EPIDAPHELES AND THE INADEQUATELY ENRAGED DEMON

by Ramsey Shehadeh

Around here, we’re not prone to quoting reviews, but the comments concerning Ramsey Shehadeh’s first story about Epidapheles (in our Mar/Apr issue and currently reprinted on our Website) brought a variety of reactions, including “Silly and pointless,” “mercifully short,” “tried way too hard to be funny/silly,” and “didn’t score much.” Other reviewers and bloggers said, “Lots of fun, a distinctive voice, and I very much hope we’ll see more in the same vein by this author,” and “One could say this is supremely silly, but that’s what I like about it.”
In light of such enthusiasm, we welcome Epidapheles back for more silliness.

* * * *

Epidapheles stroked his beard and studied the wall. “You are quite correct, Lord Fuddlesworth,” he said. “The doorway you describe is not there. In fact, it is perhaps the most absent doorway I have ever encountered.”

Door sighed. He stood in the corner behind Epidapheles—his master—and watched.

“But many years ago, this wall did contain a doorway,” said Lord Fuddlesworth. He was a stooped old man, with a small and frail voice. “And then, quite suddenly, and for a very long time, it did not. And now it sometimes does, and sometimes doesn’t. It is perplexing.”

“Interesting,” said Epidapheles. “Very interesting.” He paused. “Very, very interesting,” he said.

When Epidapheles did not know what to say, he tended to repeat himself until something occurred to him. Things very rarely occurred to him, however, so he was likely to go on in this vein for some time. Door decided to intervene. He tiptoed forward, as quietly as he could, trying to keep his wooden legs from clattering against the tiled floor, and nudged his master.

Epidapheles spun around and glared down. “What?”

Lord Fuddlesworth started, and glanced over. He could not see Door, as Door was invisible, but he could see Epidapheles addressing the empty space behind him.

“Don’t look at me,” whispered Door.

“Why not?” said Epidapheles.

“Don’t talk to me either,” whispered Door.

“I will speak to you as long as it pleases me to do so.”

Lord Fuddlesworth’s expression shifted from confused to baffled. “Lord Mage, are you communing with demons?” he said.

“We don’t want him to know I’m here,” hissed Door, with all the patience he could muster. “Don’t you remember? We just discussed this.”

Epidapheles squinted, searching through the dark and fuddled muck of his memory for the conversation they’d had an hour ago. In this conversation, Door had suggested that they should keep his presence secret, as there is very little point in telling people that your familiar is an invisible chair. No good can come of it.

Eventually, comprehension dawned in Epidapheles’s eyes—although Door suspected that it wasn’t a dawning so much as a sputtering skyward lurch, like a sun heaving itself halfway over the horizon, peeking out at the world, finding nothing particularly worth illuminating, then slipping, with some relief, back into the earth.

Epidapheles turned back to the wall. He seemed on the point of saying interesting again, but quelled the impulse.

“Fascinating,” he said, and stroked his beard. The beard was made out of twine and goat hair and pasted to his real beard with epoxy. The goat from which it had been cut was—based on the available evidence—very old, very mangy, and possibly leprous. But Epidapheles insisted on wearing it. He had recently conceived the notion that his renown placed him in great and constant danger, which required him to wear a disguise at all times. This was, Door thought, a somewhat perplexing notion. They were in constant danger, yes, but this was due much more to Epidapheles’s terrifying incompetence than it was to his renown. Also, there was no renown. Attributing something to Epidapheles’s renown was akin to attributing it to his exoskeleton, or his intelligence, or his breasts.

In any case, the disguise was not especially effective. Epidapheles seemed to believe that the best way to disguise himself was to dress up as himself, except more. Thus the tattered false beard stuck to his identical real beard, the dingy charcoal robes slipped over his dingy gray robes, and the twisted oaken staff standing in for his crooked oaken staff. Also, the pseudonym: Epidafeles.

“There are two solutions to your dilemma, Lord Fuddlesworth,” he said. “We can either make the door completely not there, or we can render it entirely there.”

Lord Fuddlesworth brightened at this. “You can make it visible?”

Epidapheles nodded. “Of course. I am Epidafeles, mage of mages.”

