The Devil's Secret

Thorn sat on a chair, precariously balanced and about to tip over, lost in an expanse of darkness. Black currents fondled his limbs with a sickly intelligence, pinning him to the chair and edging him ever closer to the inevitable fall: a fall that never quite happened. When his weight tilted the chair too far backward, the ebb and flow of the darkness around him would save him at the last moment. But then the chair would lean forward, or to the side, threatening to drop him in that direction, then in another, then another. The chair never righted itself. It drifted like a demon through the black mists.

Or was he on a roller coaster? Inching up the first incline, listening to the clicking, clicking, clicking. Knowing a fall was near. Thorn had been with Amy on roller coasters before, but he’d never felt nauseated like this. He’d never felt such dread at the coming of gravity’s inescapable maw. The coaster reached the apex of the rickety tracks, then suddenly plummeted and listed sideways. The tracks fell apart as Thorn rocketed over them, clutching the rim of his cart, preparing to careen into the abyss below.

But maybe he was standing on the edge of a great precipice instead. Maybe it was one of the skyscrapers in Atlanta, where he often went when he needed solitude. And he was tilting slowly forward. He had a body, and it had mass, and it was about to tumble headlong into those familiar streets far below. Only… Thorn could see no streets. The skyscraper’s walls plunged down forever—an infinite drop. He could see all the way to the bottom, even though there was no bottom.

No. None of that.

He sat huddled by a fireplace—Joel’s fireplace, though Joel was nowhere to be found. Someone had turned it up too hot, or fed it too much fuel, and its flames leaped out at Thorn. He found that he could not move backward. Hands were clutching his limbs. Someone was holding him here, by the fire.

“Let me go,” Thorn said. He had no time for this. Crystal and Cole were drowning in the pool, and he needed to save them. How had he gotten here, to this fireplace? “I am Thorn, once the greatest demon in Atlanta. You would be wise to free me.”

He felt cold breath on the back of his neck and shivered in spite of the fire, which grew hotter still, and brighter. It lit the walls around him with a feeble, flickering orange, and Thorn saw that he was not in Joel’s house.

He was in a daycare center. Finger-painted murals adorned the walls. Crayon drawings depicting scenes from the Bible hung on strings overhead. And the floor was slick with dark red blood. Thorn tried to move away from it, but the slickness offered no friction, and he slipped in it.

The whole room began to slant. Thorn started to slide toward a bookshelf lying on its side by a colorful door, which was slightly ajar. Beyond the door lay blackness, and this blackness was filled not with the vertigo Thorn had just experienced, but with doom. This was a bright, searing, powerful blackness, like an intense fire made of dark, and someone stood inside of it, just behind the door, watching Thorn. Waiting for him.

Thorn tried to grab a desk, a wall of cubbies, anything within reach. But all purchase lay just out of his grasp, and his flailing only sped his approach toward the door. “Who are you?” he said, a tremor in his voice.

Blood slid underneath him as he glided across the sloping floor. He slipped away from the fire’s influence, and the room grew colder. “Who are you?” he called again.

“We’re your victims,” a voice whispered from the other side of the door.

Thorn dug his fingernails into the floor so hard that three of them ripped from his hand. His own blood mingled with the children’s. He was sliding faster now.

He spoke boldly to calm his mounting terror. “You lie. I am in a Sanctuary. I know my enemies here, but I do not know you. I say again, who are you?”

“I am Shenzuul,” the icy voice whispered. “I am Jed, and his mother, and all those children. I am Madeline and Jada and Garrett and ten thousand others.”

As Thorn approached the door, it opened wider. The fire behind him now lay a mile away, but a faint glimmer reached the black beyond the door, where Thorn could just barely make out a face in the gloom. Its teeth were gnarled and rotten. Maggots squirmed in its crusty beard. It had no eyes, and the empty sockets gazed piercingly at him, into him, as if seeing all the wickedness in Thorn’s rotten soul.

Thorn’s body shot across the bloody floor faster, faster, faster. He braced himself to collide with the terror on the other side of the door. He braced himself for Hell.

“We got him. He was almost too far down, but we got him.”

All at once, three impossible thoughts implanted themselves in Thorn’s mind, yet he knew them all to be fact. The first: he was safe, at least from the Hell he had nearly experienced. He stood in a vast atrium replete with beautiful trees and plants in every direction: violet oxalises and red geraniums, towering willows with sad and slender branches, red maples with leaves as crimson as if fall were in full swing. Blue water lilies nestled in shallow streams next to ornate wooden benches, and gravel pathways wound through the foliage. A bevy of doves soared overhead. Thorn was surprised to feel the temperature—which was perfectly mild—against his skin. Sunlight gleamed through the immense crystal skylight, and through tall crystal windows cast open to the gentle breeze.

