Weird Tales #358, page 9
It was true. Every name he’d seen, most probably every name he would have seen on the bookcase had he had more time, every source from which the human drew his incredible knowledge of demonkind and their contracts, came from. . .
“F iction!”
“I don’t quite follow you,” Jup said blandly, swiveling his chair slightly to follow Notlh’s pacing back and forth across the office.
“Fiction!” Notlh repeated. “The human I’m working on, he isn’t an occultist or a demonologist or even a deranged librarian! Everything he knows about us comes from fiction. He didn’t have a single book with real knowledge about us or our contracts, and I’ll wager he doesn’t know a thing about any of it. Everything he knows comes from stories and fantasies.”
“No, you must have missed something. No human gets the kind of knowledge this one has from fake stories. I’ve read Milton—”
“MILTON!” shouted Notlh. “You’ve read Milton! Well, my human HASN’T! He has no idea what the greatest human demonologists have said about us because he’s too busy sticking sticky yellow paper notes into, let’s see. . .” Notlh looked down at the list he had made. “A Disagreement with Death. Good Omens. A Hundred-And-One Short Stories About Devils. This is the human who’s been too smart for Contracts to catch. He doesn’t know anything at all about us, but he’s read a thousand made-up stories about people who botched selling their soul to Hell and he’s systematically writing contracts which avoid every one of those mistakes, one by one. Here, look at this.”
Jup took the scroll of paper from Notlh’s hand, which was shaking in indignation, and looked it over.
“I don’t know any of these names,” he ventured hesitantly.
“I know! I only knew a few of them, but I looked up the rest. Look at this one, here. Have you ever read this fellow, Clive Lewis?”
“Never heard of him. He can’t be that important.”
Notlh snatched back his scroll, started to roll it up, started to unroll it again, and resumed his pacing.
“He’s one of the most influential surface world writers in the last hundred years, right up there with this one, Jerry Toll-Keen or something.”
“Never heard of—”
“Lewis wrote a book, The Screwtape Letters. I looked it up, and it reads like he was describing our entire bureaucracy. My human’s got a copy of it that’s got so many pencil marks in it that you’d think he was using the paper to make abstract drawings.”
Jup seemed more perplexed than anything else, almost bemused. Notlh stopped pacing and glared at him.
“You know what our problem is? We don’t. . . I don’t know. . . adapt, I guess. Or evolve. We don’t grow. We don’t update! We’re still torturing souls the same way we did centuries ago.”
“Now, that’s not fair. You remember our rotation through Research & Bedevilment. They’re constantly looking for new means of torture. Why, just look how in the last century we’ve found ways to use music to torment people that we’d never have imagined when you and I were in school.”
“Sure, but what music are we using? Bobby Vinton, with a song that the humans haven’t considered popular in more than forty years. My human’s parents hadn’t even met that far back.”
Notlh looked like he wanted to say something else, but then slumped his shoulders, almost like he was deflating. Slowly, he sat in the chair opposite his friend.
“Are you religious?” Jup asked suddenly. Notlh looked up at him, his eyes looking far more tired than any demon of only five hundred years of age should look.
“Not really,” he replied. “I was raised religious, I guess, but my parents were pretty relaxed about it and we didn’t go to worship very much. I don’t really believe in Satan.”
“Well, I do,” Jup drawled. “And when I’m feeling defeated, I try to remember something. We’re taught that Satan walks the Earth going to and fro, up and down. When we encounter problems going forward, sometimes the best solution is to go around them and come at them from another direction entirely, and see if from the other side, they’re easier to solve.”
Jup smiled to himself. It was one of his better platitudes: seemingly profound, yet totally meaningless, the very essence of good advice. He watched as the light came back into Notlh’s eyes.
“Yes, I see what you mean. Modern problems. . . modern solutions. Thank you!” And Notlh walked quickly out of the office, leaving Jup to wonder exactly which part of what he’d said had worked, so that he could say it again next time.
* * * *
When Notlh walked back into Moch’s office a week later, he carried with him two thick bundles of parchment and a self-satisfied smile. Moch gazed at him over the rim of his coffee cup.
“He signed the contract,” Notlh said. The older demon dropped his cup and rose from his chair, skin visibly turning red with rage.
