The low black boat moved softly over the dark water. I lay on my back in the bows gazing upward into the deep eternal twilight. Above me the vaulting sky was so dark and heavily overcast with storm clouds that it looked like a pall of smoke. If there really was a sky up there above the clouds, that is. I had never figured out for sure. There was no breath of wind as we skimmed along. Those minatory clouds had loomed over the water for a few thousand years. They looked as soft as black sheep wool, as if I could fall upward into their immense black softness and they would cushion me, like I was falling asleep.
On the stern a tall and lean figure in black stood poling the craft along. The only sound was the rhythmic sloosh of the water. The steady motion was hypnotic and restful. I lolled back dreamily. Thomas Niles crouched between the thwarts. If I opened my eyes I saw his two white knees, hugged in his arms under his blanched face. Despite the lack of wind his hair was wild.
"Where am I?" He blurted.
"This is the River Lethe." I said.
"Then who is she?"
The tall figure in the stern wielding the dripping pole sent a distracted smile in Thomas' direction. With her hair pulled back into a severe bun on the back of her head and the long, prim black Victorian style dress she wore, she looked something like the parlor maid from a large well-run household establishment.
"Her name is Sharon." I replied.
"That's Sharon?!" Thomas had a hysterical note to his voice.
"You were expecting maybe an animate skeleton?"
"Uh... Yeah." Thomas admitted. He threw another look over his shoulder at the boat woman. She smiled at him vaguely again. She had a dreamy expression on her face. The quiet of the river has that effect on people. Her arms under the tight fustian sleeves were brawny. It fastened high up her throat with small jet buttons. I myself was sporting black flannel trousers and a straw boater with a black band. A trio of black swans drifted into view appearing almost suspended in midair with the black water below and the dark sky above. They began to follow the boat.
I sat up on my elbow. "That's odd."
"Australian swans in Hell?" Thomas asked.
"No. They're following the punt. I wonder what they want?" I looked back over the stern and watched the swans slip away into the black mists that coiled on the water, even though they were paddling furiously, trying to keep up.
Thomas must have been scared, because once we reached the landing stage he followed me lock step. Or maybe he was just trying to be unobtrusive. I had dragged him off to Hell, naked and shrieking. He might have just have been trying to hide the cute little waggle that his dangling cock made with every step he took.
I took him into Doris' office. We both looked around bewildered. "This is Hell?" said Thomas.
While I said, "Where is she?" Once again some pressing duty had dragged Doris away from her post. The only sign of her was a plate with several cookies on it, mostly bitten. The yellow copy of the simplified instruction book I had given her was face down on the floor. There was a screwdriver driven into the wall right up to the red plastic handle. On the monitor display a gray box was directing the operator to insert floppy disk into Drive C. The cupholder stood open, but it had a black diskette on it instead of a cup of coffee. The holes in the wall had not been repaired yet. Thomas's bare feet left a track in the plaster dust as he came cautiously forward to peer at the monitor.
"Oh, this is the administration department." I explained. "Which brings me to why I brought you here, Thomas. I don't suppose you'd prefer to spend a decade or two helping out the secretary, over getting put onto a rack immediately, and being suspended head down over a sulfur fire, while leeches suck the blood from your feet, and lesser demons whip you with scorpions...?"
Thomas didn't answer me. I had thought he would jump at the offer. Instead he picked the diskette up from the cupholder and gave it a non-committal look. "This is usually your D Drive," he said. "Where are the other diskettes?"
"Down there, I think." I pointed at the heap of loose plaster.
"Ah." Thomas got down on one knee. While he was down there shaking dust out of the diskettes he peered under the desk. "Hmmm..." He added. He looked out from under the desk again for a moment and gestured at the wall. "Would that be a Phillips screwdriver by any chance?"
"Dunno." I pulled it out of the wall. This being Hell, a bat followed. It fluttered helplessly about the room, blundering into the walls. It was disoriented by the glare of the fluorescent lights. One wingtip caught the rim of my boater as it swooped back again and knocked the hat askew. "It's a slot head." I said. I passed the screwdriver down anyway and used my hat to trap the bat. I took it down the hall and let it loose outside.
When I got back Thomas was still under the desk. His rear end was sticking out. "Instead of using the adapter to attach your printer to port B, we could just install the printer to A..." He muttered.
