Updates from Below

Hell crashed yesterday morning. They’ve been running some kind of bizarre system that I cannot fully understand. Of course, the nature of Satan, since he cannot create, is to pervert what he cannot destroy, which explains their system, chilled coffee, and Windows for Apples.

Of course, Barbariccia and his cohorts know nothing of systems management, and since Hell outsourced its IT department to India there was no one to help. So they called me down, since I already know the terrain, to an extent.

It turned out, naturally enough, that those fools had crashed the entire system by storing nine terabytes of lawyer jokes and “funny vidz” on the central hard drive. There were also many viruses of questionable origin. I told them that there was nothing I could do–I know little enough about my job as it is–and that they should scrap the system for something newer, or at least perform a total overhaul.

They threatened me with hooks and fangs, of course, but did nothing. They remember our first meeting too well (Calcabrina, incidentally, has yet to fully recover feeling in his extremities). With little else to do until my return, I decided to visit some old friends in Limbo. On my way, I saw all the latest of the underworld.

Hell remains mostly unchanged, physically at least. You may ask whether my memories would have faded in 707 years and the answer is: you go to Hell and see if you’ll forget it.

The most striking difference is certainly demographic. Limbo is packed to capacity with the souls of infants–there has been a boom in the last century, Lucretius informed me. Some ideas of expanding or even subdividing Limbo have been proposed, but even with the employment of Mr. Einstein, no one can reach a consensus on the best plan of action.

One greatly expanded circle of Hell proper is the ring of the heretics. I happened to see Farinata and Cavalcante again, and noted standing room only in their particular tomb. While they were little more intelligible than normal, I did ascertain that there are a lot more good Christians down here now than before. Turns out people are trusting all kinds of things for salvation, now, especially since this Protestant thing democracitized salvation. If one accepts no authority but one’s own, there is no end to what horrors they’ll thrust upon the Church! Among the soteriological totems they invoked, I heard of baptism, baptism by immersion, music, dresses, short hair cuts, that fellow John Calvin, and, most odd of all, the King James Bible. At least in my time we had only to deal with Albigensians.

One of the shades pressed in with Farinata called on this “Authorized” Bible most of all, and said that the misdeeds of his subordinates had placed him here by mistake. He said that his “bus ministry” was second to none and that Hammond was far better off after his death.

“Not only Hammond,” I said, trying not to smirk, “but the whole world.”

He was flattered and asked me to take some message on to God for him–he had defended the King James (how odd!) and done a great deal of good. “So now you send word by intercessors!” I said. I knew who he was by then, and told him roundly that he had bused himself straight to the place he belonged, though the lustful winds would have suited him, too.

He grew somewhat angry at that, and asked me whether I had ever read the works of the comic-strip theologian. I said, “I have, and you’ll be sharing company soon, if you can all fit in there.”

“Of course you would say that, you papist,” the Pope of Hammond replied.

“There is no Catholic or Protestant–or IFB–beyond the grave,” I said, “and you can tell the scribbler of ‘This Was Your Life’ that there is no Vatican conspiracy, either. Only his own–he distracted millions and will bring them all here with him.”

Doodle a tract about that.

There is more to relate, but that must wait for a later time. Suffice it to say that Hell is nowhere near patching up their system, which barely worked in the first place, by all accounts. Ovid informed me that he can’t wait for wireless–Starbucks is supposed to be opening a store in the circle of the greedy.