Door groaned. The chances of Epidapheles producing a door out of nothing were remote. He knew this from experience, as he was the product of one such failed invocation. The old mage had attempted to conjure a door into the back wall of a tavern, and had instead animated a nearby chair. He had then rendered the chair invisible in his efforts to de-animate it. Thus was Door born.

Door had fond memories of his years as a simple chair. Everything had made sense, then. He’d existed to be sat upon, or not sat upon—a pleasantly binary, and immensely fulfilling, state of being. But there was no such clarity now. Door existed, as far as he could tell, to exist, which seemed a paltry sort of purpose.

“And you can keep it visible?” said Lord Fuddlesworth.

“Of course,” said Epidapheles.

“And it will lead to my wife’s rooms?”

Epidapheles hesitated. “Is that where it led before?”

“Yes,” said Lord Fuddlesworth. “When it wasn’t leading to the demonic realm of Disembowelebub the Eternally Enraged.” He smiled, in a distant, melancholy way. “My lovely Habakkuka disappeared with her door many, many years ago. It would be very pleasant to see her again.”

“Yes, of course,” said Epidapheles, and nodded, sagely. He looked in Door’s general direction. He looked at the old man. He looked at the doorless spot on the wall. “Perhaps you should tell me more about this demonic realm,” he said.

Door sighed.

* * * *

Disembowelebub the Eternally Enraged was in a brooding sort of a mood. He strode through his realm, hands clasped behind his back, staring down at the ground.

Habakkuka walked beside him. He was in gargantuan form today, so she had to take five steps for every one of his, and crane her neck to speak to him. “How are you feeling, milord?” she said.

“Bemused and melancholy, I’m afraid,” he said. “Which is an improvement over yesterday, I suppose. Yesterday I was approaching cheerful.”

“I am very sorry to hear that, milord.”

“As am I, Habakkuka. Does Disembowelebub the Bemused and Melancholy strike fear into your heart? No? How about Disembowelebub the Approaching Cheerful? Does this send frissons of terror crawling up and down your spine?”

“It does not, milord.”

“Of course it does not.” He sighed, and stared off into the middle distance. “When I was a stripling incarnation of evil, even the smallest slight would send me into sputtering paroxysms of rage. I remember when one of my subjects sneezed during a sacrificial ritual in my honor. I set the city ablaze, flayed and disemboweled all of its inhabitants, and then shot the entire realm surrounding it into the fiery maw of hell. For a sneeze.” He shook his head. “These days, I doubt I’d mind much if an army of paladins decided to relieve themselves on one of my altars.”

“I’m sure it’s just a phase, milord. Contentment cannot last forever.”

“Do you know what I did yesterday?”

“No, milord.”

“I was sorting through my sufferers, looking for a few thousand to excruciate before dinner, when I found myself thinking that perhaps these poor people didn’t deserve the infinite pain I was about to inflict upon them. That they were, after all, innocents.” He pinched his lower lip between his fangs, and seemed on the point of tears. “And then I let them go.”

Habakkuka nodded sympathetically. “Perhaps this was a stratagem, milord. An attempt to render yourself enraged at yourself.”

“Perhaps.” He shook his head. “If so, it failed spectacularly. I felt friendly, and benign. Disembowelebub the Friendly and Benign.” He buried his face in his hands. “Is there nothing in all the universes worth becoming enraged with?”

* * * *

Epidapheles steepled his eyebrows, glared at the wall, and cried: “Egressiniari!”

Nothing happened.

Door, folded into a corner in the back of the room, glanced over at Lord Fuddlesworth, who occupied the opposite corner, and was curled into the fetal position with his hands over his head. Fuddlesworth had long since come to the obvious conclusion—that nothing was the best possible outcome when Epidapheles was performing magic—and had subsequently begun to mutter earnest entreaties to a series of gods, demigods, microgods, picogods, and any entities that had so much as grazed a pantheon since the beginning of time.

None of them appeared to be listening, however. In the course of three hours, Epidapheles had managed to turn Lord Fuddlesworth into a sprig of parsnip, a flagon of goat urine, an ermine battleaxe, a very bad love poem, and the color blue. Door knew from long experience how to avoid Epidapheles’s magipropisms, and had therefore escaped with nothing more than a sudden outbreak of hives and a fleeting nostril infestation.