“What do you mean, he signed the contract? Who gave you the authority to go to the surface to get it signed? You were supposed to show it to Contracts before he signed it! If you gave some human an immortal lifespan for free, then you’ll take his place in the Fires, I promise—”
“No, no,” Notlh protested. “I got it right. I found the loophole he was missing.”
Moch glared at him skeptically but said nothing.
“I just had to think about it differently, think the way a young human would think about it. Here’s the contract he signed. Take a look.”
It took Moch fifteen minutes to read the entire document, at the end of which he seemed more puzzled than anything else. The anger was clearly still on his features, however, and smoke was curling up from the edges of the parchment where his fingers were touching it.
“I don’t get it,” Moch said. “There’s at least three different ways here he could argue that we don’t have the rights to his soul when he dies. He’s going to get rich and you’re going to be in very big—”
“That’s right,” Notlh agreed quickly. “I couldn’t write the actual contract up without any loopholes because he wouldn’t have signed it anyway, so I gave him the contract I knew he wanted. And then, of course, I told him he had to sign this, too.” Notlh handed over his second bunch of parchment and Moch looked at the title. His lips contorted as he tried to spell out the strange words.
“Yuleah. . . oola. . . What in Satan’s name is this?”
“It’s pronounced Ee You El Ay. . . an End User License Agreement. They’re one of the most common types of contracts on the surface these days because they’re attached to all kinds of computer programs. I basically copied this one from a booklet I found in a dumpster, but that’s not important. Everywhere that it said ‘software,’ I changed it to read ‘contract’ and made a few other changes like that.”
“I don’t understand half the words you’re using.”
“I had to think like a modern human. I spent the whole of the last week learning new words. Bear with me. The thing about EULAs is that humans who spend a lot of time on their computers agree to them constantly. Every program they download or buy has one, and they all say almost exactly the same thing. Because they’re so common, for the most part, people never actually read them. They just agree with them. Just like my human did.”
Moch smiled now.
“So you hid some evil clause in this eyouellay?”
“No.”
“Notlh, if you don’t start making sense. . .”
“I couldn’t put something dishonest into the EULA because I couldn’t be positive that he wouldn’t read it as closely as he was reading the contract itself. I gave him exactly what you asked me to give him: a truly honest document, a contract without loopholes. It does specify that violating the EULA means he forfeits his payment—his soul—to us, and I told him that. The important bit’s on the second page. I circled it for you.”
Moch flipped the page and read, his lips moving as he did.
“‘Hell hereby grants You a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-assignable license to accrue the benefits of this Contract for a single (1) lifetime lived by or for You, subject to the provisions of this Agreement as well as payment of all applicable license fees for the term of the license.’ It’s impressive legalese. So what?”
“So when the licensee dies, unless he dies with no money left, the wealth he got from Hell is going to be transferred to someone. It might go to a relative, or it might go to taxes, but someone is going to get it from him. As soon as that happens, he’s violated his EULA. And he comes to us.”
Moch thought about that for a moment, wrapping his brain around the idea. When he finally smiled, it was not a nice smile. It was the sort of smile you’d imagine only a demon could smile, and then only when something very bad was going to happen to someone.
“Notlh, I think we just be able to get you a job in Contracts after all.”
* * * *
Eric Lis lives and writes in Montreal, Canada. He is the unquestioned tyrannical ruler of the Aerican Empire (aericanempire.com) and spends his days plotting world domination. What little time he has left is spent practicing medicine at the McGill University Health Center, where he is a resident in psychiatry. This is his second appearance in Weird Tales.
BEELZEBUB’S MESSIAH, by Brant Danay
A horde of termites scuttled up and down Night Beetle’s spine as the Parasitique tribesmen hoisted him against the wet wood of the crucifix. With hammers and nails composed of chitin, the Parasitiques spiked the shaman of the Pestilante peoples to the rotten cross. Submerged to the groin in the filthy waters of Crucifix Swamp, yet dangling a few feet above the bottom of the marsh, Night Beetle’s chest collapsed and he began to suffocate. The Parastiques quickly tied the entomancer’s wrists, torso, and ankles to the wood with ropes of silk and mucus, securely trussing his half-conscious body to the crosspiece to prevent asphyxiation.
