Author: Richard Martinus
Category: Humorous
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“He…” Melody began. She studied Glenda’s expression, changed her mind and told the truth. “He’s covering up for April, of course.”
“Oh, not another bulimic episode!” Glenda wailed. “I had hoped she’d grown out of those.”
“She did what she had to do to restore order!” snarled Melody. “Anyway, I was the senior member of staff on duty, so I take full responsibility. After all, I haven’t been dragged before a disciplinary panel in months – withdrawal symptoms are setting in.”
“You of all people should know how disciplinary panels work,” said Glenda. “They’ll take all the statements, weigh up all the evidence, and then place all the blame on the person lowest in the food chain – that is, Cosmo and, if he blabs, April.”
“He won’t blab!” Melody burst out.
Glenda’s face was the very model of mock reptilian surprise.
“Really? You have that much faith in him?”
Melody glared at her.
“He’s… okay.”
“I can barely imagine the pain it must have cost you to utter those words,” said Glenda soothingly. “The boy must be a prodigy.”
“He tried to cover up for the squirt! In my books, that makes him one of us.”
Glenda nodded. “In mine also. So here’s what we’ll do. I’ll reply to this email saying I instructed you to authorise the reprocessing because, before full containment could be achieved, some unruly clients escaped into the corridors and got as far as the manticore office. You get the manticores to back us up – they’re annoying but they’re always up for a prank, so they’ll happily play along. That’s enough of a security breach to justify a memory wipe. And, furthermore, as this whole business is really Logistics’ fault for not following correct procedure, I’ll insist to our boss that he lodges the strongest possible complaint. Which he won’t do because no manager ever wants to get embroiled in an interdepartmental feud – those things can drag on for centuries.”
She leant back in her chair, in a manner that suggested she would have crossed her arms over her breast if, at that moment in time, she had possessed either.
“And that,” she concluded, “all being well, will be the last we hear of it.”
Melody gazed at her colleague across the desk for a few moments before observing: “You’re a star – you do know that, don’t you?”
“I do,” said Glenda. “Sadly, the news has yet to filter through to the upper echelons of management.”
She sighed.
“In a way, I hope he does complain. Logistics deserve it – they really are a useless bunch of flaming idiots.”
“Logistics are wack,” Melody affirmed.
“Whack?”
“Something us young folk say – you wouldn’t understand.”
VIII
“Fish-hooks!”
The trainers inches from Cosmo’s nose stopped moving.
“Are you stuck?” he asked.
April’s voice drifted back to him through the crack in the rocks.
“No, but I’ve torn my T-shirt.”
“Badly?” He tried to sound concerned rather than hopeful.
“You wish!”
Three weeks had passed since The Unfortunate Episode Of Which We Do Not Speak (as Glenda had dubbed it), and there had been no further repercussions. April, back at work and as bouncy as ever, had collared Cosmo during his time off and insisted on showing him what she called her “special place”. This involved a journey out of the Tartarus office area, taking a lift up a few dozen or more floors, and then hunting out an old and barely used storeroom. Cosmo had to help the young lamia – in her default human form, as she always seemed to be when he was around – move aside a couple of heavy filing cabinets and a large metal cupboard to reveal a cobwebby cleft in the rock wall. Squeezing through this they had entered a dark tunnel, which they followed for a long time – walking at first, then on their hands and knees. Presently the ceiling sloped down until it almost touched the floor. It was this obstacle to their passage that April was having trouble negotiating.
“This is a lot easier to crawl through as a serpent,” she grumbled.
“Why don’t you transform?” Cosmo suggested.
“No point – we’re there now.”
The trainers disappeared from view. Cosmo lay down on his stomach. He could see light on the other side of the constriction; also April’s feet, and one of her hands waggling about.
“Grab a hold!” she called. “I’ll pull.”
Cosmo took hold of her hand and squirmed through. He emerged into a cave with a jagged, brightly lit entrance about twenty feet wide and eight feet high. That was not the first thing that attracted his attention, however. Rather, it was April’s T-shirt, the left shoulder strap of which had snapped, so that the garment hung down at the front partially exposing a pink-bra-clad breast as she leant forward to help him up. Noticing the direction of his gaze, April gave a cross sniff. The severed ends of the strap snaked up her shoulder and reattached themselves to each other, making her once more decent. In an uncharacteristic onslaught of deductive logic, Cosmo realised she could easily have done this before helping him into the cave, so had she deliberately waited until he could catch a teasing eyeful of her short-lived dishabille?
“Mel showed me this place two years ago, when I became a fully-fledged member of the team,” April informed him. “I think only us lamias know about it, because I’ve never met anyone else here. Come and have a look.”
Cosmo came and looked. The cave mouth was an opening high up in a sheer cliff composed of irregular, red and cream-coloured layers of rock. The cliff face stretched some twelve or thirteen miles out to either side of them, then curved inwards to form a more or less parallel-sided chasm, the floor of which was an incalculable distance below, the far end invisible behind a veil of heat-hazed and smoke-filled air. Dark, menacing shapes drifted lazily on thermals hundreds of yards below them, plunging into columns of smoke and emerging again on the other side, searching for prey. Almost complete silence reigned, apart from a constant but near-inaudible ululation which, if you listened very keenly and/or had a vivid imagination, you might suspect was the sound of human screams echoing up the chasm walls from far below.