“Thank you, Lord Mage,” said Lord Fuddlesworth in a tiny voice. “I believe I am satisfied. I no longer see the door. It is quite invisible.”

Epidapheles turned around and studied the old man. “Did you not wish to make the door visible?”

“No,” said the old man, shaking his head. “Yes. Perhaps. But I have been persuaded that it would be far better if it were simply banished.”

Epidapheles shrugged. “As you wish. I’ll just clear away this mess.” He waved his hand at a bewildered group of marmosets he’d conjured near the beginning of the ordeal. There was a flash, and a small, localized grammarstorm bloomed out of the air and crawled along the ceiling, shedding torrents of adjectives that splashed down into the room, modifying everything they touched. Door suddenly found himself both crenelated and deciduous, and just slightly canonical. Lord Fuddlesworth had become spangled and punctilious. The walls dripped with jocund. Rivulets of trapezoidal ran between the tiles.

The marmosets did not disappear—though they did become a bit smoggy.

Also, there was a window.

Door shook off his adjectives and studied the window. It occupied the same space as Lord Fuddlesworth’s imaginary door. It was a simple unadorned rectangle, with yellow curtains gathered off to the side. A shaft of red light spilled through it into the room and painted an ochre square on the floor.

Epidapheles—entirely dry—peered at the window, the boiling mass of marmosets, the dissipating grammarstorm. He looked sidelong at Lord Fuddlesworth. “Just as I’d planned,” he said.

Door sighed, stepped fuzzily through a puddle of adverbs, and peered annually into the window. He saw a berm of red rock bristling with a dense forest of iron pikes that reached up into the sky. Men and women were impaled on the top of each of the pikes, thousands and thousands of them. They moaned and struggled feebly in the heat.

“It looks like you’ve opened the version of the portal that leads to the infernal realms of Disembowelebub.” He turned to Epidapheles. “Why does this not surprise me?”

Lord Fuddlesworth crept up behind them, stepping gingerly around a grasping mound of gerunds. He peered through the window, and a smile broke out across his face. “Oh, well done, Lord Mage!” he cried. He clambered through the window, then set off across the landscape, wending his way between the pikes, calling: “Habakkuka! Habakkuka!”

Door watched him recede. “The old fool will die in there,” he said. “We should do something.”

Epidapheles nodded. He drew himself up to his full height, steepled his brows, stared defiantly into the infernal light, and said: “I’m feeling a bit peckish.”

There was a small silence. Door said: “What?”

Epidapheles rubbed his belly. “Which is odd. I seem to remember eating breakfast.”

“The something I was suggesting,” said Door, “involved saving Lord Fuddlesworth from certain death.”

Epidapheles frowned. “I fail to see how this will assuage my hunger.”

* * * *

Habakkuka strode through the Garden of Eternal Agony at Disembowelebub’s side. The demon lord stared moodily off into the middle distance and said nothing. Each step he took shook the world and sent fissures ramifying across the dry earth and between the plots of the damned, who reached out from their holes with what limbs they still possessed. Those with tongues cried out for mercy. Those without simply moaned.

Habakkuka smiled, gently. She had learned over the years to soak up the screams of this realm, absorb them, and—when she was alone, in the middle of the night—crawl into her bed and weep, and weep, and weep for the fate of the damned. She could just as easily have ignored the suffering entirely, of course. This certainly would have spared her a great deal of sorrow. But it would have also made her into the monster she was attempting to destroy.

“Last night,” said Disembowelebub, “I read the collected works of Placidon the Loving, as you suggested. All of them. Love the Little Creatures, Gentle Footsteps on the Loving Path of Pure Lovingness, Hug the Cockles of the Heart of the Inner Everyone. It was nauseating.”

“I am pleased to hear it, milord. I expect your wrath was great.”

“It was not,” said Disembowelebub. “Today I stormed into the mortal realm, fully intending to disembowel every tenth male in the Kingdom of Ur—as is my yearly custom—but found myself thinking: What would Placidon do?” He frowned. “Apparently, what he would do is rescue a drowning puppy.”

Habakkuka nodded. “Perhaps you wished to prolong its death agonies?”

