"Oh no, no. We can’t stay long." Turner waved his hand. "Not a half bad little place you have here." He pointed to one of my carved gourds, now beginning to wither into what looked like a toothless octogenarian Jack-O’-Lantern. "Cute. Yeah, this is a cozy place, in a way. Not to brag, really, but I have a very nice place of my own, back home. I had it custom designed, a complete replica of my boyhood home. A lot of Angels want castles, palaces, plantations, and they can have them, of course. But I have more modest needs. I never believed in being ostentatious."
"I know what you’re saying."
As before, the Celestial said nothing. Its blurry-looking blue eyes seemed not to focus on anything in particular, even me, which I found more disconcerting than if it had openly glared at me.
"So…you get a day off," Turner said. "That’s very good. Not every place does that. How often?"
"Every nine days. Or every nine work periods. However you look at it. I don’t know why nine."
"Well, you’re lucky."
"Yup. So how can I help you, Inspector?" I repeated.
"No sign of the Demon Chara, still? She hasn’t made an attempt to visit you here?"
"No sir. I really don’t see why she would. Even when I rescued her from those rebels she seemed contemptuous of me."
"Well, she wasn’t so contemptuous that she didn’t feel obligated to come to your aid in Blue." Turner was bending down to examine another of my Jack-O’-Lanterns, but his eyes lifted suddenly to mine. "Rebels? That’s a bit of a glamorous term for those few troublemakers."
Shit. My mind scrambled again. "Well, whatever they are."
Turner straightened. From inside his robe he produced a metal tin, and for a second I cringed, expecting a weapon. He flicked the tin open and there were cigars inside it. "Care for a smoke?"
"Oh, no thanks. That stuff will kill ya."
"Ha! That’s funny. Mind if I…?"
"Oh no, go ahead." I placed a coffee mug in front of him and indicated with a gesture that he could use it as an ash tray.
"You sure? Some folks really hate the smell."
"Actually I like the smell of cigars and pipes, though I never smoked them myself." With his having once been a cop, I didn’t add that the same had been true with pot smoke.
Turner lit up, exhaled, savoring the act. He hadn’t offered a cigar to his companion. "See? Even in Hell one can find little advantages. One can smoke without fear of the repercussions."
"Maybe I should take it up after all, then."
Turner smiled at me and in an off-hand tone said, "I’ve been busy talking to Demons since you and I last spoke. Everything from Chara’s kind to the Overseers. No one has spotted her. Or if they have, won’t admit to it."
"It’s possible she’s already fled Oblivion, and that they’re telling the truth."
"Mm. Well, I certainly hope so, for their sakes. Even Captain Abbadon professes to know nothing about her whereabouts, but I was under the impression that with their skill at tracking down renegade humans, and with their great sense of smell, that they should have located her by now." He shrugged.
"That’s why I’m sure she’d have left already. Maybe you should send a party out beyond Oblivion, and…"
"Oh, we already have a team on that." He exhaled again.
How difficult would that make our escape to Pluto? And did this hunting party consist of Angels, Demons or, most frighteningly, of Celestials?
"But if she is still here in Oblivion," Turner went on, "then I may have to take some drastic action. You see, Mr. Butler and Mr. Franklin are still very upset at the way they were treated, and they expect me to see to it that justice is done." He made a face that was meant to elicit sympathy from me. "So I told Captain Abbadon that I expect him to step up his efforts to locate the Demon Chara. And I also told him, quite frankly, that we may soon have to gather up and execute every last Demon in Oblivion…every one of them, and replace them with brand new Demons from Tartarus…to teach all of the Demon races an important lesson in where their loyalties should really lie."
"That sounds very extreme," I managed. I felt numbed by Turner’s casualness in conveying this possibility.
"Well, we’re talking Demons here. And we’re talking two Angels who were mistreated by Demons. Demons are replaceable, but the honor of an Angel is another matter."
"Of course," I muttered.
Turner wandered to my window, where I had propped Lyre so that his cyclops eye would be directed upon the street below. The glass vibrated with the muffled sounds given off by the looming machine building which eclipsed the skyline. When the investigator picked up and handled the book it felt as though he had plucked the heart right out of my chest and was turning it in his hands. He cracked the book open to its start, read a few lines from my imposed self-debasement.
"You kept your exercise book from school?" He looked up at me.
"Yeah. I like to reread what I wrote in there. To remind me of how wrong I was in not following the word of the Son. To remind myself how lowly I am because of it."
"Huh. You see, friend, that’s what’s so tragic about folks like you. You have some really good qualities. You were almost there; you almost made it."
"I wish there was a chance for us to repent."
"Well, that’s the thing. You have to repent in life. Not when it’s too late." Without reversing the book, and opening it to its last pages where I write this journal, Turner propped it back in the window as he had found it. "What is this…your look-out?" he joked.
"Not without a mouth," I joked back. "I, ah, I just want to give it something to look at."
"You have a liberal heart, don’t you? A lot of compassion for Demons. People like this, who have been severely reprimanded…"
"Maybe it’s a failing."