It was all very different from Perdition, the Seventh Level of Hell and Cosmo’s previous stomping ground. But he recognised those cliffs all right, having seen them so often from below over the past weeks.
“That’s Tartarus,” he said.
“That’s right,” said April. “The main entrance is more or less directly below us, guarded by a fifty-headed hydra. Except on its day off, as was presumably the case when Logistics found nobody on duty at Reception and dumped that load of rowdy stiffs on us.”
“And that ribbon of fire, that’s the flaming river Phlegeton,” said Cosmo, pointing.
“Yup. And there in the distance, can you see that dark mass? That’s the great castle with three rings of walls and an iron turret, where the malevolent giant Tisiphone ceaselessly prowls the battlements, cracking her whip.”
“I’ve seen her up close – she’s only an automaton.”
April chided: “You have no poetry in your soul.”
Cosmo craned his neck to look up. Above, he could only see the bright, yellow-orange sky.
“You wouldn’t think it,” said April, “but the ceiling’s only twenty or so feet above us.”
“How high up are we?” asked Cosmo.
“According to Hesiod, a bronze anvil dropped into Tartarus would take nine days to reach the bottom.” April looked downwards. “More like nine seconds, I reckon. Well, maybe fifteen.”
She sat down, and Cosmo joined her.
“So,” said April, swinging her legs as they dangled over the edge. It made Cosmo jittery, despite the fact he knew perfectly well either of them could instantly sprout wings with which to fly back up if they fell. “Are you and Mel best buddies now?”
“Are we Hell,” he replied. “I told you – she rea
lly doesn’t like me.”
“Yes, she does! She hasn’t bitten you, has she? That proves it! You’re just confused because she doesn’t like men generally.”
“Is that because one of them gave her…?” With his forefinger, Cosmo traced a line down the left side of his face.
“No,” said April. “Well, yes. One of them did give her that – she was lucky not to lose her eye. But I don’t think she liked men before either. She was madly in love with Joy, who used to be a member of our team. She tried not to show it, but we all knew. And don’t you dare let her find out I told you that!”
“I won’t,” promised Cosmo. “What happened?”
“Nothing. Joy did like men. Nowadays she’s living with her human fella somewhere in Derbyshire.”
Cosmo was shocked. He’d never heard of such a thing, other than as the subject of a dirty joke.
“That’s why Mel hasn’t got any kids, see?” April continued. “Glen does – she has two, and three grandkids. Her daughters both work in Level Nine, in the Sulphurous Waste. Glen goes to visit her family almost every weekend. She’s terribly proud of them. If you give her a chance, she’ll burble on about them for hours and hours and hours.”
At April’s insistence, Cosmo told her a little about his own family and life, which struck him as a drab and colourless topic of conversation. He wished she would let him shut up and talk about herself instead. Maybe the young lamia sensed this, because she suddenly said: “I call it the ‘April shower’.”
“Call what?”
“The business with all the little snakelets. You asked, remember? And thanks for covering up for me, by the way. You didn’t really have to, but Glen and Mel do get cross with me when I do it to more than one victim at a time. You saw how sick it made me.”
“You three are very close, aren’t you?”
“My mother was part of the Tartarus team,” said April. “She died when I was very small, so the rest of them looked after me – Mel and Glen, Faith and Joy and Jasmine. They’d buy me presents and take me on trips, and there was always a big party on my hatching day. The others have moved on now, so Mel and Glen are all the family I have left.”
“What about your Dad?” Cosmo asked.
“Lamias don’t have Dads, silly!”
“Of course not – stupid of me.”
“Although I often wonder if Mum loved whoever it was with whom she… you know. If she did, I wish I’d known him. But they can’t have been that serious about each other, can they? Otherwise he’d still have been around when I was growing up.”
“I bet they did love each other,” Cosmo stated authoritatively. “Any number of things could have happened to prevent him from staying around.”
“I do remember my Mum,” April continued, not really listening to Cosmo’s sterling defence of her absentee pseudo-father, “but it’s such a long time ago that now it’s more like a memory of a memory, you know what I mean? Almost like it’s somebody else’s memory, or like remembering a film you saw once. That’s very sad, isn’t it? I wish I could see her more clearly in my mind.”
Cosmo put a comforting hand on hers; she appeared not to notice.
April said: “Glen told me they’re planning to fill up all of Tartarus above ground level with loads of new floors, to fit in all the clients who’ll be coming through the system as more and more of the Earthly contractors close down. They’ll probably seal off this cave then. We might be the very last people ever to see this view.”
They sat in silence a while, drinking in the endangered view – although, truth be told, Cosmo spent most of the time drinking in his companion’s profile which, in his eyes, far surpassed anything the view had to offer anyway.
Then April said, “You do know your hand’s been on top of mine for the past ten minutes, don’t you?”
“I’m sorry,” said Cosmo. “I forgot it was there. Do you want me to remove it?”
