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“. . . and so I’m being recalled,” Crowley said. "Which is a shame for you, angel, because it means you'll be getting comfortable and complacent with. . . this." He waved his hand around vaguely.
"Books," Aziraphale said genially. "You mean books."
"I mean a great many things," Crowley said, putting on his sunglasses and flashing Aziraphale a bright, toothy smile. "Try not to order the ten course tasting menu at the new French place just for yourself. You're already getting a little too complacent around the belly."
"What an absolutely demonic thing to say."
"Yes, and that's why they want me back."
Aziraphale peered at Crowley. Crowley peered back. Dust motes drifted off the shelves and twirled in the onset of afternoon sunlight through the one window Aziraphale had cracked open because the last customer he'd tried to drive out looked rather like a vampire, and Aziraphale had hoped direct sunlight would make her poof and vanish. A single dust mote fell onto his eyelash. Neither Aziraphale nor Crowley blinked.
"I can't imagine why they would recall you after so long," Aziraphale said. "Are they sending a replacement?"
Crowley looked surprised. "'What? No. Why would they?"
Aziraphale narrowed his eyes.
Crowley feigned innocence. It was not quite, as they say, successful.
"The balance of the powers," Aziraphale finally prompted with the slightest hint of irritation in his voice. He would have been quite happy without a representative of Hell stationed on Earth, of course. It was just that he had gotten used to that particular ordering, no hot without cold, no summer without winter, and so on.
"It's not necessary," Crowley replied. He rubbed his knuckles against his leather jacket. "No one can quite replace me." He preened. "Venice is sliding another centimeter into the sea, you know."
"You can hardly claim--" Aziraphale shut his mouth. "Never mind. I don't want to know." He thought about the appropriate course of action. It was hardly as if he and Crowley had never been parted before. They had happily spent several centuries without ever seeing each other in the flesh, so to speak. Even without seeing him, Aziraphale had always known Crowley was around though. All he had to do to find him was follow the path of poor choices and destruction. Fallen popes and lusty soldiers and suspiciously large wooden horses. The sudden thought of not being able to find Crowley at all was rather unpleasant. How was Aziraphale supposed to keep track of evil wiles when said evil wiles were being, well, distinctly uncooperative?
"I'll be off then," Crowley said, making an abortive gesture towards the door. "See you around. Except, obviously, that I won't."
"Er," said Aziraphale. "Yes. Goodbye." He fidgeted.
Crowley gave him a long serpentine look, which Aziraphale returned with a benevolent smile. The smile stayed on his face until Crowley was gone. A creased line appeared on his forehead, and Aziraphale turned back to the copy of Chretien de Troyes he had been reading before Crowley had shown up at his shop. He settled in for another page about virtuous knights -- much more romantic than the real thing, Aziraphale recalled, Lancelot had been rather sweaty and had grunted a lot --, but then the door opened again and a curious customer with alarmingly green hair stuck her head inside.
"Oh for goodness' sake," Aziraphale said. "We're closed."
In the beginning there was the Word, the Logos, and that Word was God, so Aziraphale felt free to love his books, to cherish them, to cluck over them, to guard them as fiercely as he had guarded Eden. The latter of which was perhaps blasphemous, but it wasn't as if Eden had ever needed much protection. The flaming sword was, in Aziraphale's opinion, a tad overmuch when swinging at gnats, and the poor, starving human couple had hardly been a threat either. While Aziraphale's books were weak and tender creatures affronted on all sides by decay, abuse by previous owners and ignorant readers, and totalitarian governments. If there was one reason why Ray Bradbury's imagination would never come to pass, it was because Aziraphale simply would not allow it. Burn books? The very idea!
There were, however, admittedly some books that were less Logos than others, but it was Aziraphale's responsibility to grasp the entirety of human knowledge, and so it wasn't his fault that humans occasionally wrote books that he was forced to read. It wasn't as if he enjoyed Mills and Boon paperbacks, or pulp detective novels, or steamy erotica. Naturally, Aziraphale disapproved of such filth. But responsibility was a harsh burden, he thought, very harsh indeed, and Crowley had taught him that keeping abreast of human customs was of utmost importance.
It didn't entirely erase the furtive feeling he got when reading Dante. Reading descriptions of Hell was one matter, but reading the descriptions with relish was another. Angels were encouraged to think about Hell often, but those thoughts were generally accompanied by thoughts of smiting and general righteousness. Angels, Aziraphale knew, were not supposed to think of Hell and wonder what it would be like to pop by and have a look.
