Looking frightened and put out, Puff took up a position behind the demon’s head and took hold of the bellows handles.
“Make sure you don’t knock the head off the chairs when you’re pumping. You have to be firm but gentle.” I wanted to add, ‘just like when you jizjam Mrs. Rickett’, but I held back. We had enough trouble on our hands as it was.
“When should I do it?”
“Just start pumping and don’t stop until we say so.”
With his elbows moving in an out like a slow impersonation of a flapping chicken, Puff Wiggery began to blow air into the demon’s head via the windpipe. The rhythmic sighing was difficult for the demon to deal with at first. Its eyes opened wide with surprise at the snorts of air coming involuntarily down its nose. It opened its mouth and made ‘haa, haa, haa,’ sounds with each pressurised blast from the bellows.
“Living up to your name now, Puff,” shouted Rickett and everyone laughed, their nerves forgotten for a moment.
Prattle stepped in front of the demon head. Because of the table and two chairs, it was higher up than his own head and the height advantage and the sheer size of it made him seem inferior in every way. He showed less confidence than he had earlier.
“Now then, demon, where have you come from and why are you here?”
“Haa, haa, I am from haa, haa, Hell, idiot mortal. Haaaaa, haa.”
Prattle blustered on, dusting over his mortal idiocy.
“What do you want with us? Why have you come to Long Lofting?”
The demon licked its lips, careful not to shred its venom-yellow tongue on its own teeth. The tongue extended further, sharpening to fleshy point and with great control, the demon licked at some irritation near the lobe of its ear. A few stifled gasps came from Long Lofting womenfolk who were brave enough to have squeezed into the priest lodge. I checked Velvet out of the corner of my eye but she seemed impassive, unaffected by the fiendish display of lingual dexterity. The demon might have had a long tongue but it wasn’t educated in the use of it, not like me. I allowed myself a moment of smugness—I, a mere mortal, could out-evil a demon any day of the week.
“There’s haa, haa, no more room in Hell, haa, haa. It’s too crowded.”
“You came here directly from Hell?” I asked.
“I’m asking the questions, Duke,” said Prattle, and turning to the demon head asked. “Well, did you?”
“Haa, directly. Yes. Haa, haaaaa.”
“Why are we asking him that, by the way?” asked Prattle.
“Because,” said I, feeling a little nauseous about the demon’s answer, “Hell is meant to be below us.”
Then the demon, which had been only sighing up to that point, started to laugh properly.
“HA, HA, haa, haaa, AHAHAHAAAaaaaa, haaa.”
The poisonous tears appeared in its eyes once again as its face crunched into painful looking mirth.
“Haa, haaa imbeciles aaaaah, HAHAHAaaaaaaHAHAHA.”
All the trauma to the creature’s neck region, brought on by the pumping and the laughing dislodged Cleaver’s thumb from the demon’s oesophagus. It landed, burned but recognisable on the table below it. Puff Wiggery fainted, ending his stint on the bellows. They clattered to the ground beside him and the demon was silent.
“Your turn, Rickett,” I said. “Go on, hurry up.”
No more enthusiastic than his farming partner had been, Blini Rickett pushed Wiggery’s limp body out of the way, picked up the bellows and inserted the dirty tip into the demon’s neck. When he pumped, the demon’s tongue shot straight out of its mouth and vibrated. I shook my head in disbelief.
“That’s its food pipe, pheasant brain. Stick it in the other one.”
When he’d got the apparatus correctly set up, Blini started pumping again and the demon continued to chortle to itself. Prattle was indignant. You could hear it in his high-pitched wheezy whine.
“Nyev, nyev. This isn’t correct. Why is it laughing?”
“Leopold,” said I, “I’m not certain we want to know the answer to that.”
“We jamming well do. What is so jizzing funny, you corrupted son of the devil?”
I’d never heard Prattle swear before. The demon had him riled.
“HAHAHA, Haa, haa, Hell is everywhere, haa, haaa. Hell is haa, haa, all around HAHAHA.”
“What? What did he say? Hell is all around? What is that meant to mean? Are you trying to scare us, Demon, is that what it is? Well, I can assure you you’ll have to do a lot better than that.”
A look of understanding passed across the faces of all the villagers present. Things that had never made sense before, suddenly added up in their minds. The hotter and hotter summers, the frostless winters. It all became clear to them. Even Rickett was shocked enough to stop pumping. The looks of recognition were followed by expressions of panic. Prattle seemed to be the only one who wasn’t able to accept what the demon head was saying to us.
“Call yourself a demon? Is that the best you can come up with, ‘hell is everywhere’? Pathetic.”
Prattle look like he was fairly close to taking Cleaver’s knife and sticking into the demon’s eyes. I stepped over to him before he had the chance and took hold of his shoulders.
“We all need a break from this. And you and I need to talk. Very seriously.”
I wondered if I was going to have to slap him. His eyes were boring into the demon’s head; his face was pale with rage. He understood well enough what the demon was saying. Then he turned to me.
“Yes. We need to talk.”
Religion and Law
Without the usual show of ceremony, Prattle banished the villagers from his house and grounds and he and I walked back towards the square. He seemed to hold some great force within him like a heated cauldron with its lid clamped shut. His bony shoulders were drawn up, his head hung forward as though weighted and his fists were clenched, the knuckles pale and strained. His mouth showed no trace of lips; there was only a slit, mashed closed. Behind us, the confused knot of villagers stared after us and then, in straggled clumps, followed. I tried to keep the distance between them and us greater than earshot.
“It’s telling the truth, you know.”
Prattle flashed his eyes my way but stomped onward, saying nothing.
“It’s a reasonable explanation for everything that’s happened over the last few seasons.”
A hiss escaped the cauldron’s lid:
“Thirty years.”
“Excuse me?”
“Thirty jizjamming years of devotion and unstinting faith. Thirty years of study, sweat, humility, service, selflessness–
—sacrifice, chastity and abstinence. Thirty years of poverty—
—and preaching to congregation after congregation of ignorant, uneducated sinners. And what do I get?”
Knowing it was a rhetorical question I interrupted by answering,
“Some kind of promotion, I would have thought…”
The flash of eyes again. He still had Cleaver’s knife. I shut my mouth.
“Nothing, that’s what. Not even the assurance after all this faith that there’s even a Great Father still out there.”
“Oh, I’m sure the Gr—”
“What would you know about the Great Father?” Prattle’s eyes bulged. He stopped walking, turned me and screamed into my face. “Eh? You with your books and your laws and your smug self-satisfaction? You think you’re so intelligent, so above the rest of us, don’t you? And you don’t have the first idea what it is we’ve all lost today, do