A Parasitique priest wearing a gigantic, wooden flea’s-head mask stepped forward. In the prosthetic pincers of his left hand he was holding an elaborate, ten-foot long, tubular device that looked like a hybrid of giant centipedes and translucent bladders. The Parasitiques fastened the myriad of ring-clasps and tiny grapnels protruding from the sides of the contraption to Night Beetle’s flesh, piercing the entire left side of his body, from armpit to ankle, with the pointed, pinching clamp-mechanisms. The device was crowned with a perforated, curling, savagely barbed straw. Chittering a prayer to Venatode, the tapeworm goddess, the Parasitique priest hooked it to the right side of Night Beetle’s mouth, driving one curved point through the side of his lip and another through the inside of his cheek. The alveolated tube began to expand and elongate, snaring his gums, tongue, frenulum, palate, and uvula on its hooks before descending through his esophagus and lowering itself into his stomach, then dividing into two, one half plunging through his duodenum , the other swerving to penetrate his surgically-implanted, giant cockroach gizzard. The sharp spikes dug into his epithelium, stomach lining, and diverticula, burying themselves in his organs and tissues. The straw could not be dislodged, swallowed, expectorated, or vomited without tearing huge chunks of his digestive system out along with it.
The base of the device was a grilled cubicle that resembled a sewer system. One of the Parasitiques dropped his head beneath the surface of the swamp and anchored it to the mud at the bottom of the marsh. The limp sacs hanging from the side of the device expanded like bladders as the green-brown waters of the swamp came bubbling up, pumping the mire through its tubes in intermittent spasms of peristalsis. It was as if the device were the giant hookah of some dominatrix psychonaut, hanging next to the torture racks and torture wheels in her pleasure chamber/opium den.
The Parasitiques gathered around the crucified Pestilante shaman in a semi-circle. As the priest spoke another prayer to Venatode, they dropped to their knees, then prostrated themselves in the filthy swamp before him. After praying to the tapeworm goddess, they chanted an incantation, blending their voodoo curses and nigromantic hexes with the oral history of the ancient vendetta between the Pestilante and Parasitique tribes. The ritual lasted for several minutes, and then the Parasitiques waded through the marsh, leaving their sacrifice to the tapeworm goddess behind, to contemplate his doom in Crucifix Swamp.
The first splash of swampwater from the force-feeding device surged into Night Beetle’s mouth, reviving him from his near-catatonic state. He could taste the rancid, fetid, diseased brine of the entire marsh through the taste buds surgically attached to the soles of his feet. A second later he opened his compound eyes. Through his entomantically grown ommatidia he watched the Parasitiques plodding through the murk and the mire. The silhouette of the large, wooden mask merged with the priest’s shadow, and it seemed as though a flea the size of a man were stalking the swamp.
Night Beetle’s headdress of moth and butterfly wings was damp with the moisture of the bog. He shook his bald head and it slid down his face and chest like a mass of wet veils, half-melting the blue paint with which the beetle-markings on his cheeks and forehead and the scarab upon his torso had been daubed. The headdress floated on the surface of the swamp like a discarded caul, drifting between the satchels of bombs, powders, cantharides, aphrodisiacs, and larvae and the vials of poisons, acids, oils, and quinones that the Parasitiques had torn from his beetle-shell belt and scattered across the mire.
Night Beetle breathed in the mephitic bog-mist and brackish fen-water as he gazed upon the swamp. In the distance, three-headed, olive-colored wooly mammoths were bathing in the fetid marshes while the mahout necromancers riding on their backs cast spells of black voodoo. Bird zombies resurrected from the lethal waters of Lake Avernus by the mahout necromancers were picking the lice from the mangy fur of the pachyderm behemoths. Crocodiles floated like piles of verdigris-coated emeralds and moldy opium. Symbiotic harpies cleaned the scum from the teeth of the crocodiles. Fist-sized tsetse flies, empty botflies, and giant dragonflies buzzed through the moist mists that arose from the waters like the dying breaths of lepers. Hawks sometimes dove from the rotten canopies to catch the flies in their salivating mouths, and ichthyosaurs sometimes snared the hawks with their whip-like tongues as they did so. Cicadas in the tenebrous trees sang stridulating threnodies, triggering Night Beetle’s entomantic powers of echolocation.