Thorn had always thought the crystal was a touch too extravagant, even for the Creator of all things. He knew exactly where he was, and this was the second impossibility. A hundred angels stood around the large room. All wore their traditional white robes and beige sandals, and all watched Thorn with impassive expressions that were difficult to read. One of them sat on a stone by a brook, swaying back and forth as he plucked strings on his harp, apparently unaware of how hilariously cliché he looked. Through the crystal ceiling, Thorn could see up to Heaven’s tallest towers and minarets, where cherubim flitted about on their daily tasks. He even spotted a seraph, thrice the size of a cherub, dressed in black armor, an immense sword at his side. On the far side of the room, the turf ended precipitously and gave way to outer space. The most breathtaking mural of all time, planet Earth hung near the bottom of the great drop from the Lord’s House, a vast star field behind it. The Western Hemisphere lay on the planet’s far side, but Thorn could see most of Asia and part of Europe.

The third impossible fact that Thorn suddenly knew was that the being standing just ten feet in front of him was God Almighty, Alpha and Omega, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. The shock of His presence, and of Thorn’s presence here in His House, overwhelmed Thorn. He tried his hardest to think straight.

God’s gender was indeterminate. Thorn remembered that He preferred to be referred to as a “He,” but His body appeared thoroughly androgynous. He wore a stylish suit of pure white that fit just a little too tightly. Inexplicably, small vines grew out of the suit in odd places: from the jacket pockets, from between the buttons of His undershirt, out from underneath His collar. Several more vines grew from holes sprinkled about the suit, lending the getup just as much green as white. His fine hair glimmered with strange blue electricity. His shoulders were hunched and His hand idled at His mouth.
Is He biting His fingernails?
Oddest of all, God was smiling. No, He was
beaming
. His grin extended nearly halfway up to His bright eyes and revealed His perfect white teeth. Thorn had forgotten how young He looked. Despite His unfathomable power and knowledge, God didn’t look a day over twenty-five. Nevertheless, Thorn recognized this thin, genderless adolescent as Jehovah, the Good Shepherd, the Great I Am.

The Enemy.

Peculiarly, Thilial stood behind and to the left of God, along with several of God’s personal guard. Like everyone else in the room, her gaze rested on Thorn, and her gaze was colder than the vacuum of the space outside.

“Do you know who I am?” God said from behind His hand, His mouth nibbling at His fingertips. His voice was soft and deep, and seemed to come from very far back in His throat. Yet it sounded strangely crisp, as audible as someone speaking through a megaphone. The voice would have been nearly comical coming from anyone else.

Thorn was too dumbfounded to offer anything other than a straightforward reply. “You’re God.”

God’s smile seemed to fade a bit. “I’m the being you call God, yes.” He took a halting step toward Thorn, then offered a hand to shake—the same hand He’d just been biting at. When Thorn reciprocated the gesture, God abruptly embraced him with a hearty hug. “Balthior. Welcome home.”

Home?
Atlanta was home. Rome had been home. Heaven… Heaven was a distant, unpleasant memory.

“You passed your test in the Sanctuary, so I brought you back to life. Most times you demons manage to keep the human bodies I give you, but even without being human, you made it through the Sanctuary. You even saved Crystal and Cole! Welcome, brilliant Balthior!” Despite the curious waver in God’s voice, it was saturated with optimism, and perhaps a bit of self-importance. God spoke with an air of finality, as if Thorn’s sudden presence here was a great reward for some noble deed. When Thorn remembered all the death and destruction in his wake, the price he’d paid for this reward seemed far too great.
At least Crystal and Cole made it out. If I passed my test, they must have made their Big Choices at the last second.
The boulder of weight this removed from Thorn’s mind would have been more significant if not for the mountain of questions that remained.

God broke the embrace and looked Thorn in the eyes. His gaze was oddly easy and nonthreatening… yet also timid. He held eye contact for no longer than a second at a time. “Welcome back to My service, Balthior. I’m sorry I didn’t help you in the Sanctuary. When I saw you were there and that your motives were pure, I wanted to intervene, but it would have taken Me most of the night to get there, and that would have ruined the test anyway.”

Huh? God is omnipotent. Can’t He just teleport anywhere He pleases?
Thorn wondered, but he kept his mouth shut. Safety such as this was so foreign to Thorn that he felt it could slip away at any moment. Given the Enemy’s history, Thorn might indeed find himself right back in Hell if he said the wrong thing here.

God caught him glancing up through the crystal roof at the highest buildings of the Heavenly City. “Magnificent, eh?”

“There are more angels here than I’ve seen since…” Thorn shook his head at his understatement. This limited view encompassed only a small portion of the city, but Thorn could see millions of angels in flight, small white specks in the distance.
How many more must be inside the buildings?

“Yes, yes. I wanted an end to the war, so I made it seem like you demons had killed most of the angels. Like we lost. In truth, though, I created two angels for every one the demons killed. On Earth, too. We’ve been watching over you all along. When you walked in darkness, when you thought you were alone… it was then that we prompted you toward the light. I never abandoned you.”

Yes, You did
, was Thorn’s immediate response, but he kept quiet. God’s tone implied that these revelations should have been a happy surprise, but to Thorn they were peculiar news.
You actually
wanted
to prompt us toward the light? Then why didn’t You just talk to us? Why did You hide behind Your Heavenly veil?

Thorn remembered too late that God’s omnipotence meant that He could read Thorn’s thoughts. Thorn’s sin had separated him from God, or so he’d been told, but surely the deity could probe Thorn’s mind when they stood right next to each other.