"A drive." I agreed. "Right. Good idea." I wasn't paying much attention. I was looking at his rump. It occurred to me that I could make his job twenty times as difficult if I got down on my knees and distracted him, say by licking him where the darker skin of his balls began to wrinkle as they came to a point into his crack. I could flicker my tongue wetly in there...
"I'd better go find the secretary and let her know what's going on." I said hastily. "Doris might get a bit upset if I don't explain to her that you're an expert I've brought in to help her. You keep working here. I'll be right back."
I opened the hall door and started down the hall towards the Nether Regions of Hell and resolutely left the nether regions of Thomas alone. I could distantly hear the broken harsh screaming of several thousand pain exhausted voices, even before I got to the first door at the end of the hall. The noise made me cringe. Rape I like, and sex and bondage I like, and even kinky little games involving dog leashes and thigh boots. Basically, I don't mind a little sadism just so long as there is sex involved. But the truth was for the last millennia or so I had been avoiding the actual Pits of Shaol because what goes on in there makes me queasy in the tummy.
"Doris..." I quavered and I pushed the inner door open.
Nothing too gruesome greeted my eyes. The screaming was coming from around the corner somewhere. There were a few sets of chains and manacles swaying on the stone wall, but nobody was wearing them and the pokers heaped forgotten nearby were cold and dark metal. There was an empty plate covered with crumbs.
Beyond the first bend there was an iron grate and the flames were leaping orange and bright. There was nobody chained to this grate either. I tiptoed forward. "Doris?" My nervous voice rose to a squeak. The heat of the writhing flames in the pit hid the crimson that my unstable voice made rise to my face.
In the bottom of the pit there was a salamander. The salamander was gold and about a hundred and twenty feet long. It was coiled up basking in the heat. All along the walls were chains and manacles to fix the doomed for all eternity where their flesh could feel the searing heat unendingly blister them. Now I could hear the hiss and crack of whips. Thumbscrews and racks and spikes and other hard to identify bits of ironmongery lined the walls and even the ceiling so that the damned could have lacerated flesh and crushed bones added to their punishment. This was the place where the nearest of those frenzied, helpless screams were coming from. I stood quite still and frowned.
Something was missing. There should have been a few hundred thousand spasming, arching, whimpering naked bodies in my sight. There should have been a few hundred-thousand stubby-winged parrot-beaked, bat-eared, hump-backed long-clawed demons hard at work, toiling away in the heat, at least one for every damned soul. But even peering as close as I did so that my head was sticking through the grate, all I could see were a few hundred thousand empty white plates resting on odd projections in the rocks and the stone-work. I could hear the damned and I could hear the devils at work but I couldn't see them. There wasn't just something missing. There was someone missing. There was everyone missing.
Oh, and there were several loud speakers dangling from the ceiling and set up one every nine or ten feet along the walls. It was the acoustic system that was doing the wailing. That accounted for the sound effects I could hear.
"Doris?" This time my voice didn't come out as a squeak. It came out completely inaudible. Just because I was no longer anticipating the sight of unspeakable obscenities of sadism and dismemberment, I didn't stop cringing as I went skulking on down the halls. In fact I was cringing so hard now that I was bent over like an apologetic hunchback. "Doris? Dorrrrris...? Where are you? If you're anywhere here could you please come out? I'd really like an explanation?!"
I gave it up at last. Hell is, after all a pretty big place, but I couldn't find anyone. I was pretty sure that while all I explored was one very small corner of it, that small corner would not have gone unnoticed by the other regions. If the one region had been abandoned, the other regions would have known about it and come to investigate the evacuation. It looked like everybody had gone on holiday and clean forgot to tell me about it. All I found was a lot of cookie crumbs.
"Oh no. Oh my. Oh dear!" I moaned. "Oh my badness! We've been harrowed. We've been robbed. He's been back again!"
Unless you are a theology student, or blessed with the inability to forget what you had to memorize for your confirmation however many decades past that was, you probably don't know that this happened to us once before. It was in AD 32. There was a death that occurred on earth, which should have been a good thing for us, but wasn't. The soul in question duly came down to us and spent three days here. We don't like to talk about it much. Total global disasters have that effect on people. On the third day He rose again, as is written in the Scriptures. He made his own hole in the roof and took all our damned souls with him. We've only had two thousand years to work on the replacement collection since then. As I was going up the hall back to the office I was having heart palpitations. I was reeling. It was the Resurrection all over again and I'd missed it.