Which was why he always drew shut all the curtains and turned off all the lights when reading Dante. Not that this would stop any of his superiors from noticing if they were ever inclined to check up on what a lowly Principality was doing. But it kept other busybodies from seeing, and most important, it kept Crowley from seeing. Aziraphale could only imagine what Crowley would say if he caught Aziraphale thoughtfully poring over descriptions of Hell. Proceed to give him a long, detailed, and obscene travelogue, no doubt, which Aziraphale would be forced to interrupt.
Angels weren't supposed to have imagination.
The air behind Aziraphale, where his wings would be, fluttered guiltily, but that didn't stop him from uncovering the Dante from the drawer and opening it to the first page.
Aziraphale needed to do his research first. After reading Dante, he started poring over the even older books in his collection. When that wasn't enough, he paid a trip to the British Library and had to gird himself very sternly from spending more time in it than he ought. Humans would notice if he never left, and never ate, and never slept. He could always alter their memories, but growing reliant on such tricks seemed like something Crowley would encourage.
He found what he was looking for in multiple manuscripts, old and tattered books that he ran his thumb over and felt the weight of years. There were several conflicting pieces of information, however, and Aziraphale read them all, puzzling out the ritual that he needed. He had no idea people had been this interested in summoning demons. Or rather, he did know, and he felt for them, how lost and hopeless they had been, and how utterly unhelpful most of their writings were. Really, you think if they had discovered a great and terrible arcane secret, they would have tried to write it down more carefully.
In the end, Aziraphale gathered the supplies. He went around to the new age shops, eyed them warily, and bought the candles, the incense, the knife. He quibbled between the cheap knife and the expensive knife, but as they were both made of iron, he supposed it didn't matter. He used the money he saved to buy a cup of Irish Breakfast and an egg salad sandwich at the cafe down the street, sitting underneath the sun and thinking, I will miss this.
Gett thee to a plyce moste foull, wrote one particularly wretched medieval writer. Stand on thy twoe feete on the byrtheplase of evyl, annd so shall evile anser.
Aziraphale thought about this.
Then he went to Disneyland Paris.
"MISERABLE HUMAN, YOU DARE CALL US FROM THE DEPTH OF THE INFERNO." The demon swirled around in a pillar of flame, while Aziraphale looked around for a tissue to wipe the blood off. He hadn't used human blood, naturally, but that was fine since angelic blood was even more potent for this kind of thing. He tugged at the handkerchief in his pocket and cleaned himself up. The demon looked down.
"Hallo," Aziraphale said.
"YOU!" the demon boomed. "I KNOW YOU. FOUL ANGEL, SLAVE OF THE ENEMY. I AM DAGON, LORD OF FLIES, MASTER OF MADNESS, UNDER-DUKE OF THE SEVENTH TORMENT. I SEE YOU WITH MINE EYES AND I--"
"Yes, it's good to see you too," Aziraphale said. "Now, if we may discuss the matter of Crowley?" When Dagon looked at him blankly, Aziraphale sighed and spoke in a series of sibilant hisses.
"OH, HIM," said Dagon. The flames flickered around his face. "WHAT DO YOU WANT WITH HIM?"
Aziraphale chose his words carefully. Hell was not going to send Crowley back to Earth just because Aziraphale wanted them to. Quite the opposite. "I don't want him back. That's not why I've come. I certainly don't want him back. Can you imagine how much trouble that would be for me? Oh no. Lots of trouble. Too much to be borne, really. Also, could you lower your voice? I'm afraid it's giving me a headache. Surely you don't need the pomp and circumstance for me."
"I am confused," Dagon admitted. "You summon me to say that you don't want our mutual acquaintance back on Earth?"
"Not one jot," Aziraphale assured him.
"Then what is the point of this?"
"So you'll send him back then?" Aziraphale asked, trying to keep the hope out of his voice. "Because he's such an awful demon. I mean, a good demon. Or do I mean awful? It's so hard to tell when you folks take good for bad and bad for good."
"I don't think so," said Dagon. "He belongs to the Dark Prince."
"Oh," Aziraphale said glumly.
"You can go now," Dagon said.
"I was afraid it would come to this," Aziraphale replied.
Angels were good at smiting. One may say that angels were astoundingly good at smiting. While demons preferred to taunt and seduce and manipulate, because what was the point of a dead human if you could have a tormented human instead, angels had laid low entire cities with one blow. It had never been Aziraphale's specialty, per se. He would have rather left the rivers of blood and the firstborn sons business to the dreadfully earnest types like Michael or Gabriel. But even so, it was in the bone. Written in Enochian, even. And six thousand years was a lot of experience.
Whoomph went the sword.
Whoomph went Dagon, twirling down into the hole in the ground. Aziraphale jumped in after him.
