Hell Hath None

      “Do you think an evil person can be so bad they’re already damned before it’s time for them to die?” a time-honored prostitute broke the silence at the end of the bar whose overhead lights were burned out. 

           “I don’t s’pose I understand.” the barman stood there polishing a glass. “Do you mean you’re predestinated to go to Hell? Why would you think that?”

           He wondered what sort of person would go to a bar whose lights haven’t been fixed; patrons usually want to be able to see their iniquities. When there was no reply he turned around and she was right in his face, grabbing him tightly by the necktie.

           “Not predestined, damned like right now today.” she voiced the only thought on her mind. “Like before I drop dead right here in this bar.”

           Had she climbed over the bar? He was glad she had taken a bath.

           “There aren’t any good-looking nightbirds are there?” he said, having never seen one. “It’s all about the personality, right?”

           She turned him loose and coughed out a laugh.

           “Keep talking like that and you’re gonna get lucky.” she responded. “So are there any places in town worse than this one?”

           “What do you mean a place that’s about to lose its license?  Or there’s a stalker waiting in the alley?”

           “Sure.” she shrugged, going back to her stool. He wondered how bad she could possibly be. In his experience most people think they’re better than they actually are.

           “You’re not that bad-looking.” he tried complimenting her. “So you can’t already be damned, you might be forgiven.”

           “Look palomine I didn’t come to a place like this to get professional help.” her eyes narrowed at him.

           “Would you rather I took advantage of you or just ignored you completely?” he replied with a professional smile.

           “I’ll have you know this day began perfectly well.” she put down her empty glass.

           “And what is a perfect day for you?”

           “Having cinder blocks piled on top of me.” she answered frankly.

           The hotel suite was so nice, the bedsheets shining white and this was a new town best of all. Last night the guy with the cinder blocks didn’t even want to screw, he just liked women to be flattened which made it a perfect evening. There was champagne and even a white bathrobe she wore to bed. She lie there snoring against the pillow with her arms curled behind her back.

           At Two AM she got up to use the restroom. She had neglected to explore all of the little oils and sponges and moisturizers; the little white cabinet had a wire beauty rack for holding them like they have in department stores. And there was something she hadn’t noticed before, like a furry black handbag for beauty supplies hanging on the wall.

           She reached out for it and immediately pulled her hand back. It was prickly and moist like the Devil’s concha. Then the eye opened and looked at her, its hairy lips spreading like a giant clam’s to reveal a giant menacing pupil behind veiny translucent layers that parted so it could see her. The word “angry” didn’t do justice to its stare; that’s a human word that means pathetic in Demon for having your feelings hurt. No there is no “anger” in something whose job is to identify the target.

           For a moment the bathroom wall looked like a one-eyed face where the sink and faucet were the mouth and nose. White paint and drywall cracked and bubbled around it as it pulsed, then she shut the door and got back into bed.

           The cable TV had turned itself on; an old movie “The Entity” was playing where the woman is molested in the shower by an invisible attacker and his two invisible dwarf helpers. (She thought she had gotten away from “it” although this wasn’t Stephen King or the “things” although it wasn’t John Carpenter.) She changed the channel to a toothpaste commercial. A curly-haired woman was brushing away.

           “So the question you’ve gotta ask is, how is it going to manifest?” she gave a wink and a smile. Then she reached up with both hands and started pulling her lips back from the gums. The channel changed back to The Entity to the shower scene where the unseen thing has her suspended in the air with two shorter unseen things holding her in place.

           “How is it going to manifest!” the woman looked directly at her from the TV screen, her hands pressed against the inside of the glass.

           A scratching sound was coming from behind the bathroom door, she could hear it moving laboriously across the floor and then the knob started to jiggle as if it was something without thumbs. Finally the door pushed open and the shower head crawled out at the end of a long steel snake. A reddish substance was dripping from it like a meat grinder.

           She grabbed the axe she always slept with under her pillow, rushed over and decapitated it, a spurt of red shooting up the wall. Then she looked back and a naked housewife from a 1982 shower scene was crawling out of the TV. Her hands were already on the carpet and her breasts had just emerged but the imbalance caused the TV set to topple forward off its stand until the cord was taut.

           “HOW IS IT GOING TO MANIFEST?” the naked half-a-woman whose body below the waist was a television looked up at her and demanded as it tried to pull itself across the floor. She swung at its hands, then she rushed over to the wall, brought the axe down and split the plug from the wall socket. The TV fell over on its front and the thing disappeared in a swirl of static.

