That’s not for me to say, replied the inspector. My task is to apprehend evildoers and turn them over to the authorities.
Well, we’re definitely evil. And does our punishment fit the crime?
It’s not punishment, actually. You’re scarcely conscious when the stake goes in.
As he said this, he confessed to himself that it must be worse for them than that. Even Father Hauser sometimes grew unnerved at the way that a vampire appeared to smile slightly when in daylight the lid of its coffin was struck off by the ecclesiastical authorities; in simple fact, the creature sensed that it had been disturbed, and struggled in its sleep to avoid the hateful stimulus of holiness, grimacing, as if it practically expected the stake.
But the vrykolakas pretended to agree, burping and saying: That’s right. So it hardly matters to me what you do. Undeath is nearly as monotonous as life. What happens next I don’t know. So I won’t betray you to your friends. In the meantime I’ve got appointments down in hell. Will you take my place?
After your accusations?
I have known far too many who have crept into the deepest positions, solely due to their proficiency in biting. Inspector, do you promise to accept personal responsibility?
So he ran everything like a dream. He arrested the ghouls who stole mammocks from each other’s tombs, and punished those who expressed seditious sentiments about the Devil. (This made him realize that some undead were less fundamentally guilty than others.) He oversaw the decorations on All Hallows’ Eve. He even drilled squadrons of undead soldiers, showing the keenest sensitivity to the prestige of the Mushroom Crown. And all the time he silently identified everyone who was active underground: the son whose parents had neglected to punish him for sluggishness, the prostitute Veronika, the nameless brother and sister burned alive for incest and so many others whose peccadilloes had ripened into sins. Many of them dwelled so far below the surface that it would be necessary to pitch holy water down into their tunnels. He began to map the warrens down there between headstone and hell.
But there were certain passageways which, finding them strangely beautiful, he decided not to betray to Father Hauser. He was willing to reveal most of what he saw, but when he entered the high-vaulted side-cellars where undead children played harmlessly with knucklebones, and sometimes tried to grow phosphorescent mushrooms, he left those off his maps.
When the King Vrykolakas came back, as a reward, or more likely an enticement, he introduced the inspector to the demon Brulefer, who causes a man to be found luscious by women; Surgat, around whom no lock can remain shut; Humots, who fetches any book one wishes for; Hael, who gives us command over any and all languages, but is ruled by Nebirots, whom it is best to conjure first; Trimsael, who teaches chemistry and legerdemain, and can accordingly impart the obscure process of manufacturing the Powder of Projection, which will alter base metals into gold and silver; Bucon, who causes antipathy between men and women; Sidragosam, who forces the girl of one’s choice to dance in the nude.
It was all profitable to the inspector, who had never been well educated. He learned the identities of the Whispering Knights, and which demon is most delighted by ritual cremation. He still believed that everything about being dead was the same for him. But what had really happened was that, as people generally will, he grew accustomed to his new state of being. This is not to say that he made plans of any sort, much less altered the previous ones. To tell the truth, he disdained the riotous ghouls and vampires upstairs as much as ever. The snoring solitude of the King Vrykolakas was more appropriate to his nature. The inspector was well aware that this monster was one of the most dangerous of all. Trollhand ought to destroy him immediately. Well, the inspector would take care of that in time. That old ghoul in the mold-green robe who had judged him last winter had already been dealt with, and a good thing, too. But when would the inspector receive his reward?
He had never been suggestible, but now it would have been easy to convince himself that in spite of the medallion of Saint Polona and even the golden pentacle, he was developing an allergy to light. Not wishing to give in to such satanic deceptions — for after all he had already rejected a number of notions in order to get where he was — he continued his investigations, under the guise of being a subaltern to the King Vrykolakas, who loved to look him up and down, snorting and snoring with laughter until blood-clots wormed out of his hairy nostrils. The golden pentacle would have been his mainstay in this time of hesitation, were it not for the fact that he dared not risk carrying it on his person, so that it mostly slept in the dark dirt high over his head.
Of course while he was down here exposing the Devil’s work, the King Vrykolakas was employing minions to counter-investigate him. First they found the medallion to Saint Polona in his coffin, together with old Jette’s skeleton-hand. These did not really signify, since any number of people in H— were buried with such trash, which availed nothing against a vampire bite. So they kept on looking, while the inspector, having received approving consent from the King Vrykolakas to conduct a census of the undead, should there ever come a need to mobilize all the undead against an invasion of Holy Knights or worse, burrowed deeper and deeper, openly mapping almost everything he saw, with a secret excitement as he imagined presenting this document to Father Hauser, and clinking glasses with Hans Trollhand — nobody had thought to offer him a drink since he died! Perhaps even Richter von Lochner would come. Turning a corner, he entered a golden-black ooze-world of jawless skulls basking like crocodiles, half overgrown with vagina-flowers. More than anything the place resembled, at least to me, one of the night-garden paintings of Leonor Fini, but since she lived after the inspector’s time I cannot imagine that he drew the same comparison. But here, in a grove of nude trees whose branches terminated in smooth blue hands, he met undead women, scintillatingly nude, whom he actually supposed he could love. — Dear boy, that’s a truly romantic place, the King Vrykolakas remarked, gnawing on a dead frog, just to bring on an appetite for dinner. — You see, Baal constructed it for his harem, although they’ve since dug down to blacker paradises. It was unoccupied for more than ten thousand years, and then some of your kind moved in.
What do you mean by my kind?
Oh, the delicate sort. They cherish all their appendages, and extrude parts of themselves into each other’s orifices. Female, for the most part, as you may have noticed. I’ve left all that above me long ago. But you’re still immature, inspector. You bear the hallmark of a living man — loneliness.
Sir, I disagree that the dead are less lonely than the living. Up there in the graveyard, all they do is play pranks together and—
Exactly. Up there. The farther down you go, the more solitary it gets.
What about Baal’s harem?
Oh, he ate them all.
The inspector said nothing. In resentment and despair he soon set out to expand his map, not that he would ever record the existence of the “romantic place,” which was too interesting to be destroyed. By now he had explored all the way to the horned long barrows of Bryn Celli Ddu. But often he returned to that black garden where the skulls basked like crocodiles, and the lovely blue undead women loitered in the grove of hand-trees, and there he tried calling on the demon Brulefer, who granted his prayer, so that all those women loved him happily. The deeper down he went, the more he began to believe, if only to console himself, that he must be digging for something, perhaps the water of life or death, although the glowing, coagulating atmosphere he swam into down there addled him so much that he sometimes hardly gathered what he was about; nonetheless, you will be relieved to know that he remained capable of mapping and memorizing everything. Just as Bohemia’s crown jewels lie hidden underground near Saint Wenceslas’s tomb, so the precious matter of the vampires and their kin entombed themselves right beneath the cemetery of H—, which after all is the center of the world. And now the inspector began to uncover more such secrets, each of them more charming than the last, and the deeper he went, the more bewildered he became, while by now the King Vrykolakas’s minions had discovered the golden pentacle, which once again (although the king himself was certain) they could not prove to be the inspector’s, but it was certainly a dangerous item; it would have burned them had they touched it; to pick it up they had to pass a stick through its necklace-chain. Depositing it in the ribcage of old Jette, whom none of the undead had ever found a prior use for, they rendered that poisonous thing halfway safe, even though the more sensitive ones among them could see its baleful golden glow right through Jette’s coffin.