“No. I wished to give it to a sick little girl. To make her feel better.” He bit his lip, and looked away. “Which is what I did.”

“Feral puppies can be quite dangerous. It could be that you expected it to simply eat her.”

“No.” He shook his head. “I just wanted to make her happy. And I believe I did. She kissed me.” He suppressed a sob. “On my horns.”

“How horrible.”

“You cannot possibly imagine.”

“It’s not too late to flay and then burn her entire family.”

“True,” said Disembowelebub, and shrugged. He picked one of the planted sufferers and twirled him between his thumb and forefinger, notched a talon under his chin and was on the point of popping his head off when he paused, sighed, and lowered him gently to ground.

The sufferer looked warily to one side, then the other. He took one backward step, then another. And then he turned and ran.

Disembowelebub watched him recede. “You’re probably thinking I’m going to let that man almost escape, and then, at the last possible moment, hang him with his own intestines.” The sufferer disappeared over the horizon. “Well, I’m not.”

Habakukka shook her head. “Your illness progresses rapidly, milord.”

“Yes.” Disembowelebub rounded on her. “And you have done nothing about it, woman. I have been under your care for many, many years, yet every day is worse than the last.”

She looked down. “You doubt me, milord.”

“Yes, I think that’s a fair statement.”

“You seemed satisfied with my credentials when you first accepted me into your service.”

“Ah, yes, your credentials. What were those again? Your miraculous healing of Baal the Intermittently Piqued? Or was it Gorgon the Passive Aggressive’s triumphant return to artfully concealed emotional sabotage?”

“Sarcasm does not become you, milord,” said Habakukkah.

“You’re right. I’m sorry,” said Disembowelebub, sagging a little. He started, and drew himself up to his full height, and roared: “No I’m not! Silence, woman!” And then, after a moment, he withered again. “No, I am, actually.”

“I believe the time has come for us to take more extreme measures.”

Disembowelebub looked at her. “Yes?”

“Have you ever conversed with a civil servant?”

“Conversed? No. I do have a plane devoted entirely to their excruciation, however. They are tasked with administering the Plane of Untamable Chaos, for all eternity.”

“They must have angered you greatly, milord.”

“I suppose they did, at one point. I seem to remember an infuriating obsession with process.” He shrugged. “They don’t particularly anger me now.”

“Then perhaps you should speak with one of them.”

“Speak? With a mortal?”

“There are few things more enraging than a civil servant.”

Disembowelebub sighed. “Well. It’s worth a try, I suppose.” He gestured, and the landscape yawed to one side, and then the other. It flipped upside-down, and righted itself, and they were among the civil servants.

A million million men and women in light gray suits rushed through a maze of fuzzy gray walls interspersed with steel desks and uncomfortable chairs on balky rollers, surrounded by a landscape of pure chaos. Inchoate, pointless shapes cycled through random configurations. Entire continents formed, unformed, reformed, and then turned into bananas. Time slowed down and sped up for no apparent reason. Universal constants fluctuated wildly.

Habakkuka and the demon lord had appeared beside a steel-gray counter. Behind it, a pinched gray man with a cropped haircut and a gray suit and a face contorted in agony was screaming at a mathematical symbol. “No! You are, by definition, irrational! You may not end! You must march forever into infinity!”

The symbol, a short horizontal line resting atop two close-spaced vertical lines, leaned against the counter, looking bored. “Look, I’m tired, man. Five decimal places is plenty accurate.”

The civil servant slapped a stack of forms down on the counter and screamed: “It is not! If you wish to change your value, you must fill out these forms, in triplicate, and then obtain corroborating signatures from both Circumference and Diameter! And then you must take your form to the committee for—”

“Golden Ratio just changed. Yesterday. He didn’t have to do any of this stuff.”

“Golden Ratio is operating outside of approved procedural norms! He is subject to disciplinary action by—”

“It’s done, man. I’m out of here,” said the symbol, and disappeared. Everything circular in the realm of chaos suddenly tightened, very slightly.

A great communal scream went up. The pinched gray civil servant dropped to his knees and clawed out his eyes. Multitudes of gray-suited sufferers threw up their papers and ran pell-mell through the makeshift corridors, shrieking.

Habakkuka pointed. “There’s another one,” she said.