"Not so much a failing, as simply goodness misdirected. I respect you for it—I do." Turner sighed. "Ah, well, it was a long shot coming to see you again…I don’t imagine that this Chara would have much to gain from seeing you. But if she should be so foolish, please tell her about what we’re contemplating. About having the entire Demon population of Oblivion replaced. She might just consider turning herself in, if she has as much loyalty to her own kind as they apparently have for her."
"If I were ever to see her, sir, you can rest assured I would pass that along."
"Good man." He patted my arm on his way past me. The Celestial drifted before him to open my door for him. Turner had just stepped through the threshold when he turned to address me again. "You need to get handy with a needle and thread; it isn’t that hard. Not a skill a man needs to be ashamed of."
"Sir?"
Turner pointed to the tear in my shirt. The tearing that had occurred when Chara tore it off my body.
"Oh…well…yeah, it isn’t something I’ve tried before. I should."
"You should. My mama taught me. Came in handy more than once in my lifetime."
"I know I’m on the shabby side, and not to complain about my well-deserved lot, sir, but I am a poor man."
"Yes, but you still have your pride, don’t you? Pride isn’t a sin, I say." He confessed this in a whisper, as if to keep the Celestial from hearing. "Just excessive pride."
"Yes, sir."
"The friend you were visiting when I came before…is she a woman?"
"Sir?"
"If your friend’s a woman, maybe she’d be willing to do a little sewing for you."
"Oh. Well, no, it was a male coworker. But maybe he knows how to sew," I joked.
"Don’t be afraid to learn new things," he mock chided me, and then he turned away at last, and the Celestial floated eerily after him.
In a half-choked panic, I wanted to fling the door shut; it was agonizing to close it slowly and gently. Even then, I found it hard to believe that Inspector Turner wasn’t still lingering just outside my locked door.
Day 69.
"
D
id you hear what happened?" Larry gushed as soon as he’d burst into the break room. I’d packed myself a small lunch and was sitting alone at a metal table bolted to the floor. The man at the table next to me had lowered his head onto his folded arms and was sobbing quietly.
A loud rush of liquid, perhaps sewerage or chemicals, flowed through the huge conduit that crossed the ceiling (the pipe trembled visibly with its force), and I waited for the sound to pass before I asked, "No, what happened?"
"I guess you couldn’t hear the gunfire from your station."
"What gunfire?"
"We heard it in my area, but of course we couldn’t go outside to look. But Jarrod’s girlfriend just came to meet him for lunch and told him what happened…"
"Which is?"
"A group of Damned stormed the torture tower where those five devil-rapists are on public display. Remember the ones we saw?"
"Yeah…so these people stormed that torture plant? For what?"
"To rescue those five guys! Can you believe the balls? They were actually able to break three of these guys free before the Demons moved in…it was a really well-planned attack…"
"
Man.
So…how many of these raiders were there?"
"Ten, maybe a dozen. Anyway, so the Demons were able to capture three of them, and they recaptured one of the rapists they rescued, but the other seven to nine guys got away with two of the devil-rapists. Can you believe it? And to top that off—they killed four Demons in the process."
"Oh…wow…"
"They had a couple guns. That’s how they were able to do this. I don’t know where they got those from. Probably from Angels they’ve ambushed, though once in a while I’ve seen a Demon carrying a gun."
I hardly knew how to absorb this turn of events. Even in my short time in Hell it seemed utterly unthinkable. But at the same time, I recalled what Chara had told me, about rebel movements in Hades…and she’d said those men who’d attacked her had been part of such a movement which she had been flushing out.
"The Demons will really be cracking down on us now," Larry predicted.
"It could be worse than that," I muttered, thinking of Inspector Turner, and what he’d told me only yesterday about the possibility that every Demon in Oblivion might be executed and replaced in order to make an example. Might the Angels, the Celestials, the Creator Himself view these most recent acts as more of an indication that Oblivion was out of control? What terrible measures might they take to resume that control?
"Wouldn’t you hate to be one of the raiders they caught?" Larry went on. "And that one prisoner they recaptured? These guys are gonna get tortured like
nobody’s
ever been tortured before."
"I wouldn’t doubt it."
"Poor bastards…I feel sorry for them. If I was as brave as they are, I’d organize my own little army to go in and rescue all of them."
"I think the ones on public display, if they remain on public display, will be guarded from now on."
"They’ll probably want to put on some new kind of public show, even more scary, as a deterrent. If they gave up on doing a public display, it would look like they can’t control the situation…and they won’t wanna lose face like that."
Larry tried to get me to go to the immense torture center with him after work, to see if the two unrescued rapists were still on display, and if the three rebels and single recaptured rapist had been added to their ranks already, but I told him we probably wouldn’t be able to get near the place right now. The Demons, leery of another attack, would no doubt cordon off the area. But mainly I just wanted to get home to see if Chara would come see me, or try to contact me in some way.
I didn’t tell Larry what Chara had told me about these men being part of a burgeoning rebel movement. I didn’t tell Larry about Chara at all. What Demon-hating human would accept my intimacy with her? Though I’m certain that many a human has lusted after these beautiful warrior Demons, I’m equally certain that very few if any of them would understand my feelings for one of them.