Chapter 26

The next morning at my meeting with the Devil, I gave Him my answer. When He heard “yes,” He very nearly exploded with joy. There was a momentary pause in time, and there suddenly appeared a swirl of pink and purple smoke. Out of that stepped a female version of the Devil. Nobody had to tell me of the family connection between the Devil and his Sister. She looked so much like Him, except for the three breasts, that I might have thought that I was seeing some sort of stage magician’s trick.

Anyway, an unnecessary introduction was made, but it seemed that courtesy was the order of the day. I held the Lady’s chair as she sat down, and we turned to the business that had to be carried out immediately. The first item on the agenda was my conversion into wizard with the full command of all of the magic that the Devil knew. The first step was to put me into a kind of hypnotic trance that gave me a full view of what went on during my transformation. Frankly, I could not fully appreciate what was going on because of the trance, but I retained a full memory of what had happened so that I understood it later.

The female spirit set to speaking a series of phrases that I did not understand at first, but I began to follow what She was saying as her spells unfolded. It finally dawned on me that what I was receiving was the ability to understand and speak any language that I would ever hear, and the reason for that was I had to know what was being done to me for the spells to work, but the spells had to be spoken in an archaic language that was never used for the past six million years except for this specific purpose.

Anyway, the casting of the spells continued for something like six days in a kind of pseudo time that was funneled into me in about three hours of “normal” time. By the way, I was conscious for the full six days and the spell casting never stopped. One of the first things that the spells did was to make it possible to go indefinitely without food or sleep. Later on, I worked out that I was tapping into a portion of what at home was called Dark Energy. No, I am not going to give the details of all of that here because too many people would try to copy the results of at least part of what happened to me, and they would go crazy because they had not been properly conditioned by an adept beforehand. And the Devil’s sister was truly an adept with all kinds of magic.

Anyway, when the full treatment was finished, She put me through some exercises to make sure that the treatment had taken root in me and I was now an adept, if a somewhat inexperienced specimen. We could now speak directly mind to mind, and She told me that I was an apt pupil, to the point that I was now a much stronger magic user than Her brother, and I could easily now best him in any contest after I had gained some experience with utilizing magic.

In fact, She recommended that I begin practicing this afternoon so that the last bits of the spells could seat themselves more fully in my mind. She gave me the explicit instructions for what I should do, and I had a memory now that could accept anything that happened to me and would never forget anything, even if I wanted to forget it. That was a scary thought!

Once the conversion and teaching phase was finished, she told me how to encase myself in a protective shell that nothing harmful could ever penetrate. That magic shell would never intrude upon what I wanted to do or what happened to me unless the intrusion was harmful. If that were the case, the intrusion would be blocked automatically, and I might well not even notice that something untoward had happened. Man, now that was a heart-felt relief!

She said that I actually exceeded her own capabilities, and she was a little bit jealous of me in that regard. I pointed out that we would never see each other again after today, so there was no real reason for her to be jealous. She thought about that for a moment and agreed that I was correct, so I had nothing to fear from her as long as we stayed away from each other. She was certainly going to keep that in mind for the rest of her life, which was forever.

At the end of the meeting, we three shared a bit of hot tea and some cookies as a parting celebration of a successful transformation. The meeting closed with her exiting in another swirl of pink and purple smoke. When she was safely gone, the Devil gave a monumental sigh of relief and said that we had a week for him to teach me the important points about running Hell, and he was anxious to get to the job so that he could be sure of finishing within the time his sister had allotted him. That was when I fully realized that He was actually afraid of His Sister and what she might do to Him if she became annoyed!

I took a small break to tell Jean what had happened at the meeting and demonstrated a couple of the magical things that I could now do so that she would believe that I was not kidding her. I did warn her that I had a lot of cramming of information on how Hell was run and I only had a week to learn all of it. The Devil had told me that I would need to be with Him for the full time during the coming week, so I would not see her until after my training was complete.

Fortunately, all I had to do to remember something was to hear or see it being done once. That was what I was depending on to help me run Hell after the Devil had departed. Jean was not happy over that long time without me, but she did admit that she would have to put up with the necessity. That was a relief to me that she was able to accept the annoyance of me being gone, but I did promise to make it up to her after the week was over.