A gray man in an identical gray suit was studying them from behind another counter. Disembowelebub strode forward, shaking the earth with each step. “Mortal,” he said.

“Good evening, sir,” said the gray man. He pulled a form from the stack beside him, attached it to a clipboard, and handed it up to Disembowelebub. “Please fill this out.”

Disembowelebub looked at the clipboard, then at the civil servant. “What?”

“We need to get your information on file before we can do anything else, I’m afraid.”

“My information?” said Disembowelebub, his voice hardening. His body began to swell. His horns thrummed with red light. Rivulets of fire foamed between his fangs and coursed down his face. “I am Disembowelebub, the Eternally Enraged, Father of Pain, Lord of Suffering, Damner of Souls, Eater of Hope.”

“Not until you fill this out you aren’t,” said the civil servant, tapping the clipboard.

Disembowelebub had by now grown to three times his usual size. He was a giant tower of rage, looming over his realm, visible from every point. When he spoke, his voice was a deafening rumble of thunder. “DO NOT THINK THAT THIS IS THE WORST OF ALL TORMENTS, MORTAL. THE REALM OF PAIN IS INFINITE, AS IS MY WRATH. I WILL TRANSFORM YOU INTO A CREATURE OF PURE AGONY. YOU SHALL BECOME SUFFERING INCARNATE. MOTHERS WILL TELL THEIR CHILDREN THE STORY OF YOUR—”

“Forgive me for interrupting, sir,” said the gray man, shouting up toward Disembowelebub’s summit, his voice shrilling into the higher registers, “but I’m afraid that I have to close for lunch now. I’ll be back in a hour, at which point I would be happy to listen to the conclusion of your diatribe.” He placed a small sign on the counter and turned away. The sign said: Lunch. Back soon!

Disembowelebub bellowed, and a roiling orb of pure darkness formed in his palm. Evil steamed off of its surface, and the cries of a billion lost souls emanated from its core. He opened his mouth and loosed a scream of such surpassing vileness that the very air around him fled, and the vacuum left behind shuddered and tried to eat itself.

Habakkuka looked on, worry creasing the skin between her brows. Perhaps she had gone too far this time. She watched the rage crackle around him, like something electrical, something alive, just as it had before she came into this realm and began to work her subtle magic.

But then, quite suddenly, she felt his rage dissipate. The orb in his hand dwindled into a pebble, and then disappeared entirely. The fire streaming from his mouth turned to smoke and billowed away. He shrank, and shrank, and shrank, until he stood at his smallest size, slumped before her.

His face was glum. “I tried,” he said. “I really did.”

“I know, milord.”

“All of this anger. It just seems so...pointless.”

“Perhaps you should smite them anyway.”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“But you cannot let such impertinence go unpunished. What will the other damned think?”

“Yes. I suppose you’re right.” He sighed, and waved a hand. The plane of civil servants disappeared.

Habakkuka surveyed the suddenly empty landscape. All of the civil servants were gone, as were their cubicles, their forms, their papers, their desks, their counters. “Did you consign them to a deeper level of your realm?” she said.

“That’s what we’ll tell people, yes. But really I just let them go. It’s so much easier.” He sighed, and turned his back on her, and began trudging across the empty landscape.

Habakkuka allowed her smile to widen—very slightly, and only for the briefest instant—then hurried after him.

* * * *

Epidapheles picked his way through the forest of pikes, staring up at the canopy of moaning souls. “Is it necessary to make quite so much noise?” he called up to them.

“Leave those poor people alone,” said Door. “They’re damned.”

“Damned loud,” muttered Epidapheles.

Lord Fuddlesworth was nowhere in sight when they stepped out of the pikes. They stood at the crest of a great hill and looked down at the infinite realm of Disembowelebub, rolling endlessly out to the horizon. It was divided into a series of vast, precise squares, each bordered by a low wooden fence. In the nearest square, millions of sufferers ran screaming from swarming phalanxes of ravenous yapping demon chihuahuas. In another, naked men and women bathed helplessly in rivers of lye. In a third, a multitude of damned boulders pushed giant Greeks up steep inclines. Straight, paved roads ran between the squares, giving the scene the appearance of a writhing patchwork quilt.

“Should we ask for directions?” said Epidapheles.