           The bedroom ceiling was rising like a circus tent as if something was pulling up on the chandelier. She looked up, breathing heavily to see the plaster around its edges was breaking and then the roof came clean off. She could see a band of the night sky, and a faceless thing that was the size and shape of Cinderella’s pumpkin-carriage only jet black with ten spidery limbs. Its job was to secure the target.

           She knew from the last time if all four of them appeared they’d have a quorum and be able to hold court if you could call it that. She ran to the balcony doors and climbed over the railing down to the street below and out of sight.

2

           On the night after her conversation with the barman, a pimp with silver teeth was waiting in the back seat of a black sedan pulled over on one side of the expressway. She came trotting up the sidewalk, got inside and immediately shut the door behind her.

           “No need to slam that, honey.” he offered her a smoke and motioned for the driver to move on. “So I hear you’re pretty bad, like that’s your thing, but the thing is I don’t know what that means.”

           The nocturnal lights of the city passed on either side of them.

           “I’ve left three children in foster care in three different states, but that’s not the crime I’m wanted for.” she answered.

           He whistled and pushed up his sunglasses with his finger.

           “So I’m tryin’ to figure out how to describe your services.” he said. “You say you want guys that are too much for other girls?”

           “Yeah convicts, felons, guys that pull a knife, anything goes.” she replied. “I want to spend the night with someone worse than me when it happens.”

           “I see. So what is it you did?”

           “It’s so bad I can’t tell you.” she made him wonder what that could be, although the truth was it wasn’t any of his business and she didn’t want to explain it.

           “I went back in time and had someone I know aborted.” she sighed. “Now don’t ask me about time travel, I hate that because I don’t know a damned thing about it. She was a bitch who hurt me so I went back and made sure she was never born.”

           “Wow, so…”

           “I dated a time traveler, a guy who goes back in time to get money, women and cars. I was a stripper he got for his birthday, okay? I’m not the same kind of person he was.”

           “And did it work?”

           “No it did nothing!” she scowled. “She doesn’t exist and she still hurt me because I still remember her doing it!”

           This made her think of the past and she wished she hadn’t told him. The rest of the drive was spent in silence. She thought of a man who called himself an anarchist, a man who was fifty but masquerading as his younger self, and used his knowledge of computers that is just common knowledge in his time. He always returned to an old textile building in Richmond, to a rooftop apartment with a door powered by servers no one was allowed to enter. He called it a HIZ (historically inert zone). He would step into it in August and moments later come out in Winter. He said he was recruited by an agency that was literally a travel agency with photos of different time periods in an album, but she had the feeling it was once his apartment and he was hacking his old job. He told her a lot of things.

           She used the portal twice behind his back, once to find out what it does and once to do the very first thing she was inclined to do. Not retire in the past with a stash of gold bars, not to sleep with Prince William. So she wasn’t exactly innocent but she didn’t have agents of Hell coming after her either. One day the time traveler did something so bad his privileges were discontinued; the portal was sucked back to whenever it came from leaving him with all of these poor souls stuck in the past.

           Her new gig allowed her to get away from it all, mostly because she was never alone at night. It also allowed her to travel, she was already sitting at a diner on a desert highway between customers. It was as pleasant a place as she had ever been.

           The pay phone started to ring and the pregnant waitress asked if she could answer it.

           “Hello?” she asked stupidly into the receiver.

           “Ma’am this is Child Protective Services calling to let you know your daughter Stevie has been extradited from Jefferson City, Missouri to appear at a court hearing, along with your son Tom in St. Louis and your daughter in California. Your presence is requested.”

           “All three of them?” she frowned. “I gave up all of my rights. Why are you telling me this?”

           “I think you misunderstand what kind of a hearing this is.” the voice replied. “All three of them will be in one place. Do you catch my drift?”

           She raised a hand to her forehead.

           “That won’t be necessary. I’ll turn myself in.” she sighed, but the line was already dead.

           She walked in a slow stupor back to her table and sat down. She never imagined things would go this far.

           “So what can I do for you, Honey?” the waitress came over with her little notepad.

           “I’ll do whatever you want.” she put her face in her hands and looked up at her between the fingers.

           The waitress’ glass eye fell out of its socket and landed in her ice water, staining the water black as it looked at her from the ice cubes.

           “It’s not what I want Honey, it’s what HE wants.” she reached down and patted her pregnant belly.

           “I’ve decided to surrender.” she answered in a tired voice.

           At this statement a contraction suddenly passed through the waitress’ body as if she was going into labor. She doubled over and lowered herself slowly to the floor, groaning.

