Puck held out a hand, and Dan saw a light begin to shimmer in the darkness of his living room. It formed into a rounded cylinder about five and a half feet tall, and the cylinder began to shape itself into the form of a woman. High, tight breasts, long legs, narrow waist, flowing hair the color of dark honey. Huge sad hazel eyes, narrow nose, full lips.
And the smile that he could never forget. The smile that said "I love you, and I will love you forever."
"Francie," he whispered.
She held out her arms to him and his heart felt like it would break.
"I can give her to you," Puck said.
The voice was outside of Dan's head, but inside of it too. I can give her back to you.
Would you give anything to have her back?
Would you give anything?
Anything?
And he thought, She's right there. Not solid yet, but she's Francie. My Francie.
And Puck is my friend. He saved my life. He cares about me.
I would give anything to have her back.
Would you?
Of course. I love her.
How much do you love her? Would you give me your soul?
That was the question, of course. He knew it was the question Puck would ask, though he didn't know how he knew. Puck had redeemed himself. Puck had saved Dan's life. He had escaped Hell, regained his memories of his past, repented . . .
But he hadn't repented. He was still angry with God for taking away his wife and his son. He still hated God for sentencing him to Hell.
And Dan had said he understood. But did he?
He'd been dead. He'd been above his body, away from the world, and he knew without a doubt that Francie would be waiting for him. He knew that he would find her there. Where? Certainly not in Hell. Francie had loved the whole world and everyone in it. Wherever Francie was—and Dan wasn't certain that she was in a literal Heaven with angels and harps and God with a long white beard—she was someplace good.
He'd been on his way to her.
And Puck had pulled him back.
And Puck was offering him a physical reincarnation of Francie for the few years the two of them would live. In exchange, he would give up an eternity with Francie in that wonderful place she'd discovered beyond.
Dan stared at Puck.
"You can't really give her back to me. You can only take me away from her. Can't you?"
He caught movement behind Puck. The imp, Fetch, shaking his head vehemently back and forth. No, no, no. But doing it out of Puck's line of vision.
"Don't be silly," Puck said. "She's right here. I'll have to have your signature on a few documents before I can completely materialize her—you wouldn't believe the number of Hellawatts it takes to bring someone back."
"You're right," Dan said quietly. "I wouldn't."
Puck stopped smiling. "Dan," he said, "what's gotten into you? I'm offering to give you Francie again. I can't tell you what I would have done if I'd had an offer like this. Here she is . . . the woman you love . . . and look at her, Dan. She wants you. She's waiting for you to bring her back into your arms. You think she hasn't missed you as much as you've missed her?"
Francie held out her hands to him. Pleading. Her eyes were so sad and full of longing, her tremulous smile so full of hope. His heart nearly stopped from the pain of turning away from her.
He reminded himself of the succubus he'd met, the one who'd offered to be Francie for him. He looked again to this ghostly Francie, and he wondered how much of her, if any of her, had ever been the woman he'd loved whole-heartedly. Probably none of her. Francie's soul was surely beyond the devil's reach. He couldn't haul her out of the afterlife and stuff her into a body—so this woman who looked just like Francie, and who might even act just like Francie, couldn't possibly be Francie. If she wasn't another succubus, she was something Puck had created from Dan's dreams and wishes and memories.
These Hellraised monsters were going to bring back the dodos and the dinosaurs and the woolly mammoths; they were going to have Wyatt Earp and John Lennon and Marie Antoinette walking around in their park shaking hands with the paying customers. Why in God's name would he think Puck couldn't create a convincing replica of Francie?
That's when it all became clear.
Resolutely he turned back to Puck and said, "Now I know why you saved my life."
Puck's eyebrows rose. "You do? Well, I'm glad to hear that. I saved your life because I'm your friend."
"No," Dan said. "You saved my life because if I'd died then, I would have gone to be with Francie, and I would have been beyond your reach. You saved my life because I wasn't damned yet."
Puck laughed.
"You've been working on me all along, haven't you? You're no closer to redemption now than you were when I met you."
Puck continued laughing, and he began to change. He grew taller, broader, uglier. His skin sprouted scales and his forehead and shoulders sprouted horns and his fingers changed to razor-tipped claws. Hellish fangs slid out of increasingly heavy jaws. His clothes vanished, and two black leathery wings unfurled from his back. His laughter got deeper and uglier.
