I didn’t see the whole thing. But I presume the corner beam gave way near its base and fell outward, propelled by the gasses trapped within its green wood, or perhaps by some randomly concurrent explosion inside the house.
It reached out, a hissing, flaming arm, and struck me solidly where I knelt, braced against the outdraft of the blaze. It wasn’t the fire that killed me, just pedestrian kinetic energy. My corpse was hardly burned at all.
The Devil (aka: Beelzebub, Satan, and the Artist Formerly Known as the Prince of Darkness) entertained me in an office rather like my dad’s cubicle when he worked for IBM. There was that same penumbra of stickies framing the fat old cathode-ray-tube monitor, the rhythmic chunking sound of a far-off photocopier, the pre-email proliferation of paper everywhere, and Old Scratch himself was wearing a blue suit, white shirt, and red tie.
But it looked better on him than on my dad.
He nodded a hello. There was no need for introductions; I knew who he was. He’s the Devil, after all. The crafty smile, his seductive grace even on the pre-ergonomic office chair, the unalloyed beauty of his face all made his fallen-angel provenance clear. I had no doubt that this was real.
But the IBM setting seemed a bit odd.
“Is this some kind of ironic punishment thing?” I asked, imagining an eternity of writing Cobol code and wearing a tie. A fitting fate for New Economy Boy.
“Not at all,” Satan replied, waving one elegant hand. “Irony is dead. Your generation killed it. Besides, nothing beats hot flames. We’re in the business of damnation, not poetic justice.”
His limpid eyes drifted across the jokey coffee mug, the dusty and fingerprinted glass of the CRT, the thrice-faxed office-humor cartoon thumbtacked to the cubicle wall, taking them all in with a kind of vast sadness. He was awfully pretty, just like they say.
He looked at me and sighed.
“My point with this apparition is to impress upon you my weakness.”
I looked at him in horror. “For bad office design?”
“Not that,” said the Devil. “Although I must say, the cubicle has crushed more souls than I lately.” He regarded the screen saver on the terminal: the words DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING ON THIS DESK rolled by in quiet desperation. He shuddered, then turned toward me.
“To be frank, we need your help.”
“My help?”
“With an FX issue.”
I narrowed my eyes.
“You see,” the Devil continued, “over the last few decades, we down here in Hell have begun to realize that we have a little trouble with our… look and feel.”
“I don’t follow you.”
He smiled, perhaps at my choice of words.
Then he shrugged. “I think it’s these video games, although some of my minions say it’s CGI graphics. But whatever is to blame, recent studies have found that the average American male spends fourteen hours per week in some sort of interactive infernal environment. And we just can’t compete with the graphics in first-person shooters these days. Many of the souls coming down here lately find the underworld rather… cheesy, I’m afraid.”
“You mean…?”
“Yes, alas,” the Devil lamented. “Hell no longer looks good on TV. Nor even in reality.”
It was true.
We soared over the damned, their voices crying in a great wail of pain. Although we were above the tongues of the flame, the heat clung to me like fishhooks. Every square inch of epidermis felt like sunburned flesh sprayed with jalapeño juice. And the smell was far worse than the sulfur we all know from rotten eggs. It was of a purer species: fifth-grade chemistry set sulfur, though tinged with a darker, murkier scent, like a dead rat behind the wall. The stench was awful even from our lofty height. I can’t imagine what it was like inside that pit of fire.
But Old Scratch was right. The visuals were very last-century. Gouts of hellfire shot across the damned in big tacky bursts, as if some Coney Island flame-breather were running around down there. And the flowing rivers of flame were so Discovery Channel: turgid and crusted with solidifying earth on top. Nothing halfway as cool as the boiling-oil algorithms that Falling Man had created for the prequel to Death Siege, and that was just a Showtime original. We’d devised a mesmerizing and viscous black liquid all run through with scintillating veins of sharp crimson, like a negative of a bloodshot eye texture-mapped onto flowing blobs of mercury.
And the Hadean backdrop of reddened craggy mountains was totally pre-fractal. I’ve seen scarier coral.