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  Praise for MATTHEW HUGHES

  "A tremendous amount of fun."

  – George R.R. Martin

  "Matthew Hughes is the best-kept secret in science fiction."

  – Robert J. Sawyer

  "If the plots weren't so compelling, if the worlds he creates weren't so sparklingly original, I could read about Henghis Hapthorn going to the grocery store.... do yourself a favor and just pick up this novel and read the first few pages. Hughes' writing is a Rolls Royce Corniche convertible."

  – Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column

  "A bit Arthur Conan Doyle, a bit Jack Vance.... [these] escapades [have] the lasting appeal of one of P. G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster books."

  – Seattle Times

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Damned Busters

  Tales of Henghis Hapthorn

  The Spiral Labyrinth

  Hespira

  Fools Errant

  Downshift

  Fool Me Twice

  Black Brillion

  Wolverine: Lifeblood (as Hugh Matthews)

  The Commons

  Template

  The Other

  MATTHEW HUGHES

  TO HELL AND BACK

  Costume Not Included

  ONE

  "I thought you weren't speaking to me," Chesney Arnstruther said into the phone.

  "I'm not speaking to you," said his mother. "I'm telling you something for your own good, is what I'm doing."

  Chesney took the phone from his ear and looked again at the display screen; the call was coming from the country estate of the Reverend Billy Lee Hardacre. He tried to counterattack. "Are you living with him?" he said.

  "I'm proud to be assisting him in his great work," Letitia Arnstruther said.

  But Chesney had been raised by one of the most accomplished interrogators of the age – his mother could have offered master classes to Torquemada's top cadre – and he knew an evasion when he heard one. "Are you living with him?" he said again, then dropped the big one: "In sin?"

  "He is a great man," she said. "A prophet. An angel of the Lord comes to him."

  "I know," said Chesney, "I was there."

  "There in body," said his mother, and now Chesney could hear the sound of tables being turned, "but not in spirit."

  "I've had plenty of 'being there in spirit'," the young man said. "Great sulfurous heaps of it. I've been to Hell and back, and more than once. Now I just want a nice, quiet life as a crimefighter."

  "After all that Billy Lee has done for you," she said. Chesney sighed. She was always at her best when working the guilt. And, of course, she never missed one of his sighs; now she bored in with the precision of a sadistic dental surgeon going for the deep nerve. "He got you the deal that you're so enamored of – and your little demon, too."

  "Mother," Chesney said. The single word carried the sound that a sentient sandcastle would have made as the first ripples of the irresistible incoming tide undercut its proud ramparts.

  "He's on in five minutes. Watch him. Hear what he has to say."

  "Aw…"

  "Don't you 'aw' me, young man. Tell me you'll watch the program."

  Chesney made a sound that he imagined Russian circus bears made when they were poked to dance yet another encore.

  "Chesney!" The ripple had become a rip tide.

  "All right. But I'm not buying in," he said. "That's for sure certain."

  "The reverend knows best," she said. "He's got the angel of the–"

  But Chesney had hung up. He was less awed by the angel – technically, a high-ranking Throne – than his mother was. He'd seen God's messenger at work and wasn't all that impressed. A smooth-voiced bureaucrat was Chesney's take on the heavenly visitor, and no use at all when the situation came to a real crisis.

  It had all happened little more than a month ago. Chesney, a mild-mannered auditor at Paxton Life and Casualty, a modest-sized insurance company in the Midwest, had accidentally caused Hell to go on strike. With the seven deadly sins on hiatus, the world had rapidly ground to a halt. Without greed, lust, vanity and the rest of the panoply of mortal iniquity, people had stopped working, competing, wooing, consuming – indeed, all the activities that made life what it was, even if, theologically speaking, that was what it wasn't supposed to be.

  Chesney had turned to his mother for help. Letitia Arnstruther, a ferocious church lady who could have given the Plymouth Rock puritans a one-lap lead and still beaten them through the strait and narrow gate, took him to the Reverend Billy Lee Hardacre, former labor negotiator, best-selling novelist and currently a television preacher of Nielsen-busting prowess.

  Hardacre had advanced a theory: that creation was a book that God was writing, and that Chesney and everybody else were characters in the unwinding tale. The point of the divine literary effort? The preacher's answer was that sometimes you read a text to learn something; but to learn some things, the best way was to write a book. God, according to Billy Lee, was writing us in order to learn about good and evil.

  There had been a negotiation. Chesney had been there. So had the Throne, Heaven's delegate. And so had Lucifer, whose infernal domain had been brought to a standstill. The details of the settlement did not concern Chesney; what mattered to him was that he came out of the crisis with his soul still intact and no one's property but his own, and that he got what he had always dreamed of – in his spare time he was now a costumed crimefighter, assisted by a weasel-headed, sabertoothfanged demon named Xaphan, whose most recent earthly assignments had placed him first on the quarterdeck of a notorious seventeenth-century pirate, and then in the inner cabal of Al Capone's Chicago mob.

