Clovenhoof 04 Hellzapoppin' Read online

  Stephen lifted the heavy book out of the box and set it down as carefully as he could on the top of another box. He reached tentatively for the clasp, remembering the mostly fictional accounts of sorcerers, spiritualists and general meddlers whose brains were fried and faces melted by gazing upon the contents of the wrong book. Mostly fictional ...

  “Right,” he said to the book. “If you so much as try to steal my soul or eat my face, I will hang you in the lavatorium and use you for toilet paper.”

  The book did nothing, which was both what Stephen wanted and expected. He undid the clasp and opened the book to a random page.

  It was a hand-written work and clearly no more than one or two hundred years old. The narrow-ruled pages and black cursive writing suggested something more like a Victorian accounts ledger than a book of demonology, but a brief glance at the Latin script disabused him of that notion.

  Stephen mentally girded his loins and read out loud with all the speed and fluency of a six year old discovering the works of Janet and John.

  “The demon… Rut…spud. Okay, Rutspud. The demon, Rutspud, is seen as a soldier all in red with the horns of… haedi? …oh, a young goat. He is a cruel demon, a torturer who delights in the work of his… hands. In his… hortos… garden!... are a thousand rooms and a thousand beds and in each there is a new and vile torture such that the inferno… Hell… will hold new surprises for all the damned, no matter how long their torments…”

  Rutspud sauntered down to the Soul Allocation Office, the song in his heart having shifted for the time being into a melancholy minor key and with more reflective and thoughtful hand gestures. The demon at the counter spiked his chit and gazed up at the towering racks above them.

  “Potter, B,” he said, clicking his tongue as he searched.

  Rutspud had heard that the filing system at Soul Allocation was so archaic and esoteric that there were souls who had been left dangling there for centuries. Perhaps for those with a fear of heights, that was Hell enough. Maybe this was one area that Lord Peter’s census might clear up.

  “Ah,” said the clerk loudly, and began cranking the handle that rotated one of the many columns. “This is yours.”

  The demon dragged one of the damned off the lower peg and, with a practised motion, slung it over the counter to land at Rutspud’s feet.

  The damned soul struggled to its feet and inspected the scraped knees below its ragged smock.

  “Potter, eh?” said Rutspud, snarling for the sake of effect, because first impressions counted even when you weren’t feeling up to it.

  “Yes,” said Potter, meeting Rutspud’s eye.

  Rutspud frowned.

  “Man?”

  “Woman.”

  “Damn,” said Rutspud. “I thought ‘woman’ and then talked myself out of it. Right, woman, this way. I’ve left my whip at home, so you’ll just have to imagine it for the time being.”

  The damned woman followed Rutspud, not seemingly out of any sense of obedience or fear, but because there wasn’t anything better to do.

  “So, what’s your major crime?” asked Rutspud.

  “Anthropomorphic animals,” said Potter.

  “Say what?”

  “I wrote stories with animals as the main characters.”

  “Uh-huh. With pictures?”

  “Yes.”

  “Woah,” said Rutspud, grinning despite himself. “They must have had a stickler on the judgement panel the day you came through. Did they accuse you of claiming to be God’s equal? A would-be creator of life?”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “Ha! I can see it now. So, what did they give you?”

  “Twenty years in the Pit of Carnivorous Rodents.”

  “Yeah? How did that pan out?”

  “I knitted them little waistcoats and taught them how to dance.”

  “Didn’t they just rip up the waistcoats and eat you?”

  “Yes. But I’m patient. Anyway, who are you?”

  “I’m Rutspud.”

  Rutspud heard Potter stop abruptly. He turned. The expression on her face, previously a blend of indifference, resignation and arrogance, was now one of mounting fear.

  “So, you’ve heard of me,” he said.

  Potter was shaking her head.

  “No?” he said.

  “I don’t deserve this,” she quavered. “I’m not that bad. I’m not …”

  “You made tailored outfits for the horrors of the pit,” said Rutspud.

