Only Begotten Daughter by James Morrow

Author:James Morrow
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2014-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

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Wave-tossed, angel-powered, His Satanic Majesty’s ship Pain blew across the Atlantic, the Pacific, and from there to the gloomy and indeterminate seas beyond. Julie stayed below, away from the spray that scratched her eyeballs, the air that filled her lungs like raw cotton.

The devil knew how to live. Pain’s cabins were air-conditioned. Its library was a cornucopia of gilded volumes redolent of oiled leather and wisdom: The City of God, Summa Theologica, Das Kapital—all Satan’s favorites. Every night at eight, Anthrax brought her a dinner menu, and Julie would check off pepperoni pizza or, on alternate evenings, something more sophisticated: stuffed lambchops, breast of peacock. Once she ordered the “musical entertainment,” subsequently dining to a violin concert performed by twenty dead preschoolers whose plane had exploded during a demonstration tour of the Suzuki method.

“Happy?” the devil asked. His metamorphosis was simultaneously startling and banal. Horns poked blatantly from his forehead. Overlapping scales covered his body like slate tiles. His nose had doubled in size, its nostrils wide and gaping like the bores of a shotgun.

“Happy,” said Julie emphatically. She stared through a porthole into the fibrous mist. Nausea pressed its rude thumb against her stomach. “You bet your tail I’m happy.” Tail: true. His coccyx, no longer a mere vestige, was growing an inch every day.

Happy? What she really felt was disconnected, standing here in a white evening gown and conversing with Satan himself in the galley of a hellhound schooner. Hard to believe she’d once been a Girl Scout, played point guard for the Brigantine High Tigerettes, or had a love affair with the Midnight Moon’s managing editor.

“I should have shipped with you long ago,” she told the devil.

The glutinous days accumulated, congealing into weeks, lumping into months. Bricks of black lustrous coal filled the sky, at first hovering individually, then fusing into an endless arch. Yet night did not descend, for the vault reflected the glow of a thousand burning islands, bathing Pain’s course in a rosy and perpetual dusk.

Good intentions, Julie learned, were among the more innocuous commodities paving the road to hell. The sea lanes threading the archipelago were dark sewery channels choked with dead tuna, while the islands themselves suggested humpback whales stitched together by Victor Frankenstein. The predictability of Wyvern’s operation depressed her: one hears from earliest childhood that in hell the convicted dead receive atrocious punishments, and that was exactly what each island offered. Training her binoculars on a plateau, she saw over a dozen naked men chained Prometheuslike to huge rocks; crazed panthers ripped open their bellies, hauling their soppy intestines down the slopes like kittens unraveling yarn. On the shores of the adjacent island, a long line of sinners stood buried up to their necks, their exposed heads resting atop the sand like beachballs; shell-crackers fixed in their claws, ravenous lobsters crawled out of the surf, breached the skulls, and, buttering the exposed brains, feasted. On other islands Julie beheld the damned drawn and quartered. Skinned alive. Broken on racks, impaled on stakes, drilled to pieces by hornets.

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