Charity and Roy were jolted upward from the bed like shells ejected from a rifle breech to hang suspended and nude in mid-air. Satan gestured negligently at the bed, where two forms gave a convincing impression of very dead.
"Dead and damned."
"We can't be," Roy attempted pathetically. "We're members of the Tabernacle of the Born Again Savior. Good Christians."
Damocles chuckled, a sound like scratching on a coffin lid. "Our favorite kind."
"No." Roy groped for the nearest part of Charity to hang on to. "My White Christian God - "
"Oh, shut up. Where do you think my authority comes from?"
Roy found a vestige of his courage. "You ain't no Christian, never were. You look like a lousy Jew."
"A touch of the Levantine." Satan bowed. "Beelzebub and all that. A touch of the Egyptian as Set, various Etruscan and Roman . . . this is really a set piece. Benet did it so much better. In the main, Mr. Stride, a Wasp like yourself. Hit it, Damocles."
Damocles pointed a foreclaw at the two shuddering wraiths. "You have the right to remain silent - "
"Never mind the Miranda," Satan prompted. "Skip to the appeal."
"All right," Damocles sulked. "You get a phone call."
Floating helplessly, hanging on to Roy, Charity stammered, "Wh-who can we call?"
"Why not God?" Satan suggested. "You've been bending His ear for the last few minutes. Give Him a buzz."
Charity did. "God! Please help us!"
The air tore visually, like something out of a Cocteau film. An imposing patriarchal figure blossomed out of nothing, brilliant white against the crimson nightmare, very much like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. He inspected Charity and Roy like smudges on glassware.
"Forget it," God said, and disappeared. Damocles' wings flared in triumph.
"Ha! Ours!"
"Appeal granted, heard, denied. Damocles, the lady was thinking of transports. Give her one."
Foaming from an obscene mouth, Damocles plucked the two gibbering forms out of the air and tucked each under an unpleasant arm. Charity had just enough mind left to see Roy, eyes bulging and mouth working in a silent prayer, before the dark came down on her with a last sensation of falling . . .
"Don't slaver so, Wilksey," Coyul remarked as they descended. "They've got the gist."
"Oh, but, Prince, how often do we have the chance for such good trashy fun?"
"Don't get carried away. You have a makeup and costume change. Mr. Steiner, Mr. Shostakovich - cue music, please. The damnation bit."
II.
THE EDUCATION OF CHARITY STOVALL.
11 - One man's media . . .
Dead and damned. Alone. Roy, the world, life gone. Dead and damned.
Stunned.
Charity couldn't make a sound beyond a pitiful squeak forced out between chattering teeth. No sense of time. She couldn't tell how long she'd huddled naked in the limbo of oily fog. Any attempt to think trailed off in whimpering terror.
Gradually she became aware of her surroundings. Limbo resolved as the fog sank to a thick, writhing carpet. No color, only barren black rocks jutting here and there. No hellfire as she'd learned from childhood and bad dreams, only damp cold and the fog coiling about her bare legs. Here and there, plumes of dark, stinking smoke rose out of the fog into a gray sky. Naked and shivering in a hell not cold enough to kill the sickening stench from the oily pools surrounding her.
And the sounds. She wasn't alone. Even gratitude for that had to be fumbled at before she could be sure of it. Thin, piping agony floated eerily on the fetid air. At last Charity dared to stumble toward the nearest sounds that might at least mean companionship.
Incredibly, there was music, deep, booming and grim, of a piece with the total absence of color. Charity hugged herself tight against the chill. As she groped forward, she heard a shift in the music, a definite beat to it now, stroked on deep bass strings.
She moved timidly, expecting demons behind every dark-rearing boulder. "Oh!"
She started; a naked arm thrust upward out of the mist just in front of her. She felt herself beginning to sink in clammy ooze. The bog's obscene odor clogged her nostrils. Charity scrabbled backward to firmer ground. The arm became a shoulder and then the head and torso of a man covered with numbers in red dye.
"Help me," he moaned. "Mercy! A good pilot, anything. I lived by the media and died by the rating."
The pitiful wretch went down again before Charity could summon the courage to help him. There were reaching arms all about her now, dyed with numbers, faces rising a little way out of the mist to implore her aid before falling back.
Charity wondered aloud, "Is this the hell for fornicators?"
"No, not quite."
"EEEE!" Charity jumped as if she'd been goosed with a cattle prod. To her left, seated on a mountainous stack of TV Guides, a monstrous thing with television screens for eyes and a speaker mouth hulked over two tiny men cavorting between his cable cord legs. One gesticulated continuously. His head was no more than a huge mouth that worked furiously without sound but produced a constant shower of popcorn. The other puppet-thing giggled and gibbered, rocked back and forth with the edged inanity of an idiot brushed for one terrible moment by the truth of the world.
"This section is for the abusers of media," said the electronic nightmare. "Actually designed for romance writers, but our place isn't ready yet. What are you?" The blank eyes peered at her. "A televangelist?"
"No, I - " Charity shivered with the damp cold. "I'm just me. Charity Stovall."
"Mm-hm. Don't look smarmy enough, in any case. Now this one." One jack-plug finger tapped the popcorn purveyor between its spindly power-cable legs. "He was a Fundamentalist politician who proclaimed himself God's candidate." The jack finger flicked at the laughing fool. "This one believed him."
Dumb as the popcorn man, Charity backed away from the horror, remembering how she'd rung doorbells for the same cause in Plattsville.
"This, as you've noticed, is a rather Brontean neighborhood," the monster said. "It's for gothic writers. How can you be gothic without bad weather? Ah-hah! Hear that? Please stand by." The ugly head swiveled on its circuitry neck. "They're coming for you."
"Me?"
"Listen." The voice trailed off in speaker hiss. "Lis-sen . . ."
Under the sobbing wind, the strange deep music resolved to a descending motif of three notes in the strings. Long, short, long under a haunting human voice.
Charity. Char-i-tee . . .
"This also is reality," the speaker voice informed her.
"It's not real!" Charity wailed. "I'm supposed to be in hell, punished. This is crazy."
"I didn't say whose reality. The popcorn always suited you. You never asked for anything better."