           “This little guy really wants to come out of here!” she said, reaching out for help since there was no one else there to assist her.

           She got up out of her seat and backed away from the woman in horror. A dark liquid was spreading across the tile floor. She turned and ran out the front doors as quick as a flash.

3

           She headed for the desert highway where a car she didn’t recognize pulled over. When she saw who was driving she got in immediately, astonished to see him again. The man’s face was gaunt and he had grown a full beard.

           “You’re a hard person to find.” he remarked as his foot hit the accelerator.

           “What are you doing here?” she was neither overjoyed nor displeased. “This isn’t your usual kind of vehicle.”

           “I made it to the portal in Giza, Egypt.” he answered. “I knew it existed but things haven’t been easy since I lost all contact with myself.”

           “I thought your license was revoked or whatever you call it.”

           “You misunderstand, my timeline ceased to exist along with everyone and everything I know.” he explained. “The agents at the time office are dead or never were, I saw it for myself.”

           He went on to tell the story although he still did not know what his blunder actually was. Since then he was a fugitive until the day he was recruited by an abusive agent from the far future who called him his “consort” (a word normally used for women like herself). When he was done there was time for her to tell him her own story.

           He seemed neither dismayed that she used the portal to get revenge nor did he know what to say about the consequences for it.

           “They’re from Hell aren’t they?” she finally broke the silence.

           “No, unless Hell is something you created by your own actions.” he posed with concern.

           “So what happens when you… terminate someone who’s already an adult and lived their life?” she demanded.

           “I don’t know, but I can tell you if you meddle in your own affairs too many times there’s the risk of becoming some kind of universal being,” he said, “where you find out not only were your friends other versions of you but your enemies were also you, which must be a real nightmare.”. “That is why I’m just a second-hand time meddler. I suppose if the networks were still the system they were you could try to steer each child away from this standoff. But the simplest solution is to go back and stop yourself.”

           She thought for a moment and then nodded.

           He slowed down for a harmless family of Canada geese crossing in front of them, an adult and three goslings. As soon as it saw her in the vehicle the mother goose let out a squawk, took flight and made a beeline for the passenger side window, its beak and long neck coming in straight through the narrow space above the glass and attacking her face. The sharp little pseudo-teeth at the end of its bill tore a mouthful of skin from her cheek, but the time traveler had raised the automatic window catching it by the throat, a flapping mass of feathers beating against the side of the car as he accelerated.

           “You need first aid.” he muttered as if it were an afterthought.

           “No! Its job is to get me in front of a mirror!” she bent down with her face in her hands.

           “The goose wants you to look in a mirror?” he repeated strangely.

           They pulled over at a restaurant where the time traveler went in first, holding the restroom door for her. There was a time when she thought he was charming.

           “See? Nothing there.” he gestured to the wall mirror that reflected just him and her bloodied face.

           “They’re always there.” she dipped her hands into the sink cautiously. “They come out of glass, appliances, water, anything.”

           She sewed things up herself with a needle and thread and an improvised bandage, not trusting an ambulance. Soon they were sitting out front where a bench was graced with a ceramic statue of the restaurant’s clown mascot, its arm extended for photographs. She looked over at it suspiciously, drawing out her axe just in case.

           “Are you going to hack it to pieces?” the time traveler asked curiously.

           “So how do I go back and stop all this?” she demanded to know. “Do I have to stab myself in the back or what?”

           The ceramic clown’s head turned to look at her, breaking the glaze around its painted neck and its extended arm closed rapidly around her throat in a headlock. But her chopping hand was still free, bringing the axe down hard on its left shoulder and chopping it clean off.

           “THAT WAS MY ARM!!!” a hideous bubbling voice came from the clown as it doubled over, the pieces of its painted arm falling off to reveal a limp human-looking limb underneath.

           But it still had her in its grip, slamming her face down against the bench and knocking her out. The axe fell from her hand, and the clown picked it up and buried it in her spine, leaving her for dead.

           “I thought you were going to help me!” it turned to the time traveler and demanded in her own voice.

           “I honored your request, now finish it.” he replied.

           The body on the ground started to get up again.

           “I don’t believe this.” the clown remarked, and in moments they were at each other’s throats. He watched her pull herself down and tear each other apart; the faceless things that were its children starting to gather around to watch. But they were too evenly matched, he imagined she would reduce herself down to a single cell someday like the ying-yang constantly overturning itself, each side containing some essence of the other and not knowing it.