“Directions to where?”

Epidapheles shrugged. “I don’t know. Huzabooby?”

“Habakkuka,” said Door. “She’s a person, not a landmark.”

“Whatever she is,” said Epidapheles, “she might know where we can find some dinner.” He set off down the hill, moving briskly. After a moment, Door followed.

There was room enough between the fenced-off squares for two to walk abreast. Epidapheles and Door moved down the road, passing through a thick atmosphere of screams, wails, laments, pleas, sobs. At first, Door looked to either side as they passed, but very soon he could no longer bear to witness the torment. He curled up into himself and trudged forward, keeping the place where his eyes would have been, if he’d had eyes, pointed resolutely forward. He could do nothing about the sounds, however. These he had to endure.

Epidapheles sauntered along, whistling something tuneless, peering into each square. Suddenly he stopped, and pointed. “That doesn’t seem so bad,” he said.

Door looked. In the square on his left, millions of naked men and women shuffled aimlessly along, their faces creased with pain and slack with exhaustion. He saw one man sit down on a rock outcropping, and then burst instantly into flame. The man screamed and stood up, and the flames disappeared as quickly as they’d appeared. A woman leaned against a tree and was immediately set upon by thousands of cockroaches, which crawled up her legs and down her back and transformed her into a chitinous construct of tiny, writhing hordes. She sprang away from the tree, and the cockroaches disappeared. She began to walk again.

“Walking,” said Epidapheles. “That’s their torment?” He shook his head. “This demon lacks ambition.”

Door didn’t answer. He was looking at the walkers. In their faces, he saw the long pain of aeons, something more than physical: a soul-sickness, the spiritual agony of hopelessness stretching out to the horizons of time.

He stopped, considering. Then he crossed to the fence and clambered onto the first rail, bent himself over the second, pushed with his two front legs, somersaulted over the top, and fell into the square.

He rose and surveyed his surroundings. Epidapheles was screaming at him, but he barely heard. He was in the thick of the milling horde of walkers. He turned to the nearest one and said: “Excuse me, sir.”

The walker started, and looked from side to side. “Who’s there?” he said.

“Would you like to sit down?” said Door.

The walker swiveled his head toward Door’s voice. He narrowed his eyes. “Why? So you can set me on fire again? Strip off my skin? Drench me in acid?”

“Nothing like that will happen,” said Door. “You have my word.”

The walker fell silent. The others milled around him, their eyes downcast, moaning quietly. Finally, he said: “I can’t see you.”

“Sit. I will be there.”

The walker blinked, steeled himself, breathed deeply, and sat. Door scampered into position, and felt the man’s weight lower onto him.

He sighed, and relaxed in slow, halting increments. An eternity of despair rushed through Door’s seat, dissipated down his legs, and fled into the ground.

“Thank you,” said the man, after a moment, each word a choked sob. “Oh, thank you. Thank you.”

“You are very welcome,” said Door. There was a something welling within him, a lovely warmth, a completeness. He had not known its like in a long, long time.

* * * *

“Who is that?” said Disembowelebub, peering into the grid. A small gray figure stood beside the Square of Eternal Walking, screaming and gesticulating over the fence.

Habakkuka looked, and frowned. The man was clearly not part of Disembowelebub’s realm. Neither was he part of her plans. “I do not know, milord.”

“He’s making a great deal of noise,” said Disembowelebub.

“Yes he is.” Habakkuka was becoming concerned.

Disembowelebub sighed. “Well. Let us go see what he wants.”

He waved his hand. Habakkuka felt herself rise off the ground, and the realm began to slide beneath her feet. The Square of Eternal Walking rushed toward her. In a moment, they were upon it. She drifted gently to the ground.

The old man stopped screaming. He turned to her, then shifted his eyes to her side, and followed Disembowelebub’s legs up into the sky. “Are you Disentowelenbug?” he said.

Disembowelebub frowned. “I am Disembowelebub, the Eternally Enraged, Father of Pain, Lord of—”

“Yes yes,” said the old man, waving his hand impatiently. “I require two services of you. First, you will remove my familiar from that stinking pit of perambulators. Second, you will direct me to the nearest alehouse.” He shook his head. “I must tell you, I have never seen an infernal realm more bereft of the basic necessities.”