“I’ll have to give it some thought,” she simpered coquettishly. “You can leave it in place until I make up my mind.”
He left it in place as they perched on the edge of their eyrie.
“Do you want to give me a kiss?” April asked abruptly.
“Yes.” Cosmo’s voice came out sounding a lot hoarser than he would have liked.
“Okay. Just the one, mind.”
IX
At Glenda’s next meeting with her line manager, neither of them raised the subject of Melody’s twenty-eight errant souls, Carnemelleck because he didn’t want to own up to not taking Logistics to task, Glenda because she was quite content to let sleeping hellhounds lie. She did have one confession to make, however.
“I admit it,” she said. “You were right, I was wrong – the secondment is working out very well.”
“Is it?” Carnemelleck looked up from where he was trying to arrange his genital region into the semblance of a stork. “That’s good, because I’ve had expressions of interest from another seven or eight candidates if you’re thinking of repeating the experiment.”
“Give me their names,” said Glenda, “and I’ll give them a once-over.”
“A treat they won’t soon forget.” Carnemelleck grinned broadly; Glenda frowned but otherwise didn’t rise to the bait.
“However,” she said, “it’s a lot of work for us, so nobody should get any ideas about secondments being a permanent solution to the staffing shortage.”
“Of course, of course. As a matter of fact, I put the topic on the agenda of the last Tartarus monthly managers’ meeting, and others said they had exactly the same problem. So we came to a decision.”
“Really?” Glenda raised where her eyebrows would have been had she at that point been wearing human form. “Now that’s a treat we won’t soon forget.”
Carnemelleck graciously signalled touché.
“The plan is to merge the smaller teams,” he said.
“Oh.” Glenda wasn’t sure how she felt about this; slightly uneasy, anyway. “Is there really no chance of the longstanding vacancies being filled in the foreseeable future?”
“Not in our lifetimes.”
“Then I guess it makes sense. So who are you merging us with? And, whatever you say next, if manticores feature in any part of it, I will bite you.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” her boss assured her. “No, it’ll be the facehuggers.”
This was unexpected.
“What – those little chaps that stick to your face and a few days later something bursts out of your stomach?” Glenda asked. “They’re not even nether parts specialists – we’ve got nothing in common with them!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Carnemelleck, absentmindedly tapping his computer keyboard with the end of his penis, spelling out rude words. “You’re both parasitoid and derive nourishment from, shall we say, intimate physical contact with your prey.” His face broke into a licentious leer at the thought.
Glenda permitted herself an unvoiced “Tch!” Intellectually, she appreciated that satyrs and their kindred were more awash with testosterone than the most ragingly hormonal adolescent. The fact that her boss limited his forays into the realm of sexual harassment to innuendo and the occasional oblique proposition was testament to his quite exceptional restraint – normally, you had to beat satyromorphs off with a stick. That didn’t make these moments any less irksome, though.
“I know it’ll take some getting used to at first,” Carnemelleck continued, “but it’ll be good for you to share your office with a different team. You’ll be able to learn from each other’s methods and practices. There will be cross-fertilisation of ideas—”
“I sincerely hope you’re not on the verge of uttering the word ‘synergy’,” Glenda told him sternly.
“I was about to,” Carnemelleck confessed. “You stopped me just in time. Anyway, at the very least, merged teams will be able to provide cover for each other and, where they can’t actually deal out each other’s punishments, these could be swapped around or rescheduled. So long as
the levels of unpleasantness achieved at the end of the month meet with the requirements of the individual client’s treatment pathway, we’ll reach our targets.”
“All right, we’ll do it,” said Glenda. “But you’d better make it very, very clear indeed to those bony tarantulas that we won’t tolerate any ‘hilarious’ practical jokes.”
“It will be their mantra,” Carnemelleck promised.
Glenda turned her eyes to the ceiling, searching for succour.
“This is one Hell of a way to run Hell,” she complained.
Her boss said: “There’s another way?”
X
“Now, is there anything else you need?” asked the manticore. Melody thought it was the one called Tim, but they all looked so similar it was impossible to be sure.
She had chosen the meeting room – that is, meeting cave – adjoining the manticore office so that they could have some privacy for her final one-to-one with Cosmo to review the secondment, but this had quickly revealed itself to be a bad idea. Privacy, for manticores, was a woolly concept.
“Nothing, thank you,” she said.
“Shall I switch on the overhead projector for you?”
“No, thank you.”
“Only it can be a bit temperamental sometimes.”
“We won’t be using it.”
“If you’re sure…”
“Quite sure.”
“Well, I’ll be just outside if you need anything.”
“Thank you.”
“In a way, you know,” continued the manticore, not budging from its position in the doorway, “it’s a shame you’ve got your own printer again. We don’t see so much of you guys anymore. I really miss our jolly chats.”
“So do I. I think you said you would be just outside?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re just inside at the moment.”
“That’s exactly what I mean, you see? You guys have such a great sense of humour. There’s not enough of that in Hell.”
“It’s an outrage. Are there any other gems you’d like to share with us before you find your way to just outside?” Melody asked through gritted teeth.
“There was something,” said the manticore, “but it’s momentarily slipped my mind. It’ll come back to me in a second.”