  From some distant chamber there came a sudden cry of anguish and pain, a fulsome many-voiced chord of shrieks, wails and bellows. Potter shuddered.

  “No …”

  “Your new home beckons,” said Rutspud, snatching hold of her wrist and dragging her along.

  The last few hundred yards to Rutspud’s cave wound through a labyrinth of narrow passages. The walls of the maze were dotted with an eclectic array of torture implements, curved and spiked works of wood and iron, many of them dotted with the scraps of flesh of those who had not been careful enough as they squeezed by.

  “I know your reputation,” whimpered Potter. “Surely, I am beneath you.”

  “Flattery. Not had that before.” Rutspud propelled her forward to a heavy gate. The hollers of the tortured were loud now, close.

  “There must be some mistake,” whimpered Potter.

  “Dancing rats,” replied Rutspud. “Get in.”

  He levered open the gate a foot and thrust Potter inside. The damned woman – it was a woman, wasn’t it? He’d already forgotten – stumbled and fell to her knees in his hall of tortures. Trembling, she raised herself up and looked around what might be her home for the remainder of eternity.

  This, Rutspud always felt, was his favourite bit. He just loved the looks on their faces.

  Potter slowly took in the devices of metal and chain and leather, the bed of fire, the snooker table, the boiling pool and the damned souls contorted, stretched out or draped like dolls upon them. Her expression of horror froze, twisted, and almost broke her face in two as she processed what was in front of her.

  “Er, you have a snooker table,” she said, a tremor in her voice suggesting she expected it to transform into a baize-covered monstrosity at its very mention.

  “Do we?” said Rutspud. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “And …” She pointed. “That bubbling pot. Is that a jacuzzi?”

  “It bears a passing resemblance, yes.”

  “And … that’s a running machine treadmill thingamajig, isn’t it?”

  “If you like.”

  “And … a sunbed.”

  “Yes.”

  “So that really is a snooker table.”

  “Full size.”

  “And these are the terrors of your cave?”

  “We also have a small library, a selection of popular board games, a small craft-making workshop, a fully-stocked bar and – excuse me – Tesla!”

  The damned soul sitting at an organist’s keyboard by the wall stopped playing and the piercing shrieks of torture ceased at once.

  “Sorry,” said Tesla.

  “I shouldn’t complain,” said Rutspud to Potter. “I asked him to invent the scream-organ and invent it he did. Getting him to stop playing it is a job sometimes. Where was I?”

  “I don’t ...”

  “You’ve landed on your feet, Potter.”

  “No, this is some trick, some ruse ...”

  This drew a chuckle from the damned.

  “You lot always say that when you first arrive,” said Rutspud.

  “But your job is to torture the damned,” said Potter.

  “Oh, you’re one of those types, are you?”

  “No. No. I mean, it’s your calling isn’t it?”

  “Sure, but if I pretend to torture this lot and they pretend to suffer, it’s a lot easier and everyone’s happy.”

  “But I’ve seen inspectors,” said Potter, “demons with clipboards. They observe the damned to ascertain if they’re suffe
ring or not.”

  “Which is where Bernhardt and Wilde come in. Every other Wednesday, they put us through our paces. Roleplaying. Method, a little Stanislavski. Really immersing ourselves in our roles so when the time comes, we can show them what real suffering looks like.”

  “What? But wait, there’s no time in Hell. There are no Wednesdays.”

  “Of course there bloody are, if we say there are,” said Boudicca, not breaking stride on the treadmill. “And Wailing Wednesday is right between Yoga Tuesday and Meat and Mead Thursday.”

  “Swear box,” said Whitehouse from her armchair, pointing to a jam jar next to her knitting.

  “‘Bloody’ is not a swear,” said Boudicca, but hopped off the treadmill and put a flinty-looking coin in the jar nonetheless.

  “Good lad,” said Rutspud.

  Boudicca growled at him.

  “Good lass,” he corrected himself.

  “But,” said Potter, flabbergasted, “this is amazing. An oasis of peace and mercy in this realm of infinite nightmares. A good demon. I would not have believed such a thing possible.”

