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Authors: Jeffrey Thomas

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"So my commission will end soon."
"We don’t know when it will end. But there are other artists who will be used instead. It is beyond my control, so do not ask me to extend your commission."
"I wasn’t going to." Wanda watched the creature’s profile, too perfect in line and form like that of a Greek statue; too idealized to be real. Then she saw the thing’s eerie blue eyes narrow. The brow became intense, perplexed. An arm rose to point.
"It looks like there is a face, there, reflected in the edge of the pool."
"A face?" Wanda turned to regard her own work. "Where?"
Zaraiah stepped close to the wall. "Here. It looks like a dark face is reflected in the water. A screaming face." Like someone drowning in the pool, unable to pull herself out as the robed figures cavorted, too oblivious to reach in for the drowning figure’s hand.
Wanda’s heart was thudding. "I don’t see it."
Zaraiah cocked its head sideways, then looked back over its shoulder at the artist. "This seems an intentional effect, to me."
"I think it’s just your own interpretation. Like people seeing figures in the constellations."
Zaraiah straightened, and the Seraph’s gaze was stern. "Do not do mischief here. You have been entrusted with a special task. You are not to conduct any pranks or irreverence."
"I understand that! I appreciate this opportunity I’ve been given, Overseer."
Zaraiah scrutinized both walls of the mural, then the arched ceiling of blue sky, with a new look of analysis on its face. Again, the pointing arm. "That isn’t a face in the clouds? A weeping child’s face?"
Wanda tilted back her head. "Please, Overseer…looking for dogs and sheep and things in the clouds is a game children play."
"It had better not be a game you are playing, my child," it said to her. "If the mistress complains to me about anything she sees within your work, you will be punished for it."
"Believe me, I respect Suzanne, Overseer. And I respect you, too."
Zaraiah met her eyes grimly. "Do you?"
"Yes. Yes, I do."
The Seraph broke their gaze first, then strode out of the hallway, throwing one disturbed look back at her. Wanda was good at psychology, from her days working with unhappy employees in the course of her former Human Resources job. But she wasn’t sure she understood Zaraiah’s look at all. It left her feeling uncomfortable, and doubting the wisdom of her actions. The Celestials could tear the Damned to bloody shreds with the best of the Demons.
She was surprised that the Seraph, clearly suspecting her secreted images, hadn’t demanded that she do away with them. Was it going to turn a blind eye to her defiance, or would the order to destroy the subliminal images be forthcoming later? For a wild moment or two she considered going in and obliterating them on her own, but she decided against it. So what if the Celestials punished her, tortured her? Demon or Celestial, it was all the same. Either way, it was her eternal fate to endure.
««—»»
Just prior to the next work period, she
was
 torn by a Demon into bloody shreds.
As the gray Demon with the glowing cracks in its hide twisted her arm to rip away the last rubbery strings that connected it to its socket, in her agony and panic Wanda wondered if this violence were in fact a response to her subversive acts, a punishment ordered by Zaraiah. But as she lay trembling hard and in shock, watching her vivid blood flow down the slope of rock beneath her, she thought that if Zaraiah had indeed wanted to punish her, the Seraph wouldn’t have permitted her to remain on the team of artists and laborers shuttled from Hades to Heaven like children between divorced parents. And yet the same Demon who had pulled her out of line and attacked her now picked her up and flung her into the black metal carriage like a doll, to be transported with the others to the portal. He kicked away her dismembered limb, leaving it to rot, knowing that a new one would emerge from her shoulder in a matter of hours. Pain-wracked hours.
They arrived at the nearest of the portals between afterlifes, and two of the other slaves helped support Wanda so she could walk. They were still supporting her when they emerged from the brightly glowing interior of the pillbox-like structure on Heaven’s side. Her uniform was black but shiny with her blood, which still oozed from her shoulder though the wound had mostly closed already. Wanda lifted her head, her face a mask of glittering red spatter. She saw that Zaraiah was staring at her.
"What happened?" the Seraph asked.
When Wanda couldn’t form words, one of the Damned who held her up spoke for her. "Our Demon Overseer did this to her."
"Why? Why her?"
"He didn’t say." The slave shrugged timidly. "They don’t need a reason. Today it’s her, tomorrow it’s me. They do this to us. It’s Hades, Overseer."
The Seraph tore its eyes from Wanda, leaving transient brush strokes of blue in the air. "Do not let the mistress see her this way. Once we reach the estate, she will remain inside the carriage until she is healed. Make her comfortable. I will go speak to the Demon Overseer now." Zaraiah started moving toward the closed, submarine-style hatch.
"Why?" Wanda croaked.
Zaraiah stopped at the sound, faced her. "Why what?"
"Why…speak to him?" she managed.
"This can’t be permitted. You are needed to do work here, not waste time regenerating lost limbs. And we cannot have the Angels unsettled by such a sight."
But Wanda had never seen the creature’s face set with such cold rage, the blue eyes dazzling like alien stars. The anger it had shown her when it realized the bitterness disguised within her painting was nothing compared to this.
"Thank you," she said.
Her words seemed to embarrass the entity, as when she had cupped her breasts, because just as then it turned away sharply and continued on to the metal hatch—to pass willingly from the beautiful dream of its home to the nightmare reality of her own.
