Mary.
Satan didn’t particularly like Sister Mary. He didn’t particularly dislike her either, but for some strange reason her pathetic, pointless death had broken something inside of him. You never knew what was going to be the last straw.
Out of curiosity, Satan had had dinner with Hitler when he’d first arrived in Hell. It was pretty awkward. Throughout the meal, Hitler kept asking him what all these Jews were doing in Heaven. Satan was fascinated by self-destructive behavior at the time, for obvious reasons, and he only wanted to know one thing: why hadn’t Hitler invaded England? It was vulnerable to a sea attack and if Hitler had just put some boots on the ground he could have stabilized Europe, deprived the Allies of a staging area for their ground invasion and turned his full attention to the Russian front. It was a major strategic blunder. Satan had thought that Hitler might not be forthcoming, but the dead dictator was only too happy to finally get it off his chest.
Apparently a glowing dwarf named Bargy had appeared to him three times and warned that if Hitler invaded England the Reich would be destroyed. This dwarf first materialized during a particularly stressful period in Hitler’s life and it had been more than he could take. The thing had freaked him right out of his mind, and Bargy became his secret terror. Hitler spent the rest of his life living in fear that the glowing dwarf was constantly watching him, hiding behind doors, drapes and shrubberies, waiting for Hitler to lower his guard so that he could jump out and accost him in public. Upon further questioning, Hitler revealed that Bargy only appeared to him after he had taken an especially large dose of amphetamines. Hitler was adamant that the two were not connected.
One hallucination and Hitler lost the war.
Or take the case of Stanley Gerwitz, in Cincinnati, who had lost his wife to a murder-suicide at the hands of her lover back in the 80’ s. His oldest daughter was his boss’s mistress and his youngest daughter was a Scientologist. His parents had died in a tragic zoo accident when he was eleven. But through it all, Stanley kept smiling. Nothing seemed to get him down, until some kid had smashed his jack o’lantern. Stanley had spent six hours carving a photorealistic Darth Vader onto this particular pumpkin and when it was smashed that was his last straw. He never left his house again. Some neighborhood children found his body seven years later when they broke in looking for a place to get high.
You never could tell what would finally break someone.
For Hitler it was Bargy. For Stanley Gerwitz it was that jack o’lantern.
For Satan it was Sister Mary’s suicide.
He stayed by her body and kept the goblins away. He would shoo off the flapping things that occasionally landed and stalked in circles around her corpse, waiting to eat it. He removed the bugs that tried to lay eggs in her ears. He dusted her. He kept her clean. He did all the things that most people hired a professional to do.
Michael entered The Room. To the untrained eye it looked exactly like an empty hotel event room with gray wall-to-wall carpeting sporting a neutral geometric pattern. Folding chairs leaned against the wall, tables were stacked up at one end. On the far wall was a door and over it was an illuminated exit sign. Michael began to walk towards it. Five hours later, he was still in the same place. He kept walking. Slowly, inch by inch, hour by hour, almost imperceptibly, the distance between the angel and the exit sign got smaller.
On the third day, some imps came to investigate Mary’s body. Imps were small, single-minded creatures who were usually the incarnation of a bad idea. These imps were all about unwise real estate speculation. They gurgled to each other and bumbled towards Mary, sniffing at the air, excited to have a human host to infect, even if it was a dead one. They didn’t notice Satan sitting next to her until he was kicking them away and making scary noises. They scrambled back to their boulders and gargled horribly at him for a while before going in search of easier prey.
Nero came by again a few hours later, but Satan didn’t respond to anything he said. Nero was convinced that this was depression of the worst kind, and that was not an entirely bad thing. For years he had