Beelzebub sat on his throne of adulterers – the sinners of the day – and let out a deep sigh. Was this really what he wanted to keep doing with the rest of his eternity? That coup he tried to pull seemed like only a few months ago, but he knew based on the rate of new souls arriving, a couple thousand years had to have passed since then. He grabbed a body from the upper portion of the throne’s back, and munched on the cheater’s leg as he thought about the concept of damnation. It seemed like a pretty arbitrary process. Beelzebub had no say as to who made it into Hell; he only got Gawd’s leftovers. There must be some sort of screening system. If the human was only kind of bad, didn’t that at least warrant them a second chance? Beelzebub chuckled the first time he heard someone ask if they could get their sentence lightened to purgatory. As if purgatory actually existed. The stories humans tell themselves to sleep better at night, seriously. No, Beelzebub sat on the red frowny face end of the spectrum, and the only other option was the blue smiley face way on the other end, with mortality smack dab in the middle.
But what a novel idea, purgatory was. A waiting room for heaven. Did Hell really come across as so unappealing that humans would rather wait in boredom for millions of years to get into Heaven, when the party was ready to start down here? Beelzebub worked his way onto the man’s arms, having had his fill of leg. For once, Satan wished, he would like to be able to actually finish eating a human. Because the suffering was eternal for the damned, the man’s leg regrew just as Satan finished eating. Even swallowing humans hole just sent them back out a few hours later, and they gave him terrible indigestion when they clawed at his intestines. Sickened by the thought at having this particular specimen inside of him, Beelzebub placed him back in the part of the throne from where he was plucked, and Beelzebub summoned a messenger. Telephones would be another welcome invention, Beelzebub thought, as he ripped the head off his messenger, stuffed a handwritten note inside her throat, refastened her neck, patting her on the rear to nudge her in the right direction. Beelzebub never felt any sexual attraction to any of his tenants; they always seemed far too sad and scared to handle the attention. One would think that after a few millennia in Hell, a sinner would become accustomed to Beelezebub’s appearance, but apparently humans were cowards. As he watched his servant float in terror to the top of Hell, and pop through the ground into the H-link – the main Heaven-Hell highway – he remembered the experiment he conducted with that woman’s family.
All her male relatives were bankers, so they had no chance in getting in upstairs, but Beelzebub had a soft spot for bankers. Really, he felt, greed wasn’t that reprehensible. And they weren’t even the heads of the operations! Those men were satisfying slaves, but these middle-level nobodies that cut themselves too big a slice of the pie were kittens compared to the child molesters and wife beaters Beelzebub had become increasingly used to. The female members of the family were notorious for sleeping with the hired help, and one of them ended up leaving her husband to run away with the chauffeur! Beelzebub laughed at that one; who better to use as a getaway driver than a driver?
When each new family member worked their way on down to Hell, Beelzebub made a point of pulling them out of the entry line. Well, the entry mob. Humans aren’t the most compliant subjects to Hell’s bureaucratic system, and even when he asks his demons to pull double duty to help cope with surges in entrants – usually during war periods – people loved to huddle and flock towards the entrance gates. Beelzebub would often try to explain that was useless, but on first encounter with the Devil, humans pay astonishingly little attention to what he has to say. When Beelzebub would finally manage to locate the family member, he flew them to his inner sanctum, and chained them to a wall. No torture devices were used against them, they weren’t restrained uncomfortably in the air, and they interacted very little with Beelzebub, except for his daily check-in. He inquired into their status, current feelings, any unpleasant body sensations, but without fail, the only answers were shrieks of horror and pleas to be spared.
Are they that egotistical that they think everything is about them? Beelzebub had plenty of souls to tend to, so what made them feel so inclined to believe they would be tortured? Once a month, Beelzebub would bring all the family members into a chamber together, and gave them a few hours to act as a focus group. Beelzebub was personally concerned for his Hellish culture: was the temperature high enough? Were the lava flows flowing smoothly? How about the scenery? Beelzebub had noticed shrinking diversity in the types of rocks he saw around recently, and was afraid the ecosystem was suffering due to recent overpopulating areas. Yet every month proved to be as futile as the daily interviews: the family would simply embrace each other, forgive each other for all the wrongs they did to each other in life, and scream to Beelzebub for mercy. Mercy from what? Usually, after a few minutes of protest and dry sobs, Beelzebub would grow bored and frustrated by his subjects, and returned them to their positions. Occasionally he would allow an old husband and wife, or mother and daughter, to face another, but all that did was produce a steady exchange of wails and sappy comments about regrets. Beelzebub considered himself a patient deity, but he preferred to keep his complaint department outside his inner sanctum, where it could be managed by lower demons. Beelzebub pitied those lower demons terribly, but it was a dirty job, and someone had to do it. Occasionally, he would receive a message from Gawd asking for a conference, which Beelzebub actively avoided for as long as he could. Conferences only meant that Gawd would have yet another opportunity to remind Beelzebub that caring for Hell was the result of his own actions, all actions had consequences, and such. Beelzebub would try not to sigh too loudly in front of Gawd during these meetings – he was so easily offended by even the slightest signs of disapproval – and would provide demographic updates. The two would then brainstorm ways to improve angel-demon relations, deal with population spikes, and send subtle yet ambiguous messages to the mortal universe to remind them of the possibility of their existence.
