Faust Among Equals (37 page)

‘Come on,' said Helen impatiently. ‘What're you waiting for?'

‘Lady.' Lundqvist didn't look up. ‘If you want to shoot me, first draw back the slide with your left hand, holding the pistol firmly in your right. When the slide is back against the stop, let go smoothly so as not to jam the feed, and release the safety catch, which is the small lever above the back of the grip on the left hand side. Your gun is now ready to fire. Do not pull the trigger; rather, squeeze firmly but smoothly in one continuous movement. I've been in there once and that'll do me fine.'

‘Chicken.'

Lundqvist nodded, pulled up a dandelion and stuck it behind his ear.

‘I'll start crying again.'

‘Be my guest.'

Just then, Hieronymus Bosch hurried by clutching a portable telephone, flung open the door and shot through. Close behind him, running lopsided because of the heavy toolbox he had with him and looking rather charred round the edges, was Niccolò Machiavelli. Following him at a rather longer interval came Christopher Columbus, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, Leonardo da Vinci, William Caxton, two seagulls, Don Juan, Albrecht Dürer, Julius Vanderdecker, Martin Luther, Don Quixote de la Mancha wearing odd socks, Sir Thomas Malory and others too numerous to particularise. The painter Botticelli, bringing up the rear, called out, ‘Wotcher, Nellie, do me another sitting sometime?' as he dashed past. All of them were carrying big dufflebags.

The door slammed.

‘I take it you don't need me any more,' Lundqvist sighed. He had finished his daisy chain, and lowered it gingerly over his head. It stuck around his ears.

‘No,' Helen replied distantly. ‘Thanks.'

‘Glad to be of service,' said Lundqvist, and returned to the bar.

 

The Marketing Director of Hell Holdings plc stood back, admiring his handiwork and sucking his thumb where he'd hit it with the hammer. The notice wasn't quite straight, but nailing bits of plywood to polystyrene trees wasn't exactly his thing. Not bad for a beginner.

There is no universally accepted definition of a gala night, except that it costs more to go in. He ran his eye down the list of advertised attractions and nodded his head contentedly.

He hesitated for a moment. At the time it had seemed pretty neat, but now he actually saw it in place, perhaps it lacked a certain culminating zing. Taking a thick-nibbed marker pen from his pocket, he wrote in:

at the bottom, grinned and turned to depart. Just then the tree caught fire. It burned without being consumed, predictably enough. Not so the notice, which vanished in a curl of ash.

Why couldn't the old fool use the phone like everybody else?

 

Imagine Time.

There is no way you possibly could; but try and picture in your mind's eye an enormous machine, with a hopper at one end and conveyer belt at the other.

Into a hopper go phenomenal quantities of the raw material. It's invisible and intangible, naturally, so they use special harmless dyes to make it easier to perceive and handle. These are burnt off in the processing.

That's us.

So if some cleverdick philosopher comes up to you and tries to tell you that Man is the measure of all things and we're working towards an ultimate purpose, take no notice. The role of humanity in the Great Design is somewhere between permitted food colouring and bar codes.

Time is a convenient if misleading term used to describe the potential energy of the impending future. It burns, and the gases produced by its combustion compress a piston in the cylinder of physics, producing the power needed to turn the year on its axis and drive the barrel-organ of the spheres. Like most internal combustion engines, its burn is depressingly inefficient; Time burns at about one-per-cent efficiency, because the future is so impure with alternative sequences of events that only a minute part of each load of raw material actually oxidises on ignition. The rest might have burnt if only things had been different.

The waste material comes out the back end, is loaded on tipper trucks and taken away for the neighbours to complain about. And boy, do they complain.

O
ver the years there have been many attempts to describe Hell, some more felicitous than others. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, would have you believe that Hell is other people.

Now, then; no disrespect whatsoever to the late Mr Sartre, as fine a writer as ever honed a subordinate clause and by all accounts a very competent amateur pianist. But no. To be disagreeably pedantic, Hell isn't other people at all. Other people are never worse than bloody aggravating. Hell is
hell
.

It's a very hot, noisy, unpleasant place full of inhuman tortures and bird-headed fiends; and the moonlight walking tours, souvenir sweatshirts and conference weekends introduced by the new management have, if anything, added to the efficiency of an already superbly effective eternity-spoiling unit. Any attempt at description which omits these basic elements is inaccurate.

And EuroBosch is to Hell as Piccadilly Circus is to England; more picturesque, perhaps, if you like that sort of thing, but definitely an integral part.The same rules apply; and one of the rules is that all stories in Hell have to have an unhappy ending.

The emergency exit opened.

Helen looked up, catching her breath. For a moment she couldn't see anything. Then . . .

 

. . . Then she cast her mind back, involuntarily, to a moment some years ago (though it seemed like only yesterday).

 

‘Hi,' he'd said. ‘My name's George. You must be Helen.'

This strange voice, coming at her from incredibly far off. A nice voice, she remembered thinking as the particles of matter and soul that had once comprised her being were suddenly scooped back from the four corners of creation for a totally unexpected reunion. A calm, wry voice, slightly cynical but not bitter. The sort of voice . . .

Just a cotton-picking minute, she remembered thinking, I'm dead. Life and I were very adult about it all and went our separate ways long ago, no recriminations, death is never having to say you're sorry.

‘Pleased to meet you,' said the voice. ‘I've heard
so
much about you, and . . .'