  Not part of the negotiation, but a no less welcome antidote to Chesney's previously celibate existence, Chesney had acquired his first ever girlfriend. Melda McCann was brave enough to have followed Chesney literally into Hell, where she had been prepared, if necessary, to give Satan himself a squirt of the pepper spray she never left home without. Fortunately, that necessity had not arisen and now Melda was his more or less constant companion. She even knew of his crimefighting avocation and its demonic adjunct: more than knew; she approved.

  Chesney suspected that Melda had initially been strongly drawn to the idea of dating a celebrity, but he was also sure that she had come to like him for himself. He had, she had told him, "qualities." Chesney's own view of himself was colored by a lifetime of coming to terms with the reality that he was not like other people. The therapists who had worked with him as a child had diagnosed him as "suffering from "high-functioning autism," according to the assessment they had given his mother, and which Chesney had read with the assistance of the public library's medical reference shelf. As Chesney saw things, the world presented itself to him as an obscure, murky landscape in which, here and there, were pools of pure, undiluted light.

  Numbers were pools of light to Chesney. They sang to him, as he had once told his employer's daughter, Poppy Paxton, with whom he had thought himself in love, until he came to know her better. Comix occupied another pool of light, especially the adventures of the Freedom Five and his favorite: Malc Turner, a UPS delivery man who, after handling a strange package from a parallel dimension, became The Driver, scourge of criminals and terrorists.

  To these islands of illumination, Chesney had now added two more: crimefighting and what passed between him and Melda in the privacy of their bedrooms. Much to the young man's relief, it had turned out that the contents of all of the many instruction books he had read on the techniques of intimacy had coalesced at some level of his unusually structured psyche to augment a hitherto undeveloped talent for the arts of love.

  It also hadn't hurt his chances that nature, or divine providence, had made up for the oddne
ss of his mental equipment by granting him an extra portion in the size of his genitive organ. Chesney had had no idea he was well outside the middle of the bell curve when it came to both length and girth. The only other penises he'd ever seen belonged to performers in the pornographic videos he used to rent before Melda came along. Based on what he'd seen, he was just average.

  His exceptional grasp of technique he put down to his unusual ability to remember details even while grasping complete gestalts. Melda had waved away his offered explanation, being a woman to whom deeds spoke for themselves. "Hoo, boy!" she had said, after their first exploration of his abilities, "You don't look the type, but…" And then she had switched to a nonverbal mode of expression that, Chesney was pleased to agree, said all that needed to be said.

  Chesney was looking forward to another nonverbal colloquy with Melda McCann this afternoon. It was a summer Sunday. Before her advent into his life, the day would have found him in the park near his apartment, eating a fiery chili dog and watching athletic young women in spandex and sports bras running on the path that followed the river. Today, Melda was coming to his place, bringing a picnic lunch they would go and eat in the park before heading back upstairs to satisfy a different appetite. Afterwards, they would laze around the place until evening, when Chesney would summon up his demon, put on his masked costume, and go out to fight crime.

  But first – he gritted his teeth at the thought – he must do what he had told his mother he would do. He picked up the television's remote and pressed buttons. The screen came to life, showing a commercial for a set of "handwoven mini-tapestries" depicting "great scenes from the Holy Scriptures." The camera did not linger too long on any one image, but Chesney nonetheless gained a clear impression of the goods being offered. Adam and Eve were rendered in a color-scheme reminiscent of The Simpsons, and the apple looked like a misshapen cell phone being fought over by a couple of teenage mall rats. Moses parting the Red Sea might have been a traffic cop diverting pedestrians from a street with a burst water main.

  "Just three payments of twenty-nine, ninety-nine, and these magnificent wall hangings are yours to keep and treasure," said an oily-voiced off-screen narrator as a 1-800 number flashed repeatedly in bright colors across the center of the screen. In small print below, Chesney saw that the "magnificent wall hangings" actually measured only two feet by two-and-a-half.

  The commercial ended, the screen going momentarily black, leaving only the retinal imprint of the flashing telephone number. The cable station briefly identified itself – The Word and Nothing but the Word read a display card decorated with sunlit clouds and a long, straight trumpet – then the screen went black again. Now a choir began to sing Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, with backup from electric guitar and bass. The screen erupted into light, a brilliant starburst of white and gold.

  This is new, Chesney thought. He double-checked to make sure he had the right channel. Billy Lee Hardacre's weekly program, The New New Tabernacle of the Air, had always before opened with the sound of a pulsing heartbeat and a black screen. The first visual should have been a long shot of the preacher seated at a desk on a darkened stage, a single spotlight illuminating his silver-haired leonine head bent over a sheaf of papers. He would look up, the image would switch to a close-up, and he would begin his gravel-voiced jeremiad against the evils of the week that had been.

