by Marilyn Todd
A Shamus Award nominee for her 2007 EQMM story “Room for Improvement,” about a female P.I. in 1950s London, Marilyn Todd returns, in this issue, in a much more fanciful mood. Fans of her series of novels set in Ancient Greece won’t want to miss Blood Moon, the follow-up to 2007’s Blind Eye, which is scheduled for April 2009 release from Severn House. In it, High Priestess Iliona is called on by the Spartan secret police to find out why three people were killed during a diplomatic visit.
The devil went down to Georgia. Everybody knows this, because Charlie Daniels wrote a song about how he was looking for a soul to steal and was in a bind, ‘cause he was way behind, and was willin’ to make a deal. Obviously, there’s poetic licence here. Hell, as you’d expect, is not exactly short of applicants, all of whom are processed with commendable speed and efficiency. Nor do we make deals.
What was true, though, was that when the devil came upon that boy playing on a fiddle and playin’ it hot, he did jump up on a hickory stump and say, “Boy let me tell you what: I bet you didn’t know it but I’m a fiddle player too, and if you care to take a dare, I’ll make a bet with you. I’ll bet a fiddle of gold against your soul, ‘cause I think I’m better than you.”
Or words to that effect, the devil not really being one for poetry, whereas Mr. Daniels probably needed it to rhyme. But the point I’m making is that the president does like to get out of the office every once in a while, see how the world of sin is shaping up. Which is pretty nicely, as it happens, but when he’s gone, Hell doesn’t run itself. So while he and this Johnny character were taking bets, souls versus fiddles and all that, it was noses to the grindstone for the rest of us.
Leastways, it should have been.
Was it Georgia, specifically, which always gets as hot as Hell in August? Or pure bad luck that the minute the competition started, the pitchfork sharpeners went on strike? In no time, the brimstone workers had walked out in support, with the stokers of the hellfires downing pokers in sympathy. I felt beads of sweat trickle down my horns. As the president’s right-hand demon, it was my job to relay status via his personal hotline and I wasn’t looking forward to that, I really wasn’t. He tended to have what I suppose you’d call mood swings when it came to bad news. Messengers rarely volunteered for the job. In the end, of course, it was immaterial. The weather forecast showed that it was a rainy night in Georgia. I couldn’t make a connection.
“Don’t worry about the strikers.” The head of Inhuman Resources patted my shoulder reassuringly. “I used to teach kindergarten, so I’m well used to tantrums,” he breezed. “I’m off to start negotiations straightaway.”
“Good, because it would have put the Old Man right off his playing,” I said, remembering how very attached he was to that golden fiddle of his. And quite honestly, I had enough problems to contend with without my boss venting his spleen.
The thing is, you see, before he left, he’d tasked me with conducting a feasibility study into the future of Hell.
“After all, if the universe is expanding,” he’d argued, “we need to know what’s going to happen to us.”
He was big on economic forecasts, was the president, and like any major corporation, tended to invest heavily in research, development, and marketing. Once, he set me writing slogans in his absence and I thought that was a pretty tough assignment.
The devil’s in the details, that was one of mine.
Hell to pay, another.
Damned if I know, probably the best.
But slogans, I quickly discovered, were a piece of cake compared to feasibility studies. I mean, where do you start? After kicking at the edges for a while, I eventually pressed the button in the elevator for three thousand floors down to the Finance Department, where every thumbscrew, prod, and drop of boiling oil has to be accounted for. Exactly. If taxation is hell, then Hell itself is truly taxing. But thankfully, between Accounts and the Admissions Office, I managed to gather enough statistics to fill a football stadium. And having waded through them, began to see a problem.
“Dr. Faust.” The nasal voice of the tannoy echoed through the sulphur. “Dr. Faust to ER immediately. Dr. Faust to ER.”
Another emergency in Eternal Retribution, then? Any other time I’d have been curious to see what was so urgent that it needed to drag the good doctor away from the golf course. Someone else selling their soul to the devil, and starting a fight because they couldn’t get a discount? Or was the Irritating Ringtone Punishment Squad failing to get a signal again? Whatever the crisis, though, I decided it wasn’t my problem. What I’d discovered, on the other hand, was. And it was big...
“Dr. Lecter,” boomed the disembodied tannoy. “Dr. Lecter to the canteen, please.”