"Why would I want to repent?" he asked. "Why would any of the Hellraised want to repent? We have power. We have wealth. We have unimaginable knowledge. We can do things you can't even begin to understand."
"Get out, Puck," Dan said.
"And leave you without your darling Francie? You're damned anyway now, Dan. Damned and doubly damned. Because of how you treated her, Meg is at this very moment fornicating with an incubus, knowing full well what it is, and not caring. She's hating you and cursing you for your infidelity, and swearing that she'll never forgive you. That sort of hatred would be enough to damn her, and would be almost enough to take you down with her; those who cause the damnation of others are themselves damned. But that's not all."
Dan closed his eyes. He could almost sense what the devil was about to say.
"Right now Janna is standing on her balcony railing, getting ready to take the big plunge, if you know what I mean. She's realized that you don't really love her, Danny boy, and she thinks it's the only way out."
"You're lying," Dan said between clenched teeth. "You're full of shit!"
Puck shrugged, and described a circle in the air with one claw. The inside of the circle turned white, and then Dan saw Janna, just as Puck said, standing on the balcony railing, her hair whipping violently in the wind.
Is it a trick? he thought. Could he show me this if it weren't really happening?
"There's something else," Puck said. He waved his hand and the image of Janna disappeared. "She's carrying your child, Dan. She's carrying your child and soon the two of them will be nothing more than a wet spot on the pavement. And it will be your fault."
The devil laughed.
"And tomorrow my people are going to make sure that the Great Devil Makeover is proven to be a fraud. I'm going to go out and show them how I really am. And who I really am. My name is Scumslag, and I'm in charge of Satco. I'm going to lay out all the contracts I've signed with your radio station clients—you think they wanted to talk to me because I knew where their relatives were? They wanted deals—wealth, power, success, a longer life. All of them signed my contracts. And you were with me, so how is anyone ever going to believe that you weren't in on it—on this attempt to defraud and deceive an entire nation?"
"No," Dan said. "They wanted reassurance."
"They wanted what only I could give them. Guaranteed success. You know what else? Because of you, we got the land we wanted to build Devil's Point. All because of you. We figure we can get more souls out of Devil's Point in a month than we got in ten years by regular methods. And the other devils who've been taken in and cared for by all you suckers are going to come out and let everyone see the souls they've collected. Because of you, Dan. Because of you, and the good thing you did, helping a poor unfortunate devil find his way back to Heaven."
The devil tapped on the table with one claw. "Every soul that's damned because you helped us will count against you in the Old Communist's record books. Millions of souls."
The devil smiled an evil smile. "Pretty good thing you did there, wasn't it? You fooled a nation and damned some of the better people in the state, and come tomorrow you aren't going to be able to lift your head. They'll be hunting for it from here to Alaska. So take Francie now. Sign my contract and take her, because you'll never see her again after you die. Your soul already belongs to us. All my contract will do now is dictate the terms of your service to Hell. And maybe let you live a little longer when they come hunting for you—after all, we take care of our own."
Lightning turned the room white. Thunder shook the walls and the floor and rattled the dishes.
It could all be true, Dan thought. Perhaps none of the Hellraised had escaped the clutches of Hell; maybe, as Puck—rather, Scumslag—said, they didn't want to.
Maybe every good thing I intended to do has done evil instead.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
And maybe it was all just a lie to get Dan to sign the contract. The imp still stood back there in the corner, shaking his head. No. No. No.
Dan looked up to the place where he always figured Heaven would be, and he said, "God, if I've screwed this up, I'm sorry. I mean really, really sorry. I only wanted to help the Hellraised take advantage of the second chance you gave them. Please don't let anything bad happen to Janna, or to Meg. Please."
He meant it with everything in him.
He didn't expect what happened next. Scumslag screamed and vanished. "Francie" howled, metamorphosed into a hideous long-fanged gray-scaled monster out of a nightmare, and shimmered into darkness.
Several sheets of paper fell to the floor, where they exploded on contact, burned brightly for just an instant without catching anything else on fire, and left the room in darkness.
He stood shaking. "I have to call Meg," he said. "And Janna—Christ, I have to save Janna. I have to let them know."
He heard the scuffling of tiny feet, and felt a tug at his pants leg. In a raspy, barely audible voice Fetch said, "Come too?"