Gene Wolfe - The Best of Gene Wolfe

That was not my affair, and I said so.

“I don’t. I saw the sign, and I thought there must be a lot of work to do around such a big house, washing windows and making beds, and I’d offer to do it for food and a place to sleep.”

“He agreed?” I was rather surprised.

“No.” She sat down and drank half her milk, seeming to pour it down her throat with no need of swallowing. “He said I could eat and stay in the empty room—they’ve got an empty room tonight—if nobody else comes. But if somebody does, I’ll have to leave.” She found a drumstick and nipped it with strong white teeth. “I’ll pay them when I get the money, but naturally he didn’t believe me. I don’t blame him. How much is it?”

I told her, and she said it was very cheap.

“Yes,” I said, “but you have to consider the situation. They’re off the highway, with no way of letting people know they’re here. They get a few people on their way to Hell, and a few demons going out on assignments or returning. Regulars, as they call them. Other than that”—I shrugged—“eccentrics like me and passersby like you.”

“Did you say Hell?” She put down her chicken leg.

“Yes. Certainly.”

“Is there a town around here called Hell?”

I shook my head. “It has been called a city, but it’s a region, actually. The Infernal Empire. Hades. Gehenna, where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. You know.”

She laughed, the delighted crow of a large, bored child who has been entertained at last.

I buttered a second slice of bread. The bread is always very good, but this seemed better than usual.

“ ‘Abandon hope, you who enter here.’ Isn’t that supposed to be the sign over the door?”

“More or less,” I said. “Over the gate Dante used, at any rate. It wasn’t this one, so the inscription here may be quite different, if there’s an inscription at all.”

“You haven’t been there.”

I shook my head. “Not yet.”

“But you’re going”—she laughed again, a deep, throaty, very feminine chuckle this time—“and it’s not very far.”

“Three miles, I’m told, by the old county road. A little less, two perhaps, if you were to cut across the fields, which almost no one does.”

“I’m not going,” she said.

“Oh, but you are. So am I. Do you know what they do in Heaven?”

“Fly around playing harps?”

“There’s the Celestial Choir, which sings the praises of God throughout all eternity. Everyone else beholds His face.”

“That’s it?” She was skeptical but amused.

“That’s it. It’s fine for contemplative saints. They go there, and they love it. They’re the only people suited to it, and it suits them. The unbaptized go to Limbo. All the rest of us go to Hell; and for a few, this is the last stop before they arrive.”

I waited for her reply, but she had a mouthful of chicken. “There are quite a number of entrances, as the ancients knew. Dodona, Ephyra, Acheron, Averno, and so forth. Dante went in through the crater of Vesuvius, or so rumor had it; to the best of my memory, he never specified the place in his poem.”

“You said demons stay here.”

I nodded. “If it weren’t for them, the old people would have to close, I imagine.”

“But you’re not a demon and neither am I. Isn’t it pretty dangerous for us? You certainly don’t look . . . I don’t mean to be offensive—”

“I don’t look courageous.” I sighed. “Nor am I. Let me concede that at once, because we need to establish it from the very beginning. I’m innately cautious, and have been accused of cowardice more than once. But don’t you understand that courage has nothing to do with appearances? You must watch a great deal of television; no one would say what you did who did not. Haven’t you ever seen a real hero on the news? Someone who had done something extraordinarily brave? The last one I saw looked very much like the black woman on the pancake mix used to, yet she’d run into a burning tenement to rescue three children. Not her own children, I should add.”

Eira got up and poured herself a second glass of milk. “I said I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, and I meant it. Just to start with, I can’t afford to tick off anybody just now—I need help. I’m sorry. I really am.”

“I’m not offended. I’m simply telling you the truth, that you cannot judge by appearances. One of the bravest men I’ve known was short and plump and inclined to be careless, not to say slovenly, about clothes and shaving and so on. A friend said that you couldn’t imagine anyone less military, and he was right. Yet that fat little man had served in combat with the navy and the marines, and with the Israeli Army.”

“But isn’t it dangerous? You said you weren’t brave to come here.”

“In the first place, one keeps one’s guard up here. There are precautions, and I take them. In the second, they’re not on duty, so to speak. If they were to commit murder or set the house on fire, the old people would realize immediately who had done it and shut down; so while they are here, they’re on their good behavior.”

“I see.” She picked up another piece of chicken. “ Nice demons.”

“Not really. But the old man tells me that they usually overpay and are, well, businesslike in their dealings. Those are the best things about evil. It generally has ready money, and doesn’t expect to be trusted. There’s a third reason, as well. Do you want to hear it?”

“Sure.”

“Here one can discern them, and rather easily for the most part. When you’ve identified a demon, his ability to harm you is vastly reduced. But past this farm, identification is far more difficult; the demons vanish in the surging tide of mortal humanity that we have been taught by them to call life, and one tends to relax somewhat. Yet scarcely a week goes by in which one does not encounter a demon unaware.”

“All right, what about the people on their way to Hell? They’re dead, aren’t they?”

“Some are, and some aren’t.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Exactly what I said. Some are and some are not. It can be difficult to tell. They aren’t ghosts in the conventional sense, you understand, any more than they are corpses, but the people who have left the corpse and the ghost behind.”

“Would you mind if I warmed up a couple of pieces of this, and toasted some of that bread? We could share it.”

I shook my head. “Not in the least, but I’m practically finished.”

She rose, and I wondered whether she realized just how graceful she was. “I’ve got a dead brother, my brother Eric.”

I said that I was sorry to hear it.

“It was a long time ago, when I was a kid. He was four, I think, and he fell off the balcony. Mother always said he was an angel now, an angel up in Heaven. Do dead people really get to be angels if they’re good?”

“I don’t know; it’s an interesting question. There’s a suggestion in the Book of Tobit that the Archangel Raphael is actually an ancestor of Tobit’s. Angel means ‘messenger,’ as you probably know, so if God were to employ one of the blest as a messenger, he or she could be regarded as an angel, I’d think.”

“Devils are fallen angels, aren’t they? I mean, if they exist.” She dropped three pieces of chicken into a frying pan, hesitated, and added a fourth. “So if good people really get recycled as angels, shouldn’t the bad ones get to be devils or demons?”

I admitted that it seemed plausible.

She lit the stove with a kitchen match, turning the burner higher than I would have. “You sound like you come here pretty often. You must talk to them at breakfast, or whenever. You ought to know.”