Goddammit, she'd got her legs back. And
her
legs, too; the long, perfectly proportioned honey-coloured ones she'd had as a girl, not the varicose travesties they'd fobbed her off with in her declining years. And her arms, too, and her ears, and her lips and
everything
; the whole ensemble, in fact, all in perfect working order. No scent of mothballs, no corners chewed off by earth-dwelling invertebrates. Her hair was even combed, her nails varnished. Cerise, which wasn't really her colour, but . . .

‘Yippee!' she said.

‘Do you mind?' retorted the voice called George. ‘Only, my head is a wee bit sensitive this morning. Would you just sign here, please?'

She'd opened her eyes, and seen - well, a big piece of paper, with black squiggles all over it. They'd had paper in her day, back around 1450 BC, but not black squiggles.

‘It's just a receipt,' the voice called George had told her, ‘for Mephisto here. Just to say you've got your body back and it works okay. Mephisto's a good lad, for a foul fiend, but he does love his admin. Go on, just do a squiggle or something.'

She'd found a feather in her hand, with something black and wet on the end; some sort of paint, presumably. ‘You want me to paint something on the paper with this feather?'

‘Yes, please.'

‘All right.' She splodged, and the pen and the paper vanished. And there she was. In this sort of place, sitting on what she could only presume was a chair, looking at something which might almost have been a table. On the table was a wine bottle, wrapped in straw, with a candle shoved in its neck.

‘I think I'll have the sole in butter,' said the voice called George, ‘followed by the stroganoff. What about you?' The voice, she noticed, was coming out of the mouth of this man sitting opposite her. He looked nice.

‘To eat,' he explained. Yes, she'd thought, definitely nice. Priorities absolutely right and everything.

Over lunch he'd explained. How he'd always wanted to meet her, Helen of Troy, and how, since he'd sold his soul to the devil for an effectively blank cheque, her having been dead for well over three thousand years wasn't the insuperable problem it might have been, and how here they were with a ticket to ride throughout Time and Space, expense no object, if she felt like coming along.

‘This,' he'd said, gesturing at the environment and nearly knocking a bowl of soup out of the hands of a passing waiter, ‘is the twentieth century AD. Not the best of times, in my opinion, except for the food. I come here for lunch most days, in fact.'

‘This place?'

‘This century. It's worth the effort just for the pasta.'

‘Ah.'

‘But not the wine.' He'd frowned. ‘Phylloxera, in the early part of the century. Killed off all the best varieties of grape.'

In actual fact she hadn't really taken to him all that much, not at first; he seemed a bit arrogant, seen and done everything, met everyone, been everywhere. The fact that he
had
seen and done everything, met everyone and been everywhere only made it worse. There was also the fact that he'd brought her back to life from the grave, and gratitude is always a truly poisonous start to any relationship.

On the other hand, a choice between going about with a suave, accomplished, amusing, handsome man-about-Time-and-Space who has virtually infinite magic powers, and being dead, isn't exactly something you agonise over in the small hours of the morning. And after a relatively short while, she realised that being aggravating was only one facet of the man's multiplex persona. A significant facet, to be sure; but only one. Besides, George Faustus being aggravating had a lot to recommend it, particularly when he was being aggravating to somebody else. The Pope, for instance, or Napoleon, or the head waiter at Maxim's.

She'd become quite fond of him, in fact.

Which was why, the first time he'd been foreclosed upon and dragged away to Hell by bird-headed fiends, she'd been really rather upset. She had no great desire to see it happen a second time.

Accordingly, she turned her head and looked away.

 

Therefore she didn't see a howling, lurching nightmare of demons, beast-, bird-, and fish-headed, loathsome random assemblies from the spares box of evolution, whooping and brandishing toasting forks, kicking and dancing their way in a phantasmagorical conga against a background of leaping red flames; and, hoisted on their shoulders, the small, motionless figure of Lucky George.

Imagine . . . There isn't enough cheese in the world, Wensley-dale, Stilton and Brie, to make up a bedtime snack capable of giving rise to the sort of bad dream you'd need to picture it in your mind's bloodshot eye. A riot of tentacles, pincers and talons. A maelstrom of pitchforks, meathooks, carving knives and corkscrews. Teeth beyond the wildest opium vision of dentistry, claws beyond even Satan's chiropody. Enough scaled hides to make handbags for all the witches in eternity. Enough plastic red noses . . .

Plastic red noses? Wait a minute . . .

Kurt Lundqvist, well and truly into the bourbon and branchwater, hold the branchwater, looked up and grinned. Thanks to enough alcohol to poison Chicago, he could now see clearly that he'd in fact succeeded, and the inevitable happy ending was chiming in nicely on cue. After all, he reasoned, as another billion brain cells fizzed into mucous slime, the fact that a bunch of penny-a-day fiends made the actual collar is neither here nor there. If he hadn't chased George into the one place on the whole campus where there was no possibility whatsoever of escape, there'd have been no collar at all.

‘Drinks all round,' he snarled. ‘C'mon, move it.'

The barfiend favoured him with a look of pure hatred.

‘It's a quarter to three,' he said. ‘Unhappy hour,' he explained. ‘There's no-one in the place 'cept you and—'

‘Okay,' Lundqvist replied. ‘So I'll have another.'

As we mentioned a moment ago, the demons danced. And as they danced, they sang:

All stories in Hell have an unhappy ending. Unhappy for whom is at the discretion of the management.