  Every figure in the cave had become quite still and now stared at Potter and Rutspud. Nightingale paused in cleaning. Mama-Na let the punchbag swing free. Shipton dealt out no more cards. Cartland put down her book.

  Rutspud took a deep breath. Potter was a newbie, and she had made the same mistake everyone made when they first arrived. He should go easy on her, but he had had a bad day. He had lost two friends who he would never be able to mourn.

  He narrowed his eyes to two slits of utter malevolence. He did have very expressive eyes.

  “I will say this to you once, Potter,” he whispered. “This set up exists to serve me and me alone. Hell measures performance based on specific types of evidence not actual, genuine suffering. I work very hard to get the highest ratings and continually save my own hide.”

  He placed a hand on Potter’s chest.

  “If I could get better ratings by actually torturing you, I would. Don’t delude yourself otherwise. But I’ve discovered that getting my clients to help me, to work with them, not against them, is the best way to get what I want.”

  “I understand,” said Potter contritely. “It’s worthwhile us all working together as a team, you might say.”

  Rutspud laughed grimly.

  “Sure. A team. What is it they say? There’s no ‘I’ in TEAM. But there is ME and there is the messed up MEAT. And you’re the MEAT, okay?”

  “Quite.”

  Rutspud slapped her on the shoulder.

  “Good. Right. Mama-Na! Get this young man –”

  “Nnn rar!” growled the damned Neanderthal.

  “Sorry – woman a bunk. I’m off to –”

  He was cut off by a shrill off-key alarm bell. The red warning light on the wall was also flashing.

  “Tesla!” he shouted.

  Tesla consulted a viewing tube.

  “Demon approaching, Rutspud,” he replied and took up on the scream-organ with gusto.

  Rutspud gave everyone an appraising look.

  “Ready for action stations,” he said and slipped out.

  The demon beyond the gate was one Rutspud had not met before, and yet there was something familiar about those huge flappy ears, those webbed feet, and those emaciated, fidgety fingers. Fingers he had seen recently, gripping his arm tightly.

  “Oh,” he said, sorrowfully. “Frogspear?”

  The demon looked at him with blank eyes. They were Bootlick’s eyes.

  “Bootlick?”

  Drool dribbled from the creature’s wonky mouth.

  “So, neither one nor the other,” said Rutspud, regarding the hasty stitching and industrial stapling that held this creature together, joining Frogspear’s leather hide with Bootlick’s rubbery skin. “So, is it Bootspear now? Or Froglick?”

  The demon didn’t even twitch but simply stared through Rutspud.

  “Did they even remember to put a brain in there? Frogboot? Lickspear?”

  At this last, the patchwork demon blinked and focused on Rutspud.

  “And hello to you,” said Rutspud. “Lickspear, is it now? How are you feeling?”

  “Seldom have I felt more mellow,” said Lickspear and then looked up. “Hey nonny-nonny.”

  Rutspud shook his head at this travesty of his former friends.

  “Why are you here?” he said.

  “I must tell you why I’m here,” said Lickspear with sudden urgency.

  “Isn’t that what I just said?”

  “Look lively, Lord Peter is coming.”

  “Here?” coughed Rutspud. “You’d better come inside and explain this properly. Maybe a glass of something strong will help you pull yourself together.”

  “Pull all the bits together,” nodded Lickspear. “Dig that. Might you, perchance, help me pick them up?”

  Rutspud rolled his eyes and dragged Lickspear inside, gathering his ears, laughing stick, and appendix with his free hand.

  There was a loud cry from the corridor, which made Stephen jolt upright and lose his place in the book.

  “He’s vanished!” someone shouted.

  Stephen stepped out into the corridor to find Brother Gillespie, the monastery’s infirmarian, bent double, breathless, in front of Manfred.

  “Who has vanished?” said Manfred.

  The infirmarian, his handkerchief pressed against his enormous and constantly running nose, struggled to get his breath back to reply.

  “The new abbot,” he puffed. “I left him … in his room and …”

  “He’s run off again,” said Stephen, approaching.