Poor old Hannibal. Ever since he’d been appointed Director of Pain and Misery, he kept forgetting lunch, and another time I’d have made some wisecrack as he hopped into the elevator about taking his work home with him. That day, though, I had weightier issues on my mind, and even when I got the spiky bit of my tail caught in the doors, I barely noticed the bruise.
“Good news, good news!” The head of Inhuman Resources was grinning as he rounded the corner. “Arbitration’s going swimmingly. With luck, the strikes will be over before the president returns.”
I wished I could have returned his smile, or even confided my suspicions, but for the moment, I held back. I had to be sure—I mean really sure—of my findings.
Meanwhile, up in the foothills of the Appalachians, the devil opened up his case and he said, “I’ll start this show.” And fire flew from his fingertips as he rosined up his bow.
Soon, though, it would be Johnny’s turn to play.
I was running out of time.
* * * *
“Boyle’s law?” My friend Stanley looked up from where he was updating the Liars, Cheats, and Swearers database, and frowned. “Since when have you been interested in thermodynamics?”
“I’m not,” I said, crossing my fingers in the hope that my name wasn’t about to be added to the register. “Learning the twenty-three laws of gases is a new punishment being introduced for those who didn’t eat their greens.”
Stanley used to be in secondhand car sales, so he didn’t query my explanation. Instead, he reached for a piece of paper and wrote PV = k on it in thick red ink.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Boyle’s law.”
I must have looked as stupid as I felt, because he pointed with his trident.
“P denotes the pressure, V is the volume of the gas, and k is a constant value representative of the pressure and volume of the system,” he explained. “So long as temperature remains constant at the same value, the same amount of energy given to the system persists throughout its operation and therefore, theoretically, the value of k will remain constant.”
I was hoping he’d give me a moment to take this in, preferably ten years. But, just as if he was selling a ten-year-old Chevrolet with dodgy brakes and leaking radiator, Stan was in his stride.
“Due to the derivation of pressure as perpendicular applied force and the probabilistic likelihood of collisions with other particles through collision theory,” he said, “the application of force to a surface may not be infinitely constant for such values of k, but will have a limit when differentiating such values over a given time. Forcing the volume V of the fixed quantity of gas to increase, keeping the gas at the initially measured temperature, the pressure P must decrease proportionally. Conversely, reducing the volume of the gas increases the pressure, got it?”
“Got it.”
Like you, I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about. In fact, it was only later that I discovered he’d brought up the Wikipedia article on his computer and was quoting it verbatim. Seems you can’t trust anyone these days.
“You can also tell those cabbage-haters that Boyle’s law predicts the result of introducing a change in volume and pressure to the initial state of a fixed quantity of gas. The ‘before’ and ‘after’ volumes and pressures of the fixed amount of gas, where the ‘before’ and ‘after’ temperatures are the same (heating or cooling will be required to meet this condition), are related by this equation here.”
My heart sank. Another piece of paper. Another red equation.
p1 V1 = p2 V2
I nodded knowingly, thanked him for his time, and then, once I got back to my desk, cried my eyes out. Physics and feasibility? I was doomed.
“Boyle’s law?”
Of all the help in all of Hell, the last place I expected to find it was from my pedicurist. Don’t get me wrong. Suzie does a great job, buffing, polishing, and getting a really even cleft between my hoofs. In fact, it was I who suggested she put the “love” in “cloven” in her advertisemens, and turn the “o” into a heart. Even so, she was the very last person I expected to be familiar with physics.
“Oh, sure, honey.” Buff, buff, polish, polish. “Pythagoras’s theorum, Archimedes’ principle. Ask me anything.”
I hadn’t actually intended asking her one damn thing. I’d simply been grumbling about my problems over a soothing shod-rub to unwind, when suddenly she trots out with that little gem. Amazing. And though the prospect of more horrendous equations filled me with dread, when it comes to fact-finding, there is no such thing as too much information. I braced myself.
“Easy peasy, sugar.” She gave my scales an affectionate ruffle. “Boyle’s law simply states that the volume of a gas increases when the pressure decreases at a constant temperature.”
And there it was. Suddenly boiled down (boyled down?) to something I could understand. Everything I needed in a nutshell.
“Suzie, you’re a star,” I said, hugging her.
“Aw, go on with you,” she said, blushing and pushing me away. All the same, she gave my horns a good hard burnish as a freebie, and when I left, I could really feel them glowing.