All these thoughts immediately fled my mind when I stepped back into the office once more. Thomas was back under the desk and Doris had him by the ankle, wrenching him out again and pummeling him unmercifully with her tail.
"Doris!" I yelped and leaped to the rescue. "Don't! Stop! Wait! He's just the tech support guy!"
By that time Doris had also got Thomas by the hair and he was bent over double backwards. His empty hands pawed the air. Her five-inch fangs were looming towards his face. "Don't you mess with my computer!" She howled. Then she saw me.
"Wait-wait-wait!!" I flung my hands out like the man in the old silent black and white movies trying to stop an onrushing train. "Doris, don't slaughter the tech support!"
Unbelievably she stopped dead. Doris froze on the spot and her eyes went big. Two round yellow orbs the size of soup plates fixed on me and a wide nervous grin rose to her mouth. "Why, Marplot...Uh, whatever are you doing here?"
"I've completed my assignment." I said meekly. "Doris, I'd like you to meet Thomas. Thomas is that seduction I've been working on. You'll never guess what Thomas did in his former life. He used to get people's computer systems up and running."
"Er...Hi Thomas." Doris forgot to let go of the man while she looked back down at him. "You're right, he is cute. Cuter than a bunny rabbit. He's just as adorable as you told me. Marplot here keeps dropping into my office to gush about your darling dimpled chin and all that." She informed him.
"Eep." Thomas responded.
"Yes, well..." She remembered she was holding him and let go. He fell flat on his back. "Did you say tech support?"
I smiled enthusiastically. "Tech support!" I agreed. "Why Thomas probably has your system halfway back up and running already!"
Thomas slithered about on his back trying to get his legs out from underneath himself and flip over. "I guess it is kind of a surprise. " I told Doris, "But I felt your computer problems were partially my fault, since I brought you the software in the first place. Maybe we should have gone with Apple. I was going to introduce you and Thomas to each other, but then you weren't here, and I thought he'd better get a start on it in case it took awhile, and then I went off looking for you..." I trailed off. Doris was giving me the big eyes again.
"So where did you disappear to just now?" I asked conversationally.
I had visions of her bolting the office to escape a host of avenging angels all clad in the long white nighties that our competition commonly sports, and waving flaming swords. Perhaps she had flung the screwdriver behind her in an act of defiant self-defense on her way out and then snuck back again when the heavenly SWAT team was gone. But Doris pointed in two directions at once, gesturing in the direction of the front door and the cookie plate on her desk simultaneously. Her tentacles writhed in both directions across her chest.
"I was just out feeding the swans. Got a bit stressed out there and had to take a few minutes off." She gabbled. "You know how it is, Marplot, wrestling with that machine gets me a bit wired. Real peaceful there on the river. Thought I'd sit by the water for a few minutes and get rid of the left over cookies..." She trailed off. She managed a grin. "I'll bet those swans could get used to being fed."
"I'll bet." I agreed mechanically. The odd behavior of the swans was explained but I had a different mystery on my mind. I ducked my shoulders nervously. "Umm...Is the two-thousand year reign of the anti- Christ over?"
"Over? Never...!" Doris started vehemently and then suddenly looked abashed. She scuffed her talons on the linoleum and shredded a tile. "No, not over, not yet, not exactly. I, uh, I guess you were out back?"
"Where is everybody?" I inquired plaintively.
"Gone."
"Vaporized?" I've been stuck in a rut, doing the same job for longer than you can begin to imagine, and yet the idea of it all being over did not come as a pleasant one. Call me foolish but retirement was an unattractive thought. I like my work. I didn't want to experience permanent complete discorporation.
"Er, no."
"Gone where?"
Doris turned an odd shade of olive drab. Her face achieved the hue of an old army jacket and I realized that she was blushing. "I left the back door open."
"You what?" The thought was almost as frightening as the end of the reign of the Anti Christ. In both cases the concept had horrible personal significance. There are certain rules that do not get violated. If they get violated the person we belong to might get mad. The legends are many and definite. Nobody ever escapes from Hell. Nobody. Ever. Except a couple of billion dead people that is.
"OH my God!" I dropped the G-word without apology. "How many minutes ago?!" I had visions of trying to find a cosmic front-end loader and shovel them all back in again before anybody noticed.
