It was no good. I wasn’t ready. I’d need longer to prepare. Warm up with some physical pain in Gunn’s apparatus, maybe. A stroll over hot coals. Amateur dentistry. Self-electrocution. An acid bath. Something to get me back into shape. Either way incorporeity over the Aegean right then was out of the question. Imagine returning to the basement crew in that state! Christ I’d be laughed out. I could just imagine what fucking Astaroth would make of it.
Raphael found me in the open air cinema. Schindler’s List. Not that I paid much attention to the sounds or images. It was just that I needed the darkness and the silent presence of other flesh and blood. He came in near the end, Mr Mandros, Theo, patron of the museum and provider of Greek victuals. Some lardy Hydran matron with a gigantic head of dark hair shooed her gnat-sized sprog to free-up a seat for him. He’s liked here, respected. It’s a life. I knew why he’d come. He couldn’t follow me into Hell all those millennia ago, but he could follow me, with the Old Man’s blessing, apparently, onto Earth.
‘He who saves a single life,’ Ben Kingsley said to Liam Neeson, ‘saves the world entire.’
I got up and slouched out in disgust.
‘Lucifer, wait.’
He caught me up in the street. I was heading for an appealingly dark and invitingly empty taverna at the fork of two cobbled ways, and I didn’t stop. He fell into step alongside and said not a word until we were seated at a booth within. Dark wood panelling; absurd maritime accoutrements; smell of shellfish and burnt cooking oil; a jukebox that looked like it might run on gas. Quadruple Jack Daniels for me – on the house when the barkeep, a small red-eyed bandit with a Zapata moustache and hairy forearms, realised who I was with; Mr Mandros took ouzo and called for olives and pistachios. I sat and glared at him after their prompt arrival.
‘This is all shit,’ I said. ‘Two weeks ago – no, wait – three weeks ago I get a message from your friend and mine that the Old Man wants to cut me a deal. The Human show’s coming to its close and I’m a loose end He wants tied up. I get a shot at redemption. All I’ve got to do is live out the rest of this sad sack’s miserable life without doing anything heinous. Say my prayers at night, go to Mass Easter and Christmas, love people, the usual bullshit. Big challenge for me, obviously, what with my pride and all, what with me being the second most powerful entity in the universe, what with me having developed this habit of being Absolutely Evil. So I think, what the fuck? I’ll take the month’s money back offer, live it up in the flesh, then tell Him come August 1 He can shove His redemption where it smells. Now you show up with a kebab empire and a Bogart suit and tell me my entire existence has been a delusion, and that the Hell I know isn’t the Hell I’m going to.’
‘Yes.’
‘And I’m supposed to take this seriously?’
‘Yes. You know I’m not lying.’
‘No, you’re not lying, Raphael, but you’re definitely not all there, either.’ He gave me a sad and slightly sheepish smile. ‘Okay, Mr Theo Moussaka Mandros,’ I continued. ‘Tell me what it is you think I need to know.’
‘He knew what you were going to do. He knew you weren’t going to take the mortal road.’
‘Yeah well that’s omniscience for you.’
‘We all knew. We’ve all been watching.’
‘And whacking off, I don’t doubt.’
Funny little pause there, while he stared at his ouzo and I torched a Silk Cut.
‘He knows Hell has no fear for you. The mortal John’s words were all words that stood for words unsayable. He knows you, Lucifer, though you think He does not. He knows you.’
‘Not in the biblical sense.’
It was his turn to rub his eyes. He did it rapidly, as if fighting off a sudden attack of sleep. ‘Hell is to be destroyed,’ he said. ‘Utterly and forever. No trace of the world you know, nor your Fallen brethren will remain. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, I understand.’
Poor Raphael. Torn in two. He put his hand across the table and covered mine with it. His fingers were oily from the olives. ‘You don’t think you’ve been missed, Lucifer,’ he said, his eyes welling up. ‘But you have.’
Well, I didn’t like the way that made me feel. The Jack Daniels was kicking in and somewhere in the bowels of the tavern a woolly speaker was releasing a surreal Greek instrumental version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. I started swallowing, emptily. Oh fucking great.
‘Okay, Mr Mandros,’ I said, mastering myself with a same-again gesture to the dozing barman, ‘if you’ve got all the answers, tell me this: if everything you say is true, if Judgement Day is coming and with it the destruction of my Kingdom, if Sariel, Thammuz, Remiel, Astaroth, Moloch, Belphegor, Nelchael, Azazel, Gabreel, Lucifer and all the glorious legions of Hell are to be annihilated forever, then why should I not embrace oblivion? Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven, yes. Better even not to be than to be and serve. What fear of death is there in me?’
Poor Raphael’s eyes, unable to quite meet mine. When he spoke, he spoke as if to the beer-stained table. His voice came in a flat incantation.
‘God will take unto Himself the souls of the righteous and the angelic host. The world, the Universe, matter, the whole of Creation will be unmade. Only God in Heaven will remain. Hell and all its Fallen will be destroyed. In its place, a nothingness utterly separate from Him. Eternal nothingness, Lucifer. A state from which nothing comes and into which nothing enters. Without exception, nothing. The inhabitant of such a state would exist in absolute aloneness and singularity. For eternity. Alone. Forever. In nothingness.’
Hell, didn’t I say somewhere, is the absence of God and the presence of Time.
After a long pause – the dismal rendition of ‘Stairway’ replaced now by the speakers’ endless exhalation of static or hiss – I looked up and met Raphael’s sorrowful eyes. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see.’
(It was something to think about on the flight back to London. For the sake of argument I had a (pointless) go at believing it. It was a kind of victory, when you thought about it. Last man standing and all that. You know, if you looked at it that way. Kind of.)
‘So this is all . . . what, exactly?’ I asked Raphael, rhetorically, the night before I left. ‘The best you can come up with? Me and you living on a Greek island reading Rilke and desultorily managing half a dozen restaurants while the Old Man gets up the nerve to ring down the curtain?’
‘There are worse lives,’ he said. The two of us were on the veranda again. The sun had gone down, gaudily, with exhausted passion; we’d watched from the western side of the island, having ridden out on Raphael’s two sorrel mares, lunched on olives, tomatoes, feta, cold chicken, a plummy red with peppery undertones. I’d stretched out, shadow-dappled under the eucalyptus, and he’d wandered away to fish. To give me a bit of room. Now, back at the villa, we sat facing the sea’s deepening shadow and the first faint scatter of stars. Funny to think of stars disappearing. Funny to think of Everything disappearing. Except me. Funny.
‘I thought you’d need . . .’ He’d been going to say ‘help’ I could tell. ‘A companion. It’s not easy, is it, this mortal life.’
I thought of the photograph of Gunn’s mother and of the Clerkenwell flat’s sad little corners. ‘Not unless you’re prepared to make the effort,’ I said. ‘Most mortals aren’t. We’ve always known this. That the whole fucking thing would be wasted on them.’