The next few days were an almost chaotic spell of jumping from subject to subject for me as I followed the Devil around as he went through the various duties the job of running Hell required. One interesting point I noticed was that the Devil had let things slide to the point that some operations in Hell ran more as an exercise in doing things by rote and not by being under His supervision. The funny thing was that the less the Devil supervised, the more smoothly an operation ran. In truth, the Devil did have a bad habit of micromanaging something that he was interested in while ignoring something else that he did not care about. Oh, well, I could see that Hell was in bad need of a new top manager, and I hoped that I could live up to that requirement.

The Devil threw a small going-away party for Himself and the top staff so that they would get the official announcement that I was the new boss of Hell. I couldn’t help being amused at His exit routine, but I was actually glad to see Him depart in such good spirit. I just hoped that He had not left some trap for me as a parting practical joke—that would have fit His nature perfectly.

Shortly after the Devil left and I was sure that he was not hanging around just to see how badly I would screw up, I asked the Chief of Staff to come to My office to discuss some organizational items that needed to be settled immediately. (I am sure that you have already noticed that I have given Myself the Capital Letters when I mention Myself. That is kind of a reminder to Me to remember who was now in charge of Hell.)

I was kind of surprised that a human was the Chief of Staff. His name was John Hartly, and he had been in this job for a president of the USA when he died. He had wound up in Hell because he was driving home from a party while drunk and had been involved in an accident in which he killed three pedestrians, a mother and her two young children. This was his fourth accident while drunk, but the first one in which he killed some innocents. It seemed that St. Peter really hated drunk drivers, so Hartly wound up in Hell, which I figured that he so richly deserved.

However, he was excellent at his job when sober, so he had been selected as Chief of Staff the moment he showed up in Hell. I figured that was some more of My good luck working for Me, so I decided immediately to keep Hartly in his current position. “John, I have decided to keep you as Chief of Staff for Me until you screw up, and I don’t expect that to happen. When we are alone like this, I will call you John, but you will call me Sir. You will keep what you have been assigned as help until you want to make some changes. Currently, you know how Hell should run better than I do, so I will leave most of the details of the day-to-day operation to you to manage. Later on, I may become more directly involved in managing things, but I detest micromanaging, so I will try to stay out of your hair. I hope that we can keep on indefinitely in harmony. I enjoy working with a man who knows his job and does it as efficiently as you do. Be sure to let Me know if things start to go awry.”

“Yes, Sir, I will continue to do my job as best that I can. I will let You know if anything starts to go wrong.”

“Very well, let’s now consider two items that I think need immediate attention. One of them is the removal of the invasion forces that are active in the Milky Way galaxy. I want all of them removed and returned to their previous activities if that is possible. Otherwise, you will need to find something for them to do to keep them occupied. I don’t care at the moment what that activity might be. It could be just digging a deep hole with shovels and then refilling it until something useful can be found for them to do.

“The second item I want you to look at as soon as possible is the situation with the souls who were sent to Hell because they died of suicide. Even now, death by suicide is considered a deadly sin in some places. Well, I happen to think that death by suicide it the last resort of someone suffering from overwhelming pain or frustration, and not really their fault. My idea is to sort out all of those souls that committed suicide and see what can be done for them to ease their pain. Frankly, I think that being sent to Hell because of suicide is a great injustice, and I want to ease that pain as soon as possible.

“Please put those two items at the top of your to-do list right away, and keep me posted on the progress. While you are about it with the suiciders, arrange a way for them to propose a way to relieve their pain. I think that we owe something to them.”

“Yes, Sir, I’ll get started on those two items as soon as this meeting is over. May I suggest that we schedule daily meetings to discuss any matter that needs you attention? I propose that these meetings continue until we have caught up on the things for which you want major or immediate changes.”

“That’s a good idea. Let’s start off with a meeting every day at 10:00 AM. That can be changed as necessary or convenient.

“By the way, I just thought of something that I want the returning soldiers to do. Have them clear that park of all of the statues of the Devil, and do the same if there are other such parks scattered about Hell.