Peels and shreds of linoleum were coming up like a dragon shedding its hide. Doris kept her eyes fixed on the floor. "A few years back." She mumbled.
"Like how many years back!" My voice was rising.
"Well... a lot." She turned up her eyes nervously to gauge my reaction. "It was an accident. Very nearly an accident. It was hot in here. And there had been a very big battle up on earth. The sack of Constantinople. Thousands dead, all in one day. You couldn't even picture the paperwork. We were doing it all by hand in those days and I ran out of parchment. I just propped the door open a little way. If you don't get counted, I said, nobody will ever know you were down here."
I must not have looked too horrified, because she went on. My lower jaw was resting on my chest and there was steam coming out of my ears. If I had been truly showing the horror I felt there would have been blood gushing out of my eyes as well. I felt like I had been sandbagged. "It was only a few hundred souls." Doris explained. "Nothing so much. But nobody ever noticed. I mean, I do all the paperwork, right? I just handed over fifty thousand duplicate copies of form 57834FG-19L and nobody realized they were duplicates. Nobody had the time to cross- reference. And then the next day was just as bad. Thousands of murdered souls marching into the holding pens, weeping. And believe it or not that parchment was still on back order..."
She looked at me beseechingly. "I was scared half out of my mind, waiting for when the auditors came in at the end of the year, but when they came in I just handed them all the duplicate forms I'd made. New regulation, I said. Now it all has to be done in quadruplicate. Red wax seal on forms 59834FG-19L and black wax on 57834FG-22L, Cause of Damnation to be recorded in paragraph 7ii on page 567B. They never even checked if there were the souls in Hell to match the paperwork. They never do, not in centuries."
I moaned.
"And the poor lost souls...Marplot, they hug their children and they cry. So I just go down at the end of the day and prop the door open. Gosh, I tell them, look, there's no guard on duty at this door and way up there, if you just follow that path, you could get to the World again, not that you'd do that, since this is where you belong. It's not really my fault that they take off like that. They're just trembling when they get here, they're so frightened."
"You've been letting them escape on purpose!" I howled the accusation.
She shot me a look. I changed directions instantly. "Where did all our devils go?!"
"How would I know? A few centuries ago they started to take off too. I've had to fudge the payroll to cover it up. It's not my fault if they desert their posts." She tugged distractedly at a snake on her head. "I had to conceal it when they vanished because even the auditors might start to wonder how we manage to run a Hell without any head office staff. Every time I think the auditors might be getting suspicious of something, I turn out more paperwork."
"Are you telling me that all our fucking paperwork has been your idea all along?" I shrieked.
"You're accusing me of being merciful, not of being a sadist." She bellowed back. "The paperwork is half the problem. Every time someone is born I have to open a file on them, and every time someone dies and comes here I have to open another file on them. Did you every try to fill out a form 77BH824-666 Possible Negative Pre-Natal Influences Report? All I do is try to keep up with it, without trying to keep up with remembering to lock all the doors. Did you ever try working with your office cram full of moaning sinners begging for a second chance?"
She broke down again. "Marplot, they're so scared when they see those flames! They tremble all over. The heat is roaring up to the roof and they're trembling like they're cold. Those are bake ovens, I tell them. Relax. Those fires are just for doing the cookie baking..."
"So you feed them chocolate chip cookies and let them escape on purpose?" I roared. "And just want do you think Rehtaf Ruo is going to do to us when he finds out how many souls he has left?"
Doris didn't say anything. Instead of yelling back at me she said nothing at all. She looked at me with her own yellow eyes huge with fright and worry. I suddenly realized how loudly I had been yelling and stopped. If something indescribably worse than eternal damnation was going to happen to us when Rehtaf Ruo found out what was going on, maybe we didn't want him to find out any sooner than he had to.
"Oh dear." I said softly.
Thomas was doubled up on the floor laughing his ass off. Once Doris and I stopped yelling at each other I could hear his gasping snorts and chuckles. I turned my eyes coldly down at him. "Shut up or I'll belt you." I advised. Thomas took exactly no notice of me and went right on hiccuping and sniggering.
We cut a deal, the three of us. It took Thomas fifteen days to get her a network up and running, but when he did he linked fifty thousand printers. Each one of them running day and night at high speed took care of a different form, filling in the data, which was initially compiled by a program he installed.
"It's the principal of GIGO." Thomas explained. "If you two pirates are raking off the souls and the final reports are all false in the end anyway, you may as well start with random generation of data. Saves the work, not to mention the data entry and the need to make accuracy checks."