««—»»
The work periods were long enough that even though it still seemed to take a good number of hours before Wanda’s arm had regrown, she still had time to enter the sprawling mansion at last and resume work on her mural. Her hair and face had been washed, and her blood-soaked black clothing substituted. She wore a lavender robe that fell sensuously along the curves of her young body.
"The mistress saw your condition," Zaraiah realized, when the Overseer appeared at the hallway’s inner threshold and spotted her at work.
"I’m sorry." Wanda looked nervous to be discovered this way, and her face was still white and weary from her ordeal. "The others cleaned me up a little before I came in, but she could still tell I’d been hurt. She made me take a bath and change my clothes. She’s a very nice lady."
"Mm," the Celestial grunted.
Wanda made an apologetic wincing expression. "She’s pretty upset. She said she was going to speak to you about it when she got back from visiting her friend’s house."
"I will assure her that the matter has been seen to. The Demon who injured you has been retired from service for interfering in this important project."
"Retired?"
"Yes." Zaraiah looked away from her as if to signal an end to the subject, but Wanda wondered if the Seraph had retired the towering Demon officer with its own delicately powerful hands. Still watching the creature, she saw its eyes alight where she knew they would. How could her critic and admirer help but notice the addition right away?
"I hope you aren’t offended," she said. "I changed that person to look like you. Do you think it does? Look like you?"
"Yes," Zaraiah said distantly, staring at the figure she had transmuted during the past two hours from a young woman in yellow to the androgynous Seraph in white, its perfect profile gazing off toward the horizon. "It does."
"Now you’re immortalized, too. Not in the Creator’s way, but in my own little way."
"Hm. Thank you." Not taking its eyes off its own portrait, after several long moments the Seraph went on, "I’m sorry to tell you that it’s been determined this is to be your last assignment, after all."
"I see." Wanda nodded. She didn’t doubt that this decision had been advised by Zaraiah, despite its having said that it had no input in these matters. "I understand," she told it. She was used to being fatalistic. The bad news was not unexpected.
But what she did find unexpected was, as the Seraph turned away to ostensibly go check on the headway of the other Damned laborers, Wanda caught a glistening hint of wetness in its enigmatic Celestial eyes.
1: The Angel
A
fter Michael stepped through the doorway of blinding light, he found himself in a room lined in white ceramic tiles, floor and ceiling included. The room’s only feature was a riveted metal hatch with a wheel-like valve in its center, and he saw this immediately turn with a squeal. A blast of steam entered the small white chamber…followed by the first Demon Michael had met since his death, several months earlier.
"Greetings, sir," the thing said, unfolding to its full height. At eight feet tall, it had had to stoop to fit its body through the hatchway. "I am Iblis Al-Qadim—governor of this sector of Hades."
Michael almost said, automatically, "Nice to meet you" or "thanks for having me," so stunned into a sleepwalker’s state was he by the thing’s appearance. He had taken an involuntary step backwards as it had joined him in this, one of apparently countless entry points into the netherworld.
Iblis Al-Qadim’s heavy black robes did not fully hide the fact that his body was an unpleasant cross between human skeleton and insect exoskeleton. His face was more human, but a human long dead, his skin a mere black parchment clinging to jutting bone, twin stars gleaming in the deep wells of his skull sockets. Even his teeth were black, in a lipless and humorless grin. He wore a black metal miter, making him all the more towering, intricate patterns of holes in this officious headpiece showing the green flames that blazed from the top of his skull…where it had apparently been sawed open to emit them.
He carried a staff of iron with a strange swirling design at its head, either a sign of office or a weapon’s blade, or both. His shoulders were bulked with a framework under the robes to make his width more commanding, as if taking a cue from football players (maybe if the ball were a human head), and on one of these shoulders perched and squirmed what Michael at first took to be some kind of familiar. It was a black octopus, its head so bloated with, perhaps, the gases it breathed that the stretched skin was almost translucent. It had small, bat-like wings growing out of the sides of its head, above its golden eyes with their horizontal pupils.
Despite that rasping whisper of a voice coming from the scarecrow-like giant’s jaws, Michael had the strange intuition that—rather than being a mere familiar—it was the octopus that was in charge, and the looming skeleton creature merely its vehicle and mouthpiece. Were they both, then, Iblis Al-Qadim?
Seeing that Michael was still dazed, at a loss, the official went on, "Was it not your wife’s intention to join you, sir?"
Michael recovered enough of his voice to stammer, "Yes…well…not today. We decided it was best, after all, if I came here first by myself to assess the situation, so I could go back and…prepare her for it."
"I see. Very good, sir." The thing tipped its head slightly and pointed a finger twice as long as one of Michael’s at the belt gathering his white, angelic robes. A holster was clipped onto this belt, and from the holster protruded the grip of a handgun. "Did you intend to do some hunting, as well, during your stay?"
"Hunting?" Michael looked down at his gun himself, and then became horrified when he grasped the entity’s meaning. Horrified, and outraged. But even though he was an immortal Angel—and this creature, however seemingly important, a lowly Demon who could be killed because he had no immortal soul—Michael was too intimidated to raise his voice to the being. He kept his tone stern but even. "My son is one of the Damned now, is he not? So I should hardly think I’d want to hunt any of the Damned for sport."
"I see, sir. Many do, of course."
"I’m aware of that. And those Angels should be here in place of many of the Damned. But my Father works in ways even more mysterious than I suspected when I was alive."

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