The message Beelzebub had sent was in fact a response to a meeting request Gawd had initiated a few decades back. The meeting was to figure out an appropriate course of action now that Adolf Hitler was in Hell, but Beelzebub had managed to push it off saying he would need to spend a few years settling Hitler into position, and keep him from trying to organize a rebellion. Rebellions never worked out for the humans, yet whenever notoriously heinous individuals found themselves in Hell, they felt it was their place to reorganize the place. Beelzebub really only needed a month or two to confine Hitler to a solitary torture chamber, but with the steady stream of dictators, totalitarians, and post-war sinners, Beelzebub had managed to keep himself looking busy. After sentencing Richard Nixon to swim a few million laps of the river Styx, though, Beelzebub became intrigued with the idea of purgatory. Humans had been preaching about it for ages, and yet Beelzebub and Gawd had done nothing to address this idea. Beelzebub crunched some numbers, and realized that having a purgatory open during high-traffic periods would improve efficiency in Hell alone by 33% during that time period. He hadn’t done the same calculations for Heaven, but he assumed the figures would have to be similar. Furthermore, by only keeping it reserved for the high-traffic periods, neither deity would have to sacrifice staff permanently: demons and angels could be trained for temporary work, and return to their posts when the souls began their wait. Plus, it would give Gawd and Beelzebub loads more time to review the ambiguous cases. When dealing with an eternal scale of time, anything finite seemed trivial, but the deities took their work seriously, and wanted to make sure their system was running up to date.
Beelzebub saw his messenger return shortly after conducting another focus group with the bankers and cheating whores. He had made a significant breakthrough today – one of the women whispered to her daughter that she would sacrifice herself first to protect them – so he was in a mood for more good news. The messenger began crying as Beelzebub dug the reply out of her stomach, but he was willing to overlook this annoyance as soon as he noticed the confirmation on the meeting time. Giddy with excitement, Beelzebub announced to all of Hell that they would be set free the following month. He caught himself too late, and had to send out his entire reserve supply of demons to stop the cheering long enough to make another announcement correcting himself, and reassured his civilians that they would remain in Hell for eternity as scheduled, like they were told on their first day. The atmosphere returned to its regular gloom, and Beelzebub retreated to his room, disappointed he couldn’t share his glee with his company without entirely disrupting the system. That night, Beelzebub slept better than he had since the day Jesus died.
The weeks until the meeting crawled by, and all Beelzebub could do to keep himself busy was to recruit new subjects for his surveys. He decided it was time to randomize his samples a bit more, as he finally accepted his research confirming that genes had no impact on the subjective experience of Hell, and so Beelzebub opened his research facilities to pro-choicers, gays, atheists, and all sorts of religious leaders. He found an overwhelming amount of support for his purgatory plan, and had his demons draw up quick diagrams to model his results. He polished up his presentation with some fun, interactive special effects until he couldn’t fit anything else into his allotted sixteen slides. He also tried become more involved in the welcome process, but found working there too stressful on the newcomers. The only place he felt was suitable was at the end of the welcome, when the human was finally branded with their Hell serial number, stripped of their earthly possessions, and given the key to their bedroom. Beelzebub found that by this point, the humans had more or less given up on changing their sociomortal status; he could lead them to their room, give a brief description of the types of torture they can likely expect in the upcoming weeks, and addressed any immediate questions. He felt this personal touch would bolster his support on the purgatory initiative.
The day of the meeting, Beelzebub spent an extra half hour in the shower. It took an extra 700 humans to supply enough blood, but Beelzebub felt it would be worth it if purgatory sat well with Gawd. He arranged a transportation demon force, and began his ascent. Passing up through mortality always intrigued Beelzebub, and seeing humans conduct themselves without a care for the afterlife made him hopeful for new faces. The meetings always took place in Heaven, a condition that Beelzebub resented, but learned to work around. Giving Gawd the home court meant that Beelzebub could control his time of arrival, and keep Gawd waiting if he so chose. Today, though, he had no time for trivialities. As soon as his caravan broke through the cloud cover, Beelzebub hopped off his demon carriers, and marched impressively toward Saint Peter. Unlike most humans, Saints had the uncanny ability to remain calm around Beelzebub, which he found a refreshing change of pace. For once, he could carry an actual conversation with a non-demon. When Saint Peter had difficulty locating Beelzebub’s appointment on his schedule, he attempted to point it out, but the moment he made contact with the paper, it singed beneath his touch. The two shared an awkward chuckle, and Beelzebub strode through the gates to Heaven to pitch the initiative he was sure would be a hit.
Word count: 2,088
No comments:
Post a Comment