known?   

Of
course
he had planned it, Clive thought. The evil cunning sod.  And why he had done it was pretty obvious too. But how had he pulled it off?

It turned out to be staggeringly simple when Clive looked into it. He had changed the file numbers round. After he had killed the man once – he simply switched it so that when Denny finally found what he thought was the correct file (and it made no difference to Askphrit how long this actually took, it would all happen instantaneously from his perspective anyway)  he was actually in the file for the previous day. And on that day Denny’s grandfather had faced and shot what he thought was an enemy spy – Askphrit himself of course.

He had clearly been banking on Tamar or Denny or both actually finding the codes at some point – but apart from that, he had left nothing to chance.

Clive was inclined to blame “them upstairs” for this. He was sure they had handed the codes over somehow (no doubt in some unorthodox and totally untraceable manner.  And, had Clive but known it, Askphrit had been pretty sure of this too.  As he had said to Stiles and Hecaté – good guys are all so predictable.

Still, none of that mattered now.  It was done, and Denny (and by association, Tamar) were stuck in a time loop.  It was fortunate, Clive supposed, that Denny had not really touched many lives in any significant fashion.  The resulting mess, had he been a political icon, for example, or a contestant on “Big Brother”, would have been inconceivable.  Still it was bad enough as it was, and what was to be done about it? 

He considered simply pulling the plug on mainframe and switching the universe off.  Maybe when he plugged it back in, it would go back to startup mode, and he could put this – and a whole host of other things, now he thought about it – right.

Bad idea!  Someone would have done it by now if it were possible.  Maybe someone had, he thought. After all, how would anyone really know?

He decided that it was too risky, besides he was not sure where the plug was.

He checked the alternate realities, but Denny it seemed was a remarkably consistent character. There was no universe out there that Clive could find where he had not taken exactly the same path – the aggravating creature.  The only exception was the universe that had split off when Askphrit had dramatically changed his own destiny – and that was clearly impossible.  It was not even the same Denny.    

If only he could insert some extra time into the file.  Just a few seconds would do it.  Just long enough to break the cycle, in those few seconds Denny would both exist and not exist at the same time and Clive was quite certain that he was astute enough to see what was happening and stay his own hand.  The problem was that time is not a commodity that one can just shift around at will. Although humans treated it that way, file clerks knew better.  Humans talked of saving time or wasting time, of losing time and even – gross conceit – “making” time.  Of course, humans did not actually “make” time they merely pinched it from other tasks.

 Hmm, maybe they were on to something there.    

* * *

The procession stopped abruptly as Tamar ran out heedlessly from her hiding place to where Jack Stiles had now stopped his slow shuffle towards eternity.  He was, quite possibly, the first person ever to have done so. But not the last.

 Charon was speechless with indignation this was unprecedented.  The march toward eternity (as it was officially called) halted for no man – or woman. 

Stiles stared blankly at Tamar, his eyes dull and uncomprehending.  She stared back shocked and disbelieving.  Not Jack! –  Not
here
.  The pain of it was unbearable; she felt like she could not breathe.  She began to sob uncontrollably. The parade of the dead stared. 

Suddenly Jack smiled – another first – lost souls do not smile.  ‘Tamar?’ he said haltingly as if the word, as if speech itself was an unfamiliar concept. ‘What are you doing here?’ 

Tamar gave a watery smile.  ‘I was going to ask
you
that.’

‘I’m dead,’ he said simply.

‘But- but, this is Hell!’ as soon as the words were out of her mouth she realised that she could have put it more diplomatically. 

Stiles seemed unconcerned, however. ‘Is it?  Well, I can’t say I’m all that surprised.  My mother always said I wasn’t a good Catholic boy.’ He leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘I used to steal cookies,’ he said, with a sickly grin.  ‘And once – I killed a man.’

‘I’m sure you didn’t mean it,’ said Tamar her heart wrung with pity.

‘Doesn’t matter does it?’ said Stiles. ‘Thou shalt not kill, and thou shalt not steal.  I suppose it’s all one down here.  I broke the rules.’

‘The rules?’ murmured Tamar, more to herself than anything else.  There was that thought again, really clamouring for attention now.  If only she had time to think.

By this time, the whole crowd of souls were crowded round them listening with their mouths open. 

Charon had so many things he wanted to say, that the processes of his thoughts had brought his mouth to a standstill.  He was choking on his own breath.

‘’Course, it was really my mother who promised that I’d keep the rules, not me,’ said Stiles, darkly.  ‘Nobody asked
me
.  But I suppose once you’ve been baptised into the Faith, that’s it.’

A door in Tamar’s head flew open and the thought marched in crying. ‘SEE ME!’.