Snake Eyes

“Because,” said I, feeling a little nauseous about the demon’s answer, “Hell is meant to be below us.”

Then the demon, which had been only sighing up to that point, started to laugh properly.

“HA, HA, haa, haaa, AHAHAHAAAaaaaa, haaa.”

The poisonous tears appeared in its eyes once again as its face crunched into painful looking mirth.

“Haa, haaa imbeciles aaaaah, HAHAHAaaaaaaHAHAHA.”

All the trauma to the creature’s neck region, brought on by the pumping and the laughing dislodged Cleaver’s thumb from the demon’s oesophagus. It landed, burned but recognisable on the table below it. Puff Wiggery fainted, ending his stint on the bellows. They clattered to the ground beside him and the demon was silent.

“Your turn, Rickett,” I said. “Go on, hurry up.”

No more enthusiastic than his farming partner had been, Blini Rickett pushed Wiggery’s limp body out of the way, picked up the bellows and inserted the dirty tip into the demon’s neck. When he pumped, the demon’s tongue shot straight out of its mouth and vibrated. I shook my head in disbelief.

“That’s its food pipe, pheasant brain. Stick it in the other one.”

When he’d got the apparatus correctly set up, Blini started pumping again and the demon continued to chortle to itself. Prattle was indignant. You could hear it in his high-pitched wheezy whine.

“Nyev, nyev. This isn’t correct. Why is it laughing?”

“Leopold,” said I, “I’m not certain we want to know the answer to that.”

“We jamming well do. What is so jizzing funny, you corrupted son of the devil?”

I’d never heard Prattle swear before. The demon had him riled.

“HAHAHA, Haa, haa, Hell is everywhere, haa, haaa. Hell is haa, haa, all around HAHAHA.”

“What? What did he say? Hell is all around? What is that meant to mean? Are you trying to scare us, Demon, is that what it is? Well, I can assure you you’ll have to do a lot better than that.”

A look of understanding passed across the faces of all the villagers present. Things that had never made sense before, suddenly added up in their minds. The hotter and hotter summers, the frostless winters. It all became clear to them. Even Rickett was shocked enough to stop pumping. The looks of recognition were followed by expressions of panic. Prattle seemed to be the only one who wasn’t able to accept what the demon head was saying to us.

“Call yourself a demon? Is that the best you can come up with, ‘hell is everywhere’? Pathetic.”

Prattle look like he was fairly close to taking Cleaver’s knife and sticking into the demon’s eyes. I stepped over to him before he had the chance and took hold of his shoulders.

“We all need a break from this. And you and I need to talk. Very seriously.”

I wondered if I was going to have to slap him. His eyes were boring into the demon’s head; his face was pale with rage. He understood well enough what the demon was saying. Then he turned to me.

“Yes. We need to talk.”

Religion and Law

Without the usual show of ceremony, Prattle banished the villagers from his house and grounds and he and I walked back towards the square. He seemed to hold some great force within him like a heated cauldron with its lid clamped shut. His bony shoulders were drawn up, his head hung forward as though weighted and his fists were clenched, the knuckles pale and strained. His mouth showed no trace of lips; there was only a slit, mashed closed. Behind us, the confused knot of villagers stared after us and then, in straggled clumps, followed. I tried to keep the distance between them and us greater than earshot.

“It’s telling the truth, you know.”

Prattle flashed his eyes my way but stomped onward, saying nothing.

“It’s a reasonable explanation for everything that’s happened over the last few seasons.”

A hiss escaped the cauldron’s lid:

“Thirty years.”

“Excuse me?”

“Thirty jizjamming years of devotion and unstinting faith. Thirty years of study, sweat, humility, service, selflessness–

Could he really be talking about himself?

—sacrifice, chastity and abstinence. Thirty years of poverty—

Oh, please.

—and preaching to congregation after congregation of ignorant, uneducated sinners. And what do I get?”

Knowing it was a rhetorical question I interrupted by answering,

“Some kind of promotion, I would have thought…”

The flash of eyes again. He still had Cleaver’s knife. I shut my mouth.

“Nothing, that’s what. Not even the assurance after all this faith that there’s even a Great Father still out there.”

“Oh, I’m sure the Gr—”

“What would you know about the Great Father?” Prattle’s eyes bulged. He stopped walking, turned me and screamed into my face. “Eh? You with your books and your laws and your smug self-satisfaction? You think you’re so intelligent, so above the rest of us, don’t you? And you don’t have the first idea what it is we’ve all lost today, do you?”

The villagers who’d been following us were now hearing everything we said.

“An inedible barbecue?”