the chasm like she was being sucked down a straw.
“No!” Satan shouted. “No! No! No.”
He wanted to run after her but there was no path down the cliff, just the howling wind surging up. So he went in the other direction to get help, but after a step he realized that there was no time, and so he went back to the edge of the cliff to maybe jump after her, but he could land anywhere, so he took two steps to the side but there was nothing over there and so he did a crazy little futility dance on the edge of the chasm.
“Geryon!” he shouted. “Geryon!!!”
And the abomination swooped up out of the abyss and hovered before him, lazily flapping its enormous leathery wings. Its body was that of an engorged lion, crusty with rot and scabs. A serpent’s tail, with a single fang dripping poison from the tip, unfurled beneath Geryon’s fat ass. But he had the face of a really nice guy.
“Whassup?” he asked.
“Get me down there,” Satan practically screamed and clambered onto his back. One of his feet slipped and Geryon dipped to catch him.
“Whoa,” he said. “Whatever happened to ‘please’?”
“Just get me down there!” Satan shouted.
Geryon spiraled down slowly.
“Were you with that nun? I was washing myself on a ledge and it was the craziest thing. I said to myself, ‘Geryon, did a nun just go past you?’ and I said back to myself, ‘Yep, Geryon, it sure did. I wonder what that tastes like.’ And then you’re all up here dancing around like a nut so I assume you pushed her, right? That’s cold, brother, even for you.”
Satan didn’t answer. The dank wind slammed into his face.
“Just fly,” he said.
It took almost an hour, but finally Geryon’s claws gripped the gravel next to where Sister Mary lay cracked and broken on the flinty surface of the upper Bolgia. No one had killed her yet, and she was making little sounds and trying to move. Satan knelt by her head.
“What did you do?” he asked. “What did you do?”
“Saint Jude...told me...atonement...ascend to Heaven...if I...” and then she gagged as she swallowed part of her hard palate.
“And you believed him?” Satan cried in frustration.
Satan had seen a lot of stupid things done in the name of faith – the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Communal Riots, suicide bombings – but this topped them all. This was a sucker getting rolled for her soul. It was a waste. It was cruelty.
“She’s not dead, dude,” Geryon observed. “That is gross.”
Mary was mewling, wracked with more pain than the human body was meant to bear. She tried feebly to crawl away from her pain, to escape the nest of splintered bones and crushed flesh her body had become. Her broken fingers pulled uselessly at the gravel.
“Put her out of her misery, man,” Geryon whined.
“Go away,” Satan snapped, and Geryon, hurt, shambled off and flopped down on some rocks.
What should he do? What should he do? What should he do? She wasn’t dead, she wouldn’t die until he or one of Death’s Minions turned her off. And as long as she didn’t die then the will of Heaven was stymied. A long, keening sound rose from the shattered hole in Mary’s face that had been her mouth. Her throat had been crushed and now it was swelling. She couldn’t force air through it anymore, but still she did not die. Death had to claim her.
Satan looked down at her. This stumpy little nun who had done nothing but curse him and lie to him. She was gagging on her own soft tissues as they filled up with subdermal blood and swelled to twice their normal size. It would be a mercy to kill her, but she had to live. If she died, Hell was doomed. Satan felt the forces of Creation all around him, like great gears and spring-loaded iron jaws, tensed in anticipation of what he would do next. Mary’s eyes rolled up and seemed to fix on him. They reminded him of the eyes of a dog that had been hit by a car: dumb, not comprehending where all this pain was coming from, not understanding why it hurt so bad.
Finally, he stopped resisting and he stepped into the trap Heaven had prepared for him and he reached inside Sister Mary and he extinguished her life, and the life of her baby.
The gears began to move. The jaws clamped shut.
Nero found him six hours later, sitting next to