Butcher Bird

"I don't think that. We just don't know each other that well, yet. In my kind of work, trust is important. And I don't give it easily."

"Neither do I, and I'm not even a killer."

"Then, you should understand that I'm enjoying your company, but I'm not entirely at ease with it yet."

"I'm right with you there, Calamity Jane."

"We'll know more by the end of the trip."

"Not me. Aside from you, I want to forget every bit of what I've seen," said Spyder. He lit a cigarette.

"These things are never that simple," Shrike said. "I'm from another Sphere. When you lose the sight, I'll be gone, too. If you saw me at all, it would only be as a ghost."

"Balls. Madame Cinders said her book has the power to create and uncreate things. She should be able to bend a few rules about what can and can't be seen. I want to see you. I don't want to see anything that's going to eat me; I don't want to see demons or talking snakes; and I don't ever want to see anyone with horns or wings."

"Some of my best friends have horns and wings."

"I'll be your hillbilly boyfriend. Purty, but slow."

"No problem there."

"See? We're halfway home."

"And if Madame Cinders can't bend the rules? What if, to regain your precious ignorance, we never see each other again?"

"We'll deal with that when it happens. Besides, I don't know what the hell I'm doing out here. I'm probably going to get eaten by a demon dachshund or shanked by a fire-breathing tea cozy. That'd solve everything."

"Stick with me, pony boy. The talking dogs will have to get through me to get to you."

Shrike laid her hand on Spyder's chest. He didn't move, but became aware of his heart beating and the movement of blood through his body.

"I think you're sexually harassing me again, but I'll let it go for now," he said.

"Did you bring your books?"

"Jenny took most of 'em. But I know the important stuff, the grand schemes. The first, most important thing you need to understand about Hell is what Hermes Trismegistus, a famous alchemist, said: 'Hell is like anywhere else. Only worse.' Course, that sounds better in Latin."

Spyder talked into the night, telling Shrike about the pits and traps of Hell-the cunning lies demons tell, the slowly spinning trees full of knives in the abattoir forests. Lulu slept nearby in the hold. Spyder checked on her from time to time and made her drink water. They sailed west all day and all night. Like bright toys, airships drifted in the distance.

Twenty-Three

Death is not the End

Among the greatest lies ever told, probably the greatest is that death only comes in one flavor.

Depending on the time, the place, the species of the deceased and its general standing in the universe, the nouveau-dead can find themselves experiencing any number of different types of death.

Most often, the classes of death experienced by humans fall into three categories:

Total Death. This is the typical human death. Sleeping the big sleep. Taking a dirt nap. The spirit has moved on and the body is empty meat in the cold ground. Nothing, short of some expensive special effects or an act of God, is going make a Total Death anything but a common separation of spirit and a feast for worms.

Hungry Death. This is a loathsome kind of half-death. Typically, the hungry dead end up as zombies-slow-witted, gluttons for human flesh and smelling like an abandoned pig farm. This is the category where you never want to find yourself. Too deranged for Heaven and too unstable to accept damnation in Hell, there's no love lost in any Sphere for the hungry dead.

Petit Mort. The little death. This is the most elusive, but perhaps the most sublime human death. It's reserved for those enlightened souls to whom death and life aren't separate states, but the continuation of a single thought. Once they've made that initial transition between life and death, your typical Petit Mort spirit slips continually been the Land of the Dead and the Living Earth, wherever the action happens to be at the time.

Each state of death has a very different cast. Not all bad ones are punished. Not all good souls are rewarded. Luck or the lack of it, timing and intelligence are as important in death as they are in life.

A few of the humans who've experienced Total Death are musicians Buddy Holly and Bob Wills (plus most of his Texas Playboys); comedian Andy Kaufman; aviatrix Amelia Earhart; Picasso; cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova; Marilyn Monroe; and Hitler.

The hungry dead also include a number of musicians, most notably Jim Morrison; also actress Jayne Mansfield; serial killer (and the real Jack the Ripper) Frederick Bailey Deeming; author Ayn Rand; big-eyed child painters Margaret and Walter Keane.