  But now the starburst lingered, a four-pointed star whose downward-pointing lowest projection lengthened and kept on lengthening, so that the image evoked both a crucifix and the star that was supposed to have lured three Persian magi across Mesopotamia to Bethlehem. And then came a little special-effects image manipulation: Billy Lee appeared to step through the starburst from the darkness behind, his hands raised, arms outspread, his contact lens-enhanced blue eyes brilliant beneath the swept-back pompadour of shining hair.

  The sounds of choir and guitars faded away. In the silence that followed, the preacher lowered his arms, looked straight into the camera and said, "He is coming!"

  Chesney groaned. It was a little groan, half suppressed – as if his mother, though miles away, might hear him. "No," he said, more to himself than to the man on the television, "I'm not."

  The Reverend Billy Lee, broadcasting live from a highly automated studio a few miles from his walled estate, ninety minutes by car south of the city where Chesney lived, did not hear the young man's groan or his denial. And Hardacre would not have changed his message even if he could have heard the defiance. He was, as he was now telling the television audience, the bearer of a message from on high.

  "I am the forerunner," he said, his eyes shining, his square-jawed, broad-browed face set in an expression of exalted expectation. "I am the harbinger. I am the messenger who brings the word. And the word is: he is coming. A prophet, the bearer of a new gospel, a gospel for our times. He is coming."

  The camera angle changed, and the preacher turned to meet it. "I have met him. He has crossed my threshold, sat at my table, broken bread with me." Now the wellmodulated voice fell to a breathy whisper. "And he was attended," Hardacre said, "by an angel of the Lord."

  "That's not how it happened," Chesney said. "The angel was there to see you."

  The man on the television was pressing on. The glow had faded from his face – camera trickery, Chesney thought – as the preacher began to talk about the world and its current state. He talked about violence in places where violence was not unexpected, about greed and venery in the usual locations, about pride and envy. He cited examples of humanity's lack of humanity, of hunger and want amidst gluttony and excess, of blood for blood and hate for hate.

  "But all this," he said, turning to a new camera angle, one which brought the glow back to his visage and the gleam back into his eyes, "all this will soon come to an end. We will turn a page, begin a new chapter, create a new story – a good news story – to ring down the ages to come.

  "The moment is almost at hand, it marches toward us with every tick of the clock. He is coming. The prophet is coming. And all shall be made new."

  As he was speaking these last lines, an image appeared on a curtain hung behind the preacher. A rear-projected image that moved as the draped cloth rippled in a faint breeze – probably, thought Chesney, generated by a fan on the floor. The image was as of a halo of light surrounding the dark silhouette of a man's head and shoulders. The head was small and round, the shoulders none too wide. Chesney recognized the outline shapes: they were based on his own unprepossessing anatomy – in fact, they were photoshopped from a picture his mother had taken of him, in her back yard, on his twenty-fourth birthday.

  "No!" he said, and he would have said it just as loudly, even if his mother had been in the same room, even if she had been wearing her most severe frown, a downturning of the mouth's corners that made her lips resemble a croquet hoop. If Genghis Khan's mom had ever turned such a glower upon her son, Prince of Conquerors would have straightaway reconsidered his hording and pillaging ways.

  But Chesney had come to believe that he was now proof against its baleful influence. He had, after all, defied Satan, had even bested the Archfiend at a few hands of poker. And he had caused a young woman to make faces, motions and sounds that were far more affecting than those made by actresses in porn films. "No!" he told the voice from the television. "Not me! I'm a crimefighter, not a prophet! You better get yourself another actuary!"

  The phone rang. He snatched it up, pushed the talk button and said, "What?" without modulating his assertive tone of voice.

  "Sweetie?" said Melda McCann. "Something wrong?"

  The young man softened immediately. No one had ever called him "sweetie" before. Melda did it frequently, yet Chesney never tired of hearing it. "It's the Reverend Hardacre," he told her. It galled him that he couldn't just say the man's name without prefacing it with the honorific, but childhood conditioning ran deep. "He's at it again!"

  "Well, screw him and the cloud he came down from Heaven on," she said, which made Chesney laugh, despite
himself. He imagined his mother reacting to his girlfriend's view of Letitia's boyfriend – and boyfriend was the appropriate label. He was sure the preacher and his mother were cohabiting "without benefit of clergy," as his mother herself would have put it before she had apparently opted to exempt herself from her own lifelong standards.

  He had to use his imagination because, so far, the two females in his life had not occupied the same room at the same time – a state of affairs that would continue for as long as Chesney could arrange it. Of course, the young man knew that this happy situation could not forever endure; he was not looking forward to that inevitable moment, when the clash of universes must occur.

  Melda was saying something else. Chesney tore his mind away from the delayable-yet-unavoidable and paid attention. She was asking him if he wanted to meet her in the park or have her come to his apartment.

  "Here," he said, without need to think about it, "my place." There were things they could do in his apartment that they could not do in the park, things that were still new to Chesney's experience, and even more delightful than being called "sweetie." He could eat anytime.