I think this is the last one with Alfie and Mona, as part of a continued storyline from last week and the last couple of weeks, most recently here, but beginning here.

“So,” I say, watching the foot traffic.  “The loophole.”

“Yes,” Mona says, gingerly tracing a pattern on the back of my hand, which seems to be the only part ( Read more... )

A continuation of a story from last month's contest, linked here.


The sound of a demon's flesh, when rent with a barbed whip of sufficient length, is accompanied by a shriek so piercing and so horrible that it cannot be reproduced in human orthography.  It is located in the asymptotic trench that separates human tongues from Enochian; people seem ( Read more... )

So I was going to continue the story of Alfie, the lil’ accountant demon.  And, you know! I will!  I really will.  Next week, we’ll have more of Alfie.  But for this week, I really thought it would be a lot more entertaining if I simply told you what I did this weekend.

For the past few months, I have secretly been moonlighting as the king of a ( Read more... )

(A continuation of last week's story, here.)

It is raining.  I am unused to rain.  I mean, real rain - wet rain.  In Pandemonium, you get your
sulfurous suppurations, your flaming hail, your stalactitical discharges - but never good, honest rain.  I am in Baltimore, and I am being profoundly unprofessional.

“I think she’s adorable,” he’s telling ( Read more... )

(A continuation of last week's story, here)

I have vague memories of why I ended it with Mona.  It was a good half-millenium ago; these things fade - and she was always gorgeous and sharp as a tack.  I had begun to forget why I’d called off our little liaison, such that it was.  Now, eating dinner across from her, dim memories swam ( Read more... )

“No, sir,” I said into the phone.  “It’s not going to be a problem.  Not in the very slightest.”

The receiver hissed with smoke, and a thin trickle of sulfur dioxide - that is to say, brimstone - snaked out of the handset and into my nose.

“It won’t be a problem, Andrealphus,” my boss intoned, “because we do not have problems.  Fix it before it gets ( Read more... )

“And… cut!” Amitabh Filmiwalla shakes his head.  It was a bad take.  “No, no, yaar.  Up on your feet again, Javed.”

The mantrik lays his hands on Javed’s corpse and says, “Live!  Live, Javed, live!”  There is a faint humming in the air as he says this.  The one bullet that didn’t form an exit wound pops out of his gut like a champagne cork, and the ( Read more... )

They’re a lot smarter than I think they are.  They always hide in the most inconvenient places, for one.  On the rooftops of churches, where the gargoyles and grotesques are.  Like to confuse a girl, I tell you.  You can’t see them on a winter’s night up there unless you tag them with a laser and watch them refract like a cut gem.  For another ( Read more... )

Sharkey called me at three in the morning.  Of course I was asleep.

“Th’fug d’you want?” I said.  Hannah rolled over next to me, wakened by my cell phone.  She muttered into my collarbone, “Who is that?” and I said it was Sharkey and she went back to sleep.

“Hold on,” I said into the phone.  I rolled out of the bed and crept down the ( Read more... )

Thum.

Thum.

Thum.

Call me Squishy.  There were, I reasoned, worse things than keeping the beat on a Space Viking war-galley.  There were precisely two of them.  One was being chained to an oarlock.  The other was being on the business end of a Space Viking war-galley.

“Heave!” I cried, thwacking the drum (Thum.), and a hundred thralls grunted in ( Read more... )