Habakkuka felt something burgeoning beside her. She looked up at the demon. He had grown huge again, but there was something authentic about his menace now. Something profound and deep-seated.

“Come, milord,” she said. “Let us leave this impertinent man to his own devices.”

“Still your tongue, woman,” said the old man. “You are in the presence of Epidapheles.”

“WHO?” Disembowelebub towered over them, his head abutting the sky. He hands were curled into claws, each the size of a small mountain.

“Epidapheles!” cried the old man. “Mage of mages, scourge of....” He paused, considering. “Scourge of many things,” he said, at last. “Many, many things. There is very little that I am not scourge of.”

“SILENCE, MORTAL. YOU WILL LEAVE MY REALM IMMEDIATELY.”

“I will leave your realm when I am ready to do so, Disenterthethong,” said Epidapheles.

Habakkuka stepped back and looked up at the demon. He was fully enraged now. The sky had darkened around him. The damned paused in their suffering to cower away from their overlord’s mounting wrath. She watched all of her years of patient coaxing, gentle palliatives, quiet magic dissolve into nothing.

“THE SONG OF YOUR DEATH WILL BE SUNG THROUGH THE AGES, MORTAL,” rumbled Disembowelebub. “MOTHERS WILL WEEP FOR YOU. CHILDREN WILL LIE TREMBLING IN THEIR BEDS AT THE THOUGHT OF THE PAIN THAT I WILL—”

Epidapheles raised his arms, and pointed at the demon, and cried: “Enbugularium!”

There was a silence.

“Soon,” said Epidapheles, “when my magic takes effect, you will be transformed into a beetle.”

There was a little more silence.

“At which point you will be very small and harmless,” said Epidapheles.

Silence. Various things failed to occur.

“Any moment now,” he said.

A teacup appeared in the air, between the demon and the mage. It hovered there for a moment, looking confused. And then it fell to the road and shattered.

“But first,” said Epidapheles, after another uncomfortable silence, “I will summon a teacup.”

Disembowelebub raised his arms. Habakkuka felt the sum of all malice gathering above her, an infinitely dense distillation of all the rage that ever was, all the rage that ever would be.

* * * *

Door looked up at the demon, and then down at Epidapheles, who was squatting in the road, inspecting the shards of a teacup.

He sighed.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m afraid I need to tend to my master. He appears to be enraging a demon again.”

“Oh,” said the man. “I am very sorry to hear that.”

“It’ll just take a moment. I’ll be back. I promise.”

“Yes, of course.” The walker stood with a grunt, then turned around, and bowed. “I thank you,” he said. “You cannot know how much this has meant to me.” And then his face stiffened into a rictus of torment, and he rejoined the shuffling throng.

Door watched him until he disappeared, then turned and sprinted toward the fence, vaulted it in a single leap, and tore down the road toward Epidapheles.

He arrived just as the demon, roaring, burst into flames and sent a giant bolus of rage screaming down the sky. Door charged headlong into the old mage, knocking him off the road an instant before the bolus arrived. It plowed into the ground and burrowed down, down, throwing up great gouts of dirt and brimstone.

The Earth screamed.

And then there was silence.

Door, collapsed in a tangle of Epidapheles’s limbs on the side of the road, looked up. He saw a giant crater in the ground, and beside it a lovely woman in white robes, and beside her a man of average height and average demeanor. The man was looking about: first at the crater, then at the nearest square, and then the next square, and then the next, his face contorted in horror.

* * * *

Habakkuka studied the man beside her. She saw the barest traces of the demon Disembowelebub in his features, but that was all: he’d expended the entirety of his rage on that disreputable old wizard, and all that was left was the man he’d been, long ago.

“Gods,” he breathed. “What is all this?”

“This is your realm, milord.”

He turned to her. “All this suffering,” he said, “is my doing?”

“Yes,” said the woman. “You have been the scourge of the dead for many aeons. Do you not remember?”

He shook his head. “I was a mage,” he said. “I remember I was...angry. I experimented with the fell arts. I communed with demons. But I did not...” He broke off. “I did not intend this.”

“I have tried for many years to drain you of that anger. It has been a slow process. Too slow.” She watched him. “You must undo all of this, milord. Now. Before the rage returns to find you.”

