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The first Vaggie learned something was amiss was when Charlie shrilly yelled in the lobby, "Why are you covered in blood?!" half-overlapped with Alastor shouting, "I found this sweetheart in the dumpster! The dumpster, can you believe it?!" followed by Charlie yelling, even more shrilly, "A baby?!"
Vaggie had sprinted in a burst of adrenaline from the far end of the hotel before Alastor had a chance to continue his rant: "With two villains pouring gasoline around it! Gasoline!" Blood soaked half Alastor's face, both hands, and one pant leg—as well as the dirty towels he'd wrapped around the bundle clutched in his protective embrace. But the blood wasn't half as terrifying as the look on his face. It looked less like a smile and more like a monster's lips curling right before ripping out someone's throat. "It's a miracle none splashed on the darling! Gasoline's caustic! We'd be dealing with serious chemical burns even without setting it on fire!" He bounced his little rescue in his arms, like a mother trying to sooth a fussy baby, but Vaggie suspected he was really shaking with rage and trying to redirect his nervous energy.
"That's horrible," Charlie cried. She was trying to edge close enough to see into Alastor's bundle without him noticing she'd crept within his personal space bubble. "What did you do?"
"Why, ripped them up and tossed them in the dumpster, of course! I was tempted to set them on fire and see how they like it, but I didn't want to expose this poor dear to the fumes."
Vaggie grimaced. Charlie pressed her hands together in front of her face, and after a moment said, "Okay so the Happy Hotel doesn't officially endorse that, but under the circumstances, I'll let it slide."
Wandering over from the stairs, Angel stopped near Vaggie and muttered, "Hey, the fuck smells like fast food farts down here?"
"Dumpster baby," Vaggie said.
Angel grinned in amazement. "No shit?" He slid away from Vaggie and crept around behind Alastor.
Alastor went on, "And the poor little thing is so starved, I couldn't get it to make a single sound all the way to the hotel—"
Angel clapped two hands on Alastor's blood-soaked shoulders. "Lemme see!"
Alastor, Vaggie, and Charlie all immediately tensed, but Alastor tilted the bundle away from his chest far enough to let Angel see. As if he hadn't been interrupted, Alastor continued, "Who knows when it was last fed! I've got to get it a fresh battery."
Charlie shot Vaggie a baffled glance. "'Battery'?"
"Wha—?" Angel choked back a laugh. "It's a radio."
"And who would ever want to hurt such an innocent little angel," Alastor said indignantly, as if Angel was backing up his point. "It's never hurt anybody!"
"How do you know?" Angel asked, grinning cheekily. "Maybe it got dropped on somebody's head!"
"And shatter its delicate little chassis?!" Alastor shrugged off Angel's hands. "I ought to drop you on your head." He breezed past Vaggie in a cloud of blood droplets and dumpster smell. "Now if you'll all excuse me, I've got to find your battery charger!" He vanished down a hallway.
Vaggie gave Charlie an uncertain look. "Do we have a battery charger?"
Charlie grimaced. "I don't... think so?"
Vaggie sighed. "I'll go tell him."
###
When Vaggie tracked Alastor down again, he was still soaked in blood, but the radio had been wrapped in a fresh, clean blanket. To her consternation, it appeared to be one of the hotel bedsheets. He looked like he was trying to burp the radio like a baby, but as she got closer, she realized he was actually sticking the biggest, oldest battery she had ever seen in its back. God only knows why he had to carry the radio like that to do so instead of setting it down on a table.
Before she could scold him about spreading the blood from his clothes to the hotel's sheets, Alastor caught sight of her and announced, "The battery still charges just fine!" As if he thought Vaggie had been waiting for news. "And it only took a little magical assistance! I was worried I'd have to figure out how to build my own battery eliminator for it! Replacement parts for this beauty are non-existent!"
"Really? 'Non-existent'?" Vaggie said dubiously. She didn't know a whole lot about antique electronics, but she knew that where there were antiques, there were a bunch of middle-age nerds obsessively dedicated to swapping parts and restoring them.
"Completely," Alastor said, with the fervid confidence of somebody who'd never once encountered a VoxTube channel exclusively dedicated to repairing 1950s kitchen appliances that were made of more rust than metal.
"They can't be that rare," Vaggie insisted. "It looks like a radio my grandparents have. Somebody's got to have parts—"
"Does it!" Alastor rounded on her, eyes wide with naked excitement. "They still have their radio?"
"Uh." How was she supposed to know. "Last I checked?"
"They didn't burn it?!"
"What? Why the hell would they burn it?"
Alastor blinked at her in amazement. For a moment, they stared at each other in mutual confusion.
Then Alastor's expression twitched with a realization, and he quickly looked away from Vaggie. "Oh, of course, you meant in the mortal realm! My mistake! I'm forgetting how recently you arrived."
In that moment, a realization dawned on Vaggie—an answer to a question she'd never before thought to ask:
If Hell has just been invaded by a terrifying demon that can broadcast his evil through radio, a demon so terrible that almost a century later people's first instinct upon seeing him is to run as fast as possible, a demon so inextricably associated with radio that the only name most people know him by is the Radio Demon... then what's the first thing people do to try to keep him away?
