Chapter Twelve

Deep in the bowels of Hell, which, believe it or not, is worse than only being slightly in the bowels of hell (which is still pretty bad), the ancient, powerful and diminutive demon Nubbins was taking out his annoyance and bad mood on a corrupt senator who had joined the ranks of the damned fairly recently. The senator had been reduced to weeping within nanoseconds of arriving in hell (not that time has much meaning in an infinite existence), but Nubbins intended to keep working with him, that is to say, on him, until he started gibbering and drooling. It was just that kind of day.

Nubbins felt annoyed and extremely irritable. The meeting he’d had with his superior had gone poorly. The higher-ranking demon had talked about opportunity, pulling together to reach a mutual goal and a used variety of other meaningless boss-speak Nubbins himself had invented. He did have a certain grudging admiration for how well the demon used this particular form of torture.

All the same, the new assignment – nay, the new busywork – Nubbins had been assigned was particularly insulting. Make sure a soul that was probably already doomed to Hell doesn’t go and redeem itself? That was the kind of work you gave to recently spawned demons to hone their chops, so to speak. It might be a little more challenging than possessing some unimportant asshole, but probably less fun. And he was under strict orders not to possess this soul.

So, essentially, he’d been told to leave Hell, and hang around on Earth for the next fifty years or so (unless he could figure out a way to bump the sucker off sooner) making sure the damned soul didn’t find Jesus or something.

Which would be ironic, given the soul’s profession. A preacher saving his own soul? Ho ho!

“The label on this says you should not get it in your eyes,” Nubbins said to the Senator. Nubbins held a box labeled “Lye.”

“N-no!” the Senator pleaded.

“Yuh-yes!” Nubbins said. “Open those peepers extra wide, I’d hate to have to remove your eyelids, seeing as the only tool I’ve got with me that could do the job is this rusty nail.”

I’ll spare you the details of how the lye mixed with the senator’s tears and burned great holes through his eyes, letting nasty, vibrantly green and sticky, lye-filled eyeball goo spill down his cheeks, which then burned as well. The smell was awful, truly putrid as only a chemical burn can smell. No, I won’t describe that, because it’s all too horrible, and besides, the senator’s burns healed up as soon as Nubbins was done with him, leaving him whole and fresh in order to be tortured some more later. So it’s like it didn’t even happen, really.

Nubbins knew he should have been promoted several times over by now. His immediate superiors weren’t even as powerful as he was, just better at office politics (an invention he hated himself for, given how it had worked against him). He could easily destroy the majority of the demons above him if he wanted to. And he did. Unfortunately, with the gift of office politics came the gift of being unnaturally good at watching their backs, so he simply waited until an opportune time. It’s not like eternity was going to run out, anyway.

This assignment ate him up, though. If he could have thrown down his hat and quit, he would have. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to resign as a demon. Hell is tricky that way. You probably don’t even want to think about what happens when a demon gets fired. Let’s just say it doesn’t smell very nice at all, though the colors can be quite pretty in a Hellish sort of way.

Guarding a soul, no babysitting a soul, that would find its way here anyhow. It was an insult. It was a deliberate insult. His boss didn’t even need to wink at him for Nubbins to know he was getting screwed, and they didn’t care if he knew it.

Foolish of them, he thought. He had, after all, also come up with what is now referred to as “going postal.”

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to a matter that should be cleared up before we continue any further. Historically, most people who claimed the devil made them do it, the devil in question was actually Nubbins, not Satan. Sure, Satan got out a bit now and then, usually if he was working on something personally important to him, but Hell had been in operation for a long time, and Satan had become pretty good at delegating. He didn’t do much on his own anymore. Contracts for souls, demon possessions, suggesting wicked deeds to otherwise innocent souls, tempting the strong-willed, these were all handled by the day to day demons. The peons, if you will.

Nubbins had been one of the first peons, and he had done a lot of good work. Well, to be accurate, he’d done a lot of very bad work. Well, you know what I mean. Nubbins was a pro.

Nubbins produced a black, oily-looking roofer’s torch and a large, blunt pair of iron tongs. The torch was bigger than he needed, really, but it was good for show. He scratched his fingernails against each other to produce a spark and lit the torch. Once he had the flame adjusted the way he liked it (big and showy, which was inefficient but good for scaring souls), he stuck the tongs in the flame and whistled a jaunty tune.

The senator, who had healed from the chemical burns, as promised, watched the tongs as the torch slowly heated them. They began to glow a bit at the tip, and after several minutes were a glowing a lovely bright from tip to hinge.

Nubbins looked from the tongs to the senator, and waited until the senator looked up at him and made eye contact. Then he smiled.

“No, please!” the senator screamed. Sweat covered him with a sick shine, and snot ran from his nose.

“Oh yes,” Nubbins said, and smiled all the wider. He opened the tongs, thrust them forward and grabbed on to the senators nose.

The senator shrieked. “Ged id obb! Ged id obb!” he cried.

“Oh ho! You like this game, eh?” Nubbins said. He let go of the senator’s nose, now a blackend wreck, and returned the tongs to the flame of the torch. “Let’s see, what other bits of you are conveniently sticking out?”

Quite a while later, when the senator was good and damaged, Nubbins went back to his dank, foul-smelling cave to brood a while longer and make sure he had his things in order for his trip to Earth. He took a small leather pouch out from a hole in the wall, and gathered his few possessions. He had a hooded cloak, and a staff (a stick, really, but Nubbins was very small and it suited him fine). He could find or improvise anything else he needed.

Now he had only to wait until the preacher committed his greatest sin.