He nodded.

“Hurry, please.”

He nodded again, and closed his eyes.

The fences disappeared first, and then the roads, and then the agents of excruciation: lye and chihuahua, fire and brimstone, rack and thumbscrew and iron maiden—all of it, suddenly gone.

The damned, freed of their agony at last, crawled out of their holes, paused in their endless flight, came off of their pikes. Sat down.

A great sigh of relief rippled through the realm. And then all the dead souls rose into the sky and misted away.

And they were alone: Habakkuka, and the demon, and the old man. And someone else, nibbling at the edge of her consciousness. Someone oddly chair-like.

The demon was shaking, and his skin was beginning to redden. The buds of horns were forming on his temples. “It is coming back,” he said.

“Yes, milord,” said the woman.

“It must not,” he said.

She nodded.

He looked at the crater, its irregular borders still sizzling with molten rage, and then turned back to her. “Thank you,” he said, taking her hand. He walked slowly to the edge of the pit, then looked into its endless depths. He closed his eyes and took one more step. And fell.

* * * *

Epidapheles peeked up from his cower. “Did I defeat him?” he said.

Door disentangled himself from his master’s legs and stood up. “If by ‘him’ you mean ‘common sense,’ then yes,” he said.

There was a shout in the distance. Door turned, and saw the small, bent figure of Lord Fuddlesworth cresting a hill. “Habakkuka!” he called. “My love! I have found you!”

The old man hurried down the hill and fell into the arms of the woman in white. She embraced him, smiling. “It is good to see you again, husband,” she said.

Epidapheles struggled to his feet, grumbling loudly. He was in the act of straightening his robes when he noticed his surroundings and froze. He turned in a small circle, surveying the empty wasteland about him.

“I seem to remember,” he said, presently, “there being a demonic realm here.”

“There was,” said Door. “It’s gone now.”

“Ah.” Epidapheles looked at the endless chasm yawning down into forever at his feet. He looked at the woman in white, and the tiny lord in her arms. He snuck another peek at the barren wasteland. He looked at Door.

“Sometimes,” he said, in a confidential whisper, “I find the world entirely bewildering.”

Door was looking at the empty space where the Square of Eternal Walking had been. He said nothing.

* * * *

Door and Habakkuka stood outside the manor of Lord Fuddlesworth, watching the sun set over a line of trees in the distance. The sounds of revelry came to them from within the manor: Lord Fuddlesworth and Epidapheles in their cups, singing bawdy songs, clattering from room to room, overturning flower pots, dancing on tables, terrorizing the house staff.

Habakkuka rested her hand on Door’s back, and said: “I hope you know that you are welcome to stay for as long as you’d like.”

“That’ll change,” said Door. “The old man will probably insult your husband soon, in a profound and unforgivable way. There’ll be an argument, and he’ll cast some angry bit of magic that’ll go awry and cause a priceless family heirloom to sprout legs and totter away, or a volcano to appear in an inconvenient place.” He paused. “Somewhere in the middle of all that, he’s very likely to stagger out here and say something outrageously salacious, and then try to grope you.”

“Oh dear,” said Habakkuka.

“I expect to be fleeing from armed men by evening. Tomorrow morning at the latest.”

“But you can stay,” she said.

“No. I’m bound to him.”

She was looking directly at Door now. She couldn’t quite see him, but she could sense his presence, and he found that oddly comforting—to be known by someone other than the old mage. “I saw what you did for that poor soul in the Square of Eternal Walking,” she said. “It was very kind.”

Door shrugged. “Moot now,” he said, and looked at her. “You seem tired.”

She nodded. “I have spent most of the past ten years following that demon around his endless realm.”

“You should get some sleep, milady.”

“Yes, but not quite yet. I have not seen a sunset in a very long time.”

Door looked up at her. “If you want,” he began, and stopped. “If it would please you,” he said, and stopped again. “I would be happy to be of assistance,” he said.

She smiled. “It would not be an imposition?”

“Not at all, milady.”

“Thank you,” she said, and eased herself gracefully down. He felt her weight settle onto him, and the warmth ran through his frame again, stronger than before.

Together, they watched the sun sink into the night.