* * * *
I know what you’re thinking.
You’re wondering why, if Hell doesn’t make deals, the devil was cutting one in Georgia. Well, I’ll tell you. Fun. He just went up there to have a look around and enjoy himself, because win or lose, Johnny’s soul was his. It was only ever a question of time, since what people often don’t appreciate is that everybody goes to Hell—and I do mean everybody. You. Me. Murderers, thieves, rapists (obviously), but where do you draw the line? Pickpockets? Exam cheats? People who exceed the speed limit while driving? Yes, you’re probably thinking. There might be a case to be made for those, along with adultery, tax evasion, forgery, and plagiarism. And you probably have a mental image of a panel of judges sitting in the Admissions Office, deciding who comes in and for how long, but you’d only be partially right. Sinners are indeed sorted according to category. But I repeat: Everyone comes in.
Nobody comes out.
Surprises you, does it? It shouldn’t, because in the end it all comes down to religion, many of which proclaim that if you are not a member of theirs, you will go to Hell. And since there are many of these religions, and given that people never belong to more than one, everybody ends up here by default. Factor in projected birth and death rates, and you begin to see that the clientele is increasing in direct proportion. Hence the need for a feasibility study.
But having done the analysis, the conclusion was chilling.
And frankly, it made telling the president about pitchfork sharpeners going on strike look very tame indeed.
You see, this is where Boyle’s law comes in. Once I’d got to grips with Wikipedia, I saw that if you look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell, you’ll see that the temperature and pressure can’t stay the same; and the volume has to expand as more souls are added. Which means one of two things will happen.
Either Hell will expand at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter. In which case, the temperature and pressure will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
Or Hell will expand at a faster rate than the rate at which souls enter. In which case, the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.
Now who’s going to tell the devil that?
* * * *
The boy said, “My name’s Johnny and it might be a sin, but I’ll take your bet, you’re gonna regret, ‘cause I’m the best that’s ever been.”
He played: Fire on the mountain, run boys run, devil’s in the house of the rising sun, chickens in the breadpan, picking out dough, Granny does your dog bite? No, child, no.
Hmm, I thought. Fire on the mountain indeed.
Believe me, with what I’d just discovered, I was really starting to sweat.
* * * *
The devil bowed his head, because he knew that he’d been beat. And he laid that golden fiddle on the ground at Johnny’s feet.
This is a fact. I witnessed it myself.
Johnny said, “Devil, just come on back if you ever wanna try again. I done told you once, you son-of-a-bitch, I’m the best that’s ever been!”
He wasn’t. The devil was just giving him his due, or at least an extension of it. “Sucker,” he chuckled under his breath, and was so busy laughing at his own joke that he failed to notice me.
And really, why should he?
When you leave the Great Underground Car Park, you adopt human form, and the first thing I did when I got back to earth was catch that midnight train to Georgia. You see, at heart I’m a coward. I knew what would happen when I showed the president the results of that feasibility study, and I didn’t fancy being toasted over fire while having my liver ripped out as rats gnawed at my vitals. Not eighteen times a day for all eternity. No way.
On the other hand, I couldn’t fudge the results, either.
So there was only one thing left to do.
I had to kill the devil.
* * * *
Despite what you might think, murder isn’t easy. Not that I haven’t picked up a few tips over the millennia, of course. The Borgias had enough poison recipes to fill a cookery book. Ghengis Khan was never short of ideas, either. Plus there was always Torquemada’s bestseller to dip into, Ink and Inquisition, if I got stuck. But this is the devil we’re talking about, and whilst silver bullets work for vampires, the president was bulletproof, and there was no heart to drive a stake into.
I resorted to the age-old tried-and-tested never-fails routine. My good friend, the peanut allergy. And since the devil has no soul, he won’t be going back to Hell, and neither, for that matter, will I. No, sir. Not with that prognosis!
And in case you’re wondering who I am, look up. Now whose is the first face that you see...?
Fire on the mountain, run boys run, devil’s in the house of the rising sun. Chickens in the breadpan, picking out dough. Granny does your dog bite? No, child, no.
Cerberus, the three-headed hound who guards the gates of Hell, does tend to whine a bit, mind you. But that’s only because he’s missing his master, and no doubt once Hannibal takes over, he’ll settle down again.