‘He told us, my Lord,’ Nelchael continued in a lowered voice (and without managing to conceal a glance at his master’s strange corporeal dress), ‘that you had . . . that you had . . . forgive me, Sire, but he told us that you had deserted Hell to live as a mortal!’
‘Do you know, Nelkers,’ Lucifer said, scratching his head and sucking uselessly on the sodden cigar, ‘it did used to be said that there was honour among thieves.’
He had got to his feet to receive Nelchael. Now, smiling, he laid himself gently back in the tub. (I’ve thought of this, since, that he laid the body down as one might the corpse of a beloved friend.) Nelchael, seeing his master apparently readying himself for sleep, misunderstood. ‘My Lord, I beg you, you must return and order the defence of your –’
‘Relax, Nelks,’ he said. ‘Go. Depart. Vanish. I’ll be at your heels in less New Time than it takes to boil an egg. Tell the faithful of Hell that Lucifer is coming and that Uriel will bow. No new campaign will succeed under him. I’ll lead the attack myself. I give you my . . . Well, just tell them that. Now go.’
What else is there to say? Useless entreaties. I’m angel enough yet to recognize inevitable motions when I see them.
So for a few moments we eyed each other in silence. I could have been mistaken but I thought his hands trembled a little.
‘You did consider it, didn’t you,’ I said. ‘You can’t deny, now, to my face, that you considered it. Lucifer?’
‘Finish my book,’ he said, swallowing the last mouthful of cognac and smacking his lips. ‘So that what little of posterity there may be left . . .’
‘This is the second time I’ve lost you –’ I began – but he closed his eyes.
‘No time for speeches. Super hols. Had a lovely time. Be seeing you.’
‘God be with you,’ I said, reflexively, forgetting. At which the eyes opened again, for a moment, in glittering accompaniment to the sudden and ravenous grin.
‘Do me a fucking favour,’ he said – then went.
I watched the body slacken as his spirit departed. The shoulders sagged, the bowels released a long and noisome fart, which bubbled up through the water as if in announcement of the kraken. The brandy balloon dropped from the lifeless hand; a cheap rug by the tub; it didn’t break. Thunder boomed and rolled
Try ‘like celestial pianos tumbling down Heaven’s stairs . . .’
In the quiet that followed, the steady breathing of Gunn’s deep sleep.
I gathered the papers together and added these notes of my own. Nothing else remains. I shall never see him again.
Except, perhaps, if I’m human enough. Except, perhaps, if there’s world enough and time.
Postscript, 18 October 2001
3.00 p.m.
Simplest if I stay out of it, I think. What is there to say? You’re holding it in your hands, aren’t you?
I got four phone messages that day. The first was from Violet.
‘Declan for heaven’s sake where are you? I’ve been trying and trying. Why didn’t you tell me he was going to be there? For God’s sake why’d you dash off with that chap in the suit? Who is he, by the way? Is he someone? Someone else? I love Trent. So much . . . energy, you know? But is Harriet . . . well . . .? She seems . . . Anyway the point is both of them couldn’t stop saying how much they loved the script. I don’t know why the fuck you didn’t do this years ago. They want us to go out to LA. You, anyway, but I mean they are going to screen test me in any case . . .’
The second was from Betsy.
‘Declan, hi, it’s Betsy. Call me back when you get this. They like what I sent them. You have finished it, I take it? Anyway they’ve made an offer. Wonderful news. Speak to you soon, you appalling boy. Bye!’
The third was from Penelope Stone.
‘Hello, Gunn, it’s me. I don’t know. I don’t know what. It was good to see you. Do you think anything? I’m leaving my number. I don’t know anything, now . . .’
Not that there isn’t a story from my end. The drying out, the rehab, the sexual health overhaul. (Test results came back negative, by the way. Clearly, there’s no justice in this world.) Still, best that I stay out of it. Not just because the story of the last two months – from the moment I woke in the tub’s cold water, with the sense that, astonishingly, I’d nodded off on the occasion of my own suicide, to the movement of my reclaimed fingertips over these keys – is a tale of metamorphosis all on its own, but because, let’s face it: some personalities, you don’t bother trying to compete.
I’ve had some decisions to make. Some I’ve made. Some I’ve put off. It’s not easy.
I returned all three of those calls.
The fourth one I didn’t.
I guess it was made in a bar. There were a lot of voices in the background – really a lot of voices – but I couldn’t tell whether it was a party or a punch-up. Could have been anything. For a while – since the caller didn’t speak for several seconds – I thought it was a mobile mistake, Violet groping in her handbag, Betsy with her mind on something else. I was just about to delete the message when a voice – at once alien and deeply familiar – said:
‘See you in Hell, scribe.’
Outside, the sky looked exhausted. A wind had picked up. Dust blew in the courtyard. An empty milk bottle rolled around, like a past-caring drunk. The flat was a mess. I felt terrible.
See you in Hell, scribe.
Well, I thought. Probably.
But not today.
Acknowledgements
Several books were useful in the writing of this one, most too venerable (and too long out of copyright) to require a note. Of special help, however, was Gustav Davidson’s A Dictionary of Angels (The Free Press, New York, 1971), an engaging and comprehensive guide through the labyrinth of angelic nomenclature.
I’m indebted to Montague Summers’s The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (Castle Books edition, Secaucus, NJ, 1992 – originally published by Kegan Paul, London, 1926) for the story of Lucifer’s ‘Crucifixion sketch’. Names, dates and places are my own invention.
Ron Ridenhour’s connection to both the My Lai massacre and the Milgram obedience tests is noted in Jonathan Glover’s book Humanity, A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (Jonathan Cape, London, 1999). The author cites an internet communication from Gordon Bear (1998) as his own source.
Himmler’s speech in this book is a fusion of two separate originals, both of which can be found in Heinrich Himmler by Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel (Heinemann, London, 1965).
Grateful acknowledgement is given for the publishers’ permission to reproduce copyright material from:
‘Fern Hill’ by Dylan Thomas, from The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (JM Dent, Everyman edition, London, 1989).
‘The Novelist’ by WH Auden, from Collected Shorter Poems 1927–57 (Faber and Faber Ltd, London, 1984).
‘The Ninth Elegy’ by Rainer Maria Rilke, from Duino Elegies, translated by Stephen Cohn (Carcanet Press Ltd, Manchester, 1989).
Biblical quotations are from the OUP’s King James Version With Apocrypha (Oxford World’s Classics paperback, Oxford, 1998).