Hell, he thought, after he had landed and left Dagon otherwise inconvenienced behind a large boulder, was a rather badly decorated place. Maybe because he had spent too much time with Crowley, but he had imagined it to be. . . well, posher for one, dripping with the trappings of the sinful modern era. Crowley was so good at adapting to the eras, Aziraphale had thought Hell might be like that too. But it looked almost exactly the way Dante had described it in the Middle Ages, with the flame and the sulfur and the the red redness.
But, Aziraphale realized with a shiver of delight, the inhabitants wore togas.
Aziraphale nearly rubbed his hands together in happiness. He'd dearly missed his toga. He quickly donned his and wriggled his toes within his sandals, sighing at the pleasure of it. Then he stopped, because there was an almost sensual aspect to his pleasure, he suspected. Maybe even lurid. And that was no good either. So Aziraphale stopped wriggling his toes, remembered why he was here, and headed onwards, deeper into Hell.
He walked through the first circle easily enough. None of the demons stopped him, not even the serpent Minos, though granted Minos seemed busy judging the sins of the dead. Aziraphale squared his shoulders and tried to make himself seem unassuming, just in case. It wasn't difficult.
In the second circle, the tawdry one, Aziraphale tugged his toga tighter against the blistering winds. Souls blew to and fro, and one of them smacked right into his chest. "How are you?" Aziraphale asked politely. "Gosh, the weather's terrible, isn't it?"
"How am I?" the soul asked. "An eternity of torture and restlessness."
"Ah, er," said Aziraphale. "Carry on then." He peeled the soul off him and watched it taken up in the winds again.
It was impossible to get rid of the itchiness that being in Hell made him feel, a scratch under the surface of his skin. No, deeper than that, because the skin wasn't real, just a container. The scratch was. Aziraphale didn't know what he expected to feel when entering Hell for the first time. Shocked, furious, dismayed. And there was a bit of all of that, but mostly there was befuddlement. Seeing the images in Dante was one thing, but the souls smacking around each other in the wind was more than a little ridiculous in reality. At least in Heaven, he thought, they were efficient. Souls formed lines. They were clean kept and well organized.
Which was why all the accountants were in Heaven, every last one of them, even the bad ones. It was a standing order from Above.
"No use fretting about it," Aziraphale muttered to himself. He was here for one reason only, and he knew that Crowley had to be in the ninth circle where the lords of hell cavorted. Not that Crowley was even remotely close to being a lord of hell, and not that he could imagine Crowley cavorting. Slinking around like a flash bastard, yes, that was more likely.
There was the third circle of hell, and Aziraphale stepped around the Great Worm guarding the patch of icy rain as it beat down upon the gluttons. Aziraphale ached to give them a creme tart, but he had to move on. There was the fourth circle, where the sinners jousted with great weights. Aziraphale actually stopped to watch this for a while, fascinated, before he realized that he was acting like a tourist. He shifted from one foot to another, and then fiddled with his sandals. "Do I know you?" asked one of the demons overseeing the jousts, fat-tongued and narrow eyed.
"Of course you know me," Aziraphale said. "Don't you remember the last time we. . . feasted on flesh? That was jolly good flesh, wasn't it? It was a Tuesday," he prompted helpfully, while inside his chest, his heart rate picked up. The demon continued to stare at him. "And then we. . . watched some telly? You remember that, don't you? Telly?" He drew the last word out as long as he could, and finally the demon laughed.
"I have to go now," Aziraphale said. "But my money is on the jouster in blue."
He hurried away. To the fifth circle, where Styx bubbled with violence and underneath, the sullen drowning of sinners caught between fury. Then Aziraphale stumbled upon the city of Dis, and he ducked as quickly as he could behind a dead tree because this was the tricky part, all right. Dis was guarded by fallen angels, and he recognized Shamsiel standing on the walls, sword flaming like black midnight.
Aziraphale looked at his own sword, the one he had nicked. Or, rather, the one he had borrowed with the full intent of returning at the next Apocalypse, whenever that was supposed to be. Shamsiel was frightfully large, with a wingspan like the reach of the moon. Aziraphale reached into his pouch and took out a stone. He reared back and he threw it as hard as he could, which was very hard indeed, being that he had supernatural strength. He once knocked Crowley out with a bingo chip.
Shamsiel never saw it coming. "Ow," he said, and then he tumbled off the wall.
Aziraphale used the opportunity to run past him. He ran past the flaming tombs of the sixth circle, past the three rings of the seventh circle, past the minotaur, down the vast cliff that protected the eighth circle where he spread his wings and plummeted down, eyes squeezed shut. Then he scurried past the Malebroge and was about to duck past the giants into the ninth circle when he saw a familiar pair of sunglasses.
"Crowley," Aziraphale hissed, crouching behind a rock.