  “No,” said Brother Gillespie and sniffed back a gurgling stream of snot. “Window … locked. I was outside the door the entire time.”

  “Impossible,” said Stephen.

  “So quick to limit the possibilities of God’s creation,” Manfred admonished him gently. He deftly tossed a bag of jelly babies he had borrowed from Brother Bernard from one hand to the other. “Lead on, Brother Gillespie. Show us this locked room mystery.”

  Brother Gillespie coughed and spluttered his way back up to the prior’s house with Stephen and Manfred in his snotty wake. Stephen reflected on the unfortunate fact that he’d never seen the infirmarian in good health. While most of the time he thought it was an astonishingly bad advert for the monastery’s healthcare, he could never shake the notion that Gillespie was hogging all the illnesses for himself and thus sparing everyone else.

  “Here!” said Brother Gillespie, flinging wide the door to the abbot’s bed chamber (a place that Manfred had never moved into during his temporary promotion).

  Stephen and Manfred stepped into the room side by side. Here, the bed with barely rumpled sheets. Here, the rust-flowered mirror. Here, the damp spotted wash stand and the imposing walnut-veneered wardrobe. Here, the leaded windows that had been painted shut decades before and not opened since.

  Stephen got down on hands and knees and looked under the bed.

  “Chamber pot,” he said.

  “Well then,” said Manfred, “we have a mystery such as might confound the famous Oberinspektor Derrick.”

  “Who?”

  “But it is perhaps a mystery with only one solution.”

  Manfred stepped over to the wardrobe and rapped sharply on the door.

  “Father Eustace?”

  There was no reply from within. Manfred tried the handle. The door came open an inch and was then pulled shut from within.

  “Not coming out!” snapped a muffled voice.

  Manfred shrugged.

  “So our abbot has retreated into his own private Narnia.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” said Stephen.

  “Shock, perhaps,” said Brother Gillespie, who had been inspecting the contents of his hankie. “I checked him earlier. Blood pressure, heart rate and temperature; all fine. No sign of concussion or injury. In fact, if anything, the man’s only issue was that he looked a little malnourished and under
fed. My prescription would be a good hot meal or two. Plenty of fats, sugars and salts.”

  “Good,” said Manfred. “Then all is well.”

  “What?” squeaked Stephen. “The man has shut himself inside a wardrobe!”

  “Is he in any danger in there?”

  Brother Gillespie sniffed and shook his head.

  “I believe there’s a pile of blankets in there. The abbot should be quite cosy.”

  “So, we’re going to leave him there?”

  “Yes. Come.” Manfred moved to the door and then clicked his fingers at himself. “Almost forgot. I have for you the jelly babies, father. I’ll leave them just outside the door.”

  Manfred deposited the paper bag on the stone floor in front of the wardrobe. Stephen, incredulous at the acting abbot’s blasé attitude, followed the older men out of the door. As he left, there was a rustle and a slam and, when he looked back, the bag of sweets had gone and the wardrobe was making munching noises.

  The eccentricity scale at St Cadfan’s, always hovering in the upper reaches, had just risen a couple of notches.

  Chapter 2 – The day the school party visited

  Stephen ripped the tape from the last box of books, feeling in that sound both a note of satisfaction and regret. Around him, glass-fronted shelves housed more than two hundred volumes, while five display cases held the finest works of illumination that the monks of St Cadfan’s had produced in the last millennium. His library was almost complete, and it had taken far less time than he had feared. The constant rain of the last few weeks had helped, giving him little opportunity to go out and do much else (although muddy feet suggested that his sleeping mind had yet to receive that memo). It also provided a soundtrack of ceaseless patters, drips and trickles as it worked its way through the monastery stone.

  A recent undertone to that background noise was the muttering of Brothers Huey and Bernard in the corridor outside. Their work on the visitor centre wall paintings had become more intense and more fraught as the date for their first scheduled visitors had approached. Nonetheless, Stephen was surprised when the corridor echoed with a shriek from Brother Bernard.