The crosses from which Crucifix Swamp took its name were interspersed throughout the bog, usually a mile or more apart from one another. Crux ansatas and crux decussatas alike rose from the marsh like the grave markers they were. Some still bore the mildewed skeletons and rotting corpses of the victims that had been sacrificed in days, years, centuries, and millennia past.
The enteral contraption bubbled like a hookah and fed him another mouthful of marsh and miasma. The device kept him nourished and alive with a steady diet of swampwater and all the detritus within it, from flukes and annelids to plankton and prawn, freshly spawned roe and newly hatched larvae to fossilized will-o’-the-wisps and ancient coprolites (which he ground up in his gigantic cockroach gizzard), etiolated plant-scum and rotten algae to free-floating mud and dredged-up corpse-sludge, the barnacle-ridden flotsam of war canoes and the bait-infested jetsam of hunting rafts to the blood-stained wreckage of legendary hydromachies and the fresh gore of ongoing vendettas. With his heightened shamanic senses Night Beetle could taste everything that dwelled in the noxious swampwater, even the bacteria and microorganisms. Most importantly, he could taste the dead fleas and the unborn tapeworms inside their eggs. He knew he had less than one hundred moons to decrucify himself, escape, and survive. Once the tapeworms had grown to maturity in his guts, the parasite goddess would come to collect her sacrificial offerings and devour his intestines. His eviscerated corpse would be its own cenotaph, his crucifix an open grave.
As a green, flea-ridden swamp sphinx crawled upon the branch over his head and a horde of leeches attached themselves to his inner thighs, Night Beetle closed his eyes and drifted into a meditative trance. He sifted through all the arcane knowledge stored like ant-food in his brain and soul, conceiving of various methods to decrucify himself.
Telepathically, Night Beetle reached out to the termites infesting the cross. He asked the soldiers guarding the crucifix if they could call upon their brethren to devour the decrepit wood into splinters and dust to free him. The soldiers replied that he would have to ask their Warlord. Night Beetle hopped from the consciousness of one termite to another, working his way down the main tunnel of the cross and below the bottom of the swamp. The end of the crucifix was more than ten feet beneath the ground, where it then opened up into a termite mound. He continued to jump from brain to brain until he found their Warlord, who responded to his query by psychically communicating that the cross was owned by his Princess, and he would have to gain permission from her to initiate its destruction. Night Beetle traveled further into the termite hive, scurrying from mind to mind, traversing now the consciousness of workers and drones, until he reached the chamber of the Princess of the cross upon which he was crucified. He implored her for assistance, but she told him that all of the crucifixes were sacred, and he would have to seek an audience with the Queen. Night Beetle quested through the vast, subterranean labyrinth, and as he wandered he discovered that the termite nest was as long and as wide as all of Crucifix Swamp, and that each of the individual crosses was anchored by a termite mound and ruled by a Princess and her Warlord. At last he came to the royal chamber of the Queen. She was as large as a human, with a gargantuan egg-sac that moved and bulged and rolled as though it were filled with severed heads and interspecies mating balls of stoneflies and garter snakes. Fresh offspring were crawling over her entire body, and in and out of her crevices and orifices, and flying around the chamber in thick, clustered hordes. Her King lay beside her, his proboscis leashed to her fourth leg, his neck encircled by a cangue, his body trapped in three pillories, one for each segment. Night Beetle begged the Queen for aid, but she informed him that the crosses were composed of the eternal wood of the Ashvatha Tree, in which Gaeaphage the Termite Goddess herself had been spawned, and with which she had built her million-storied pagoda in the underworld. The wood could not be devoured, burned, sundered, smashed, or killed. It was the fate of her termite colony to perpetually devour the crucifixes so that they did not grow to the size of trees themselves, for, although coated with rot, the crosses possessed regenerative powers and had cores like stone. This was the reason they had stood for millennia and marked the graves of so many a sacrificial victim, for none had ever been able to decrucify themselves from the living wood.