Crowley was riding the Geryon, the three-part beast. He looked fierce and malevolent and also quite, quite miserable. "Angel?" he hissed when he turned his head around. Aziraphale beckoned with two fingers, and Crowley landed the Geryon and dismounted. He looked around twice to make sure no one was watching, and then he went over to Aziraphale. The rock wasn't large enough to hide both of them, so Crowley flicked his hand and made it larger.
"What the hell are you doing in Hell?" Crowley asked. It was a mouthful.
"I've come to get you back," Aziraphale whispered furiously.
If he had anticipated gratitude, he got none. "Are you an idiot?" Crowley replied. "Are you seriously trying to storm Hell single-handedly and drag me back onto Earth? You?"
Aziraphale quivered in outrage. "Yes, me. What's so strange about that?"
"You can't kill demons with a teapot, for one. Not even the very heavy ones," Crowley said disdainfully. He lowered his shades and peered at Aziraphale with his unblinking eyes. "How did you get past all the others anyway?"
"Oh, a little bit of this, a little bit of that," Aziraphale said noncommittally. "It doesn't matter, my dear boy. What matters is that you don't want to be here. You want to go home."
"This is home," Crowley said, but he sounded doubtful. So Aziraphale tore into his weakness.
"Home," Aziraphale pressed. "Where you drive Bentleys instead of beasts. Where you can tempt and thwart as much as you like. Where there's sachertorte and suits with bright pins and bottles of aged wine and corrupt politicians and beds with silk sheets. Home. Where there's elevators that never come on time and God Shave the Queen and watermelon on sticky summer nights. Where there's bebop."
Crowley was crumbling, he knew it.
"I can't," Crowley said miserably. "I have orderssss, and if I don't follow them this time, Hastur will rip me into pieces and sew me into a pair of leather shoes. Have you ever been a pair of shoes?"
"I can't say I have."
"It's terrible." Crowley shuddered. "In any case, it's only a week."
"Even a week spent as shoes is--"
"I meant it's only a week until I go back to Earth."
Aziraphale stared at him. "I beg your pardon?" he asked frostily.
"You didn't think I was being recalled for good, did you? I'm just back to do some paperwork, catch up on some meetings, talk the talk and walk the walk. It happens every few hundred years. Hell has a lot of documents for me to sign and date." When he saw Aziraphale's expression, Crowley began to smirk. "You did. You thought I was leaving forever. You started missing me, didn't you?"
"I most certainly did not," Aziraphale said.
"Storming Hell like you're a demented Lancelot--"
"Lancelot never stormed anything," Aziraphale sniffed. "He lurched drunkenly. The stories never get that right." But Crowley had the full blown grin of the madly insufferable, the kind that said Aziraphale was not going to live this down for another six thousand years.
"My dashing prince," Crowley drawled.
"If you're done taking the Mickey out of me, I'll just be going then. I have my Kipling to catch up on, after all." Aziraphale started trudging in the opposite direction, but stopped when there was a pillar of fire and Hastur appeared.
"Hello, what's this," he said.
"You didn't need to start swinging the sword on him," Crowley said later, but his voice was thick with unholy glee. "Though I imagine Hastur will be looking for his left arm for a while."
Aziraphale shrugged sheepishly as he tore off a piece of bread for the ducks at St. James' Park. "I didn't think I would get out, to be honest."
"Are you kidding me?" Crowley said. "A wrathful angel, armed and practically frothing at the mouth? Hell didn't know what to do with you."
"There was no frothing. I was a tad worked up when Hastur put his hands on me, is all. And what about you?" Aziraphale prodded. "How did you explain your way out?"
"Didn't need to," Crowley said cheerfully. "Once they saw the lengths you were willing to go for me, all my superiors congratulated me for successfully tempting an angel to sin. They sent me back and told me to keep up with the thwarting."
"What sin could you have possibly tempted me to?" Aziraphale scoffed.
Crowley's smile grew sharper.
"Oh!" Aziraphale took a step back. "Oh."
"It could be worse," Crowley said.
Aziraphale scratched his cheek. He didn't need to, strictly speaking, but it gave his hands something to do. "I suppose it could," he said. "But bugger. Not like that," he quickly added when Crowley showed his teeth. "I mean that it'll be a nuisance if my superiors get wind of this. They'll be asking me all sorts of questions."
"We'll deal with them when the time comessss," Crowley said casually.
That was the Arrangement. He helped Crowley with small matters, Crowley helped him with his, and they both helped each other avoid their overeager authorities. It was a good arrangement, Aziraphale thought with a sense of satisfaction, turning back to the ducks and feeding them the last pieces of bread. He would be put out if it changed.
"Let's get dinner," Aziraphale said. "You pay for the drinks." He had gone to Hell for him. It was the least Crowley could do.