Burn their radios.
Vaggie tried to remember the last time she'd heard a radio playing. She heard music in restaurants—but did she ever remember hearing the DJ chatter that proved it was a radio, and not a CD player? She could remember the first time she'd heard a store's music interrupted by a plug for a premium subscription and realized the music was playing from a streaming service, but could she remember the last time she could tell it was over the radio?
Sometimes she listened to online radio, but she'd never checked to see whether any of the stations she listened to had an analogue equivalent. She tried to remember if any of the stations she listened to online mentioned their call numbers.
In her first year in Hell, she'd taken note of how many people seemed to have tiny portable TVs with long antennae, the sort that on Earth she'd only ever seen people prepping for natural disasters buy so they could watch the weather forecast. She'd chalked it up to the fact that Hell just had more natural disasters.
She remembered noticing how many cars had their radios ripped out, replaced with CD players or tape decks or speakers to plug in smart phones. She'd thought Hell just had a problem with auto burglary. She tried to remember if she'd ever seen the cars' removed radios replaced with another radio. She tried to remember if she'd ever seen an undamaged car using AM or FM instead of Internet radio.
Alastor cradled that bundled-up radio like it really was a baby he'd saved from murder.
Vaggie didn't realize how long she'd been watching Alastor until he glanced at her again. "Yes?"
She started. "Nothing, I was just—realized the one you've got looks a little different from my grandparents'. On the front." She gestured vaguely at the cutouts in its wooden face that left decorative curlicues over the dirty speaker fabric. "The, uh... the curls look nice."
Alastor's face lit up, his eyes brightening like two dying flashlights that had just been given new batteries. His habitual smile stretched into a genuine, warm one. "Don't they just! You don't see many like these in Hell! It's probably from '33, '34 at the latest—they were all over the place on Earth by then, but they hardly had a chance to hit the market here in Hell before they fell out of favor, more's the pity—occasionally you'll find imports from other rings, but look here—" he slid the radio's swaddling down a bit to expose the elaborate apple-shaped symbol on the tips of all three of its knobs, "—this darling was made right here in Pride, you never see that! Believe you me, somebody's been guarding this baby jealously for over eighty years."
He bundled the radio back up, pausing use the blanket to polish a fleck of dirt off the radio's wooden facade. "I hope I meet whoever took such good care of you. I'd love to thank them."
Vaggie pressed her lips together, reminding herself that the dearth of radios in Hell was Alastor's own fault. He didn't have to mutilate half the city and upturn the local political landscape. But at the same time, she tried to remember where the wood cleaner and polish were stashed.
###
Vaggie and Angel chewed their breakfast slowly, suspiciously side-eyeing the new guest at the table.
Alastor's freshly-cleaned radio sat innocently on a placemat, as if it too had come here for breakfast. An empty coffee mug sat in front of it.
Vaggie and Angel exchanged a glance.
"Think my brother used'ta have one like that in New York," Angel said. "He was real proud of the thing. Wouldn't let nobody touch it."
"Couldn't have. This one was made in Pride," Vaggie said.
"Eh." Angel shrugged.
"You've never mentioned you have a brother."
"He ain't worth mentioning." Angel propped his chin in a hand. "You know, when I first died, I thought it was funny nobody had radios. Never really asked about it, though. I just thought Hell's state-of-the-art was twenty-something years behind, you know? Then jukeboxes and TV took off and I never thought about it. Figured radio must've died off topside."
"No, there was still radio up there when I died." She could probably still rattle off the numbers of every station she'd cycled through in high school—92.5, 93.3, 94.1, 104.9, 107.1 107.5, 107.9... "But by the time I died, I pretty much only listened to music on my phone. I guess I thought radio died, too." Although she should have made the connection sooner. Unlike Angel, she'd at least heard of the Radio Demon.
She supposed it just hadn't occurred to her that one person could so violently shift the course of mass media history. Technology like that seemed like it ought to be something inevitable—the same industries would rise and fall at the same time no matter what and no matter who was facilitating the rising and falling. The brand names and celebrated inventors might change—if not Edison, then Tesla; if not Gates, then Jobs—but the tech itself was inevitable. To imagine that one man could kill an entire industry.
To imagine that he killed his own industry.
"Eh." Angel plopped his chin in two hands and poked at his plate with his fork. "You realize he's gonna use it to spy on us all now."
The radio turned itself on with a click and a hiss. Alastor's voice clearly said, "So paranoid! You really ought to work on that."
"Yeah, when you work on your eavesdroppin' problem."
"When Hell freezes over." The radio turned itself off.
Angel rolled his eyes and stood up. "If he starts a radio orphanage, I say we give 'em one room and keep them all locked up."
It wasn't a bad idea. She'd have to run it by Charlie.
She found she was still staring at the radio long after Angel had left. Alastor had cleaned it up nicely. It didn't smell anymore, and the wood's old luster had been returned. But there were several deep gouges in the wood that couldn't be polished away, and the speaker fabric was stained.
After a moment, she reached over to switch it on. She turned its dial through the static, searching to see whether any stations were still broadcasting in Hell.