He patted the monitor on Doris' desk. "This one'll take care of it for you. All you have to do is type in the number of souls you want to create reports on and then press enter. I've set up the network to do the rest. It's so simple you'll have time on your hands."
"Changing fifty-thousand ink cartridges is still going to take up a lot of time." I pointed out.
"Not compared to filling out over 987,280 Possible Negative Pre- Natal Influences Reports every single day." Doris shot back. "I'm not going to know what to do with myself."
"I've thought of that." Thomas continued. "So I've taken the liberty of installing a few games on the system for you to try out, and hooking it up with the Internet so you can surf. If I understand your mores right, goofing off on the job is wrong, and minions of hell are supposed to do wrong things so it's arguably a job requirement?"
"Not exactly." I said, but Doris was hunching close over the screen by then.
"What's Rodent's Revenge?" she asked.
Of course, I had to take Thomas back up to earth again. Now, I had, sort of been planning to do that, though I figured I'd have to do it behind Doris' back and say I was bringing him back to get a refresher course in Access. But the way it turned out he would have just gone out the back door anyway if I'd left him and Doris wasn't raising any objections. The very hour that he finished explaining to Doris how the system worked, I flung him over my shoulder and got him out of there. Doris might not have been caught in over a thousand years, but I wasn't taking any chances of Thomas being on the premises when it finally happened.
"Are you always this impetuous?" Thomas inquired as he dangled head down.
"I kinda like the position." I explained. With my shoulder under his belly, his ass was exposed not far from my free hand. I started exploring. I slid my fingers up his thigh and got a hand around his balls. "All sorts of interesting places to cop a feel."
"I see what you mean." His prick rose and poked me in the collarbone as I started exploring farther back with my thumb. I felt his hands begin wandering too. They were dangling just a little higher than my knees. Where I could get my hands in he could too.
"I was just thinking, Thomas." I said casually. "You wouldn't mind if I dropped by for a visit from time to time after you're back on earth? Just to check up on you. Doris might need some more help from tech support and I could be the go between. I could make sure you're doing okay at the same time."
"Mmm..." He said vaguely.
"Okay." I said. "I'm sorry. Alright? I'm sorry I entrapped your soul. I'm sorry I took you to hell and made you install a system for a completely novice user, and I'm sorry I kept you for the last two weeks without letting put any clothing on. I'm sorry for everything. Will that do?"
"Oh Jesus! Don't stop!" He gasped.
I licked my finger and put it back again. "I'll take that as an invitation." I said.
So Doris and Thomas were both taken care of. That left only me. Doris couldn't really jump ship. There was all that paperwork to keep generating. I was worried about her, because sooner or later Rehtaf Ruo was going to turn up again, and notice the minor changes that we had instituted. When that happened, Hell was going to become a very warm place. But Doris was stubborn about sticking to her post, and probably there was nowhere safe for us to go. When He finds out, he'll track us down no matter where we go.
But in the meantime, I was on the look out for a new line of work. I couldn't really see going on tempting sinners to damnation and sending them down to Hell any more if they were just going to escape out the back way the minute they got there. It seems rather pointless. But I only have experience at one thing.
Doris was out front feeding the swans when I came back. I gave her a wave and went in and poured myself a cup of coffee. The coffee machine was another one of Thomas's improvements. I sat down at her computer and logged on. Thomas had set it up to be really simple. He knew Doris wasn't up to much. All she had to do was point and click. As soon as I clicked on the Internet icon the connection went through and it was ready for me to type in the keywords for my search. It was working wonderfully.
Employment, I typed. Escorts.
A pink screen loaded up right away. "Models and Escorts wanted!" The text trumpeted. "Male or Female! Join the exciting world of glamour!" I leaned back with a grin. Maybe glamour wasn't the right word for the profession, but with over two thousand years of experience I ought to be a shoo-in. I'd be able to find a new job up on earth easily enough working in the same old trade. There was no point giving up the job I was good at.
I pressed the button on the cupholder and set my cup down with a happy sigh. Right away the little tray slid back inside and sent my coffee cup toppling over. A sheet of brown coffee poured into my lap. I sprang up with a yowl and began dancing.
I was going to have to bring Thomas back sooner than I expected after all. There were still a few things he hadn't got working quite perfectly yet.