“Fly around playing harps?”

“There’s the Celestial Choir, which sings the praises of God throughout all eternity. Everyone else beholds His face.”

“That’s it?” She was skeptical but amused.

“That’s it. It’s fine for contemplative saints. They go there, and they love it. They’re the only people suited to it, and it suits them. The unbaptized go to Limbo. All the rest of us go to Hell; and for a few, this is the last stop before they arrive.”

I waited for her reply, but she had a mouthful of chicken. “There are quite a number of entrances, as the ancients knew. Dodona, Ephyra, Acheron, Averno, and so forth. Dante went in through the crater of Vesuvius, or so rumor had it; to the best of my memory, he never specified the place in his poem.”

“You said demons stay here.”

I nodded. “If it weren’t for them, the old people would have to close, I imagine.”

“But you’re not a demon and neither am I. Isn’t it pretty dangerous for us? You certainly don’t look . . . I don’t mean to be offensive—”

“I don’t look courageous.” I sighed. “Nor am I. Let me concede that at once, because we need to establish it from the very beginning. I’m innately cautious, and have been accused of cowardice more than once. But don’t you understand that courage has nothing to do with appearances? You must watch a great deal of television; no one would say what you did who did not. Haven’t you ever seen a real hero on the news? Someone who had done something extraordinarily brave? The last one I saw looked very much like the black woman on the pancake mix used to, yet she’d run into a burning tenement to rescue three children. Not her own children, I should add.”

Eira got up and poured herself a second glass of milk. “I said I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, and I meant it. Just to start with, I can’t afford to tick off anybody just now—I need help. I’m sorry. I really am.”

“I’m not offended. I’m simply telling you the truth, that you cannot judge by appearances. One of the bravest men I’ve known was short and plump and inclined to be careless, not to say slovenly, about clothes and shaving and so on. A friend said that you couldn’t imagine anyone less military, and he was right. Yet that fat little man had served in combat with the navy and the marines, and with the Israeli Army.”

“But isn’t it dangerous? You said you weren’t brave to come here.”

“In the first place, one keeps one’s guard up here. There are precautions, and I take them. In the second, they’re not on duty, so to speak. If they were to commit murder or set the house on fire, the old people would realize immediately who had done it and shut down; so while they are here, they’re on their good behavior.”

“I see.” She picked up another piece of chicken. “Nice demons.”

“Not really. But the old man tells me that they usually overpay and are, well, businesslike in their dealings. Those are the best things about evil. It generally has ready money, and doesn’t expect to be trusted. There’s a third reason, as well. Do you want to hear it?”

“Sure.”

“Here one can discern them, and rather easily for the most part. When you’ve identified a demon, his ability to harm you is vastly reduced. But past this farm, identification is far more difficult; the demons vanish in the surging tide of mortal humanity that we have been taught by them to call life, and one tends to relax somewhat. Yet scarcely a week goes by in which one does not encounter a demon unaware.”

“All right, what about the people on their way to Hell? They’re dead, aren’t they?”

“Some are, and some aren’t.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Exactly what I said. Some are and some are not. It can be difficult to tell. They aren’t ghosts in the conventional sense, you understand, any more than they are corpses, but the people who have left the corpse and the ghost behind.”

“Would you mind if I warmed up a couple of pieces of this, and toasted some of that bread? We could share it.”

I shook my head. “Not in the least, but I’m practically finished.”

She rose, and I wondered whether she realized just how graceful she was. “I’ve got a dead brother, my brother Eric.”

I said that I was sorry to hear it.

“It was a long time ago, when I was a kid. He was four, I think, and he fell off the balcony. Mother always said he was an angel now, an angel up in Heaven. Do dead people really get to be angels if they’re good?”

“I don’t know; it’s an interesting question. There’s a suggestion in the Book of Tobit that the Archangel Raphael is actually an ancestor of Tobit’s. Angel means ‘messenger,’ as you probably know, so if God were to employ one of the blest as a messenger, he or she could be regarded as an angel, I’d think.”

“Devils are fallen angels, aren’t they? I mean, if they exist.” She dropped three pieces of chicken into a frying pan, hesitated, and added a fourth. “So if good people really get recycled as angels, shouldn’t the bad ones get to be devils or demons?”

I admitted that it seemed plausible.

She lit the stove with a kitchen match, turning the burner higher than I would have. “You sound like you come here pretty often. You must talk to them at breakfast, or whenever. You ought to know.”

“Since you don’t believe me, wouldn’t it be logical for you to believe my admission of ignorance?”

“No way!” She turned to face me, a forefinger upraised. “You’ve got to be consistent, and coming here and talking to lots of demons, you’d know.”

I protested that information provided by demons could not be relied upon.

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