"Death is the time of your life"

- A. Hitler, Belsen camp

It was one of those ominous nights.

Not that it flaunted its ominousity. From the outside it just seemed like any old night in mid-November, the still air at a nice mild temperature for the time of year. It was not, let me make it totally clear, dark and/or stormy. Neither did the air have that prickly sensation of possibility, hinting at what ominous treats awaited the diligent viewer. Soothsayers adamantly refused to roam around the streets, advising passing emperors to heed caution when the Ides of March came round, preferring instead to stay in and watch Blue Peter.

Sonny L. Sustenance did not believe in invisibly ominous nights, preferring instead to believe that Britain was still great, which is probably on the same level. As his shoes clumped onto the roof of the local multi-storey car park, closely followed by the feet within, he stared around at the stars that twinkled unominously at him.

Sonny was very much in the prime of his life, galloping rather distressingly fast through his late twenties and occupying a fairly senior position at the local Blockbuster video. In appearance he was rather squat and had the sort of face that was, while not unattractive, totally uninspiring. He was just a fraction overweight, said fraction preferring to hang down over his belt whenever he took his shirt off. His legs were long and bandy, making people think, when they looked at him, of an egg on two sticks of celery. In character he was nervous and retiring, but capable of being witty when there was no other way out, and had always worried about what other people thought about him.

In other words, a person who just could not win in this world.

Had someone told him just then that by the end of the chapter he would be stone cold dead, he would probably have been quite relieved. Well, no. At first he would throw his hands above his head, do likewise with his eyebrows, then run around left and right going AAAAAAAA-AAAAAAAA-AAAAAAAAARGH and words to that effect. But maybe after that, after someone gave him a coffee and maybe slapped him about for an hour or two, he would be prepared to concede that it may not be such a bad thing.

It was just fortunate, then, that Sonny did not know that by the end of the chapter he would be stone cold dead, because he would be so preoccupied with running around going AAAAAAAA-AAAAAAAA-AAAAAAAAARGH and words to that effect then the cause of his death may actually miss him. Then, and this is interesting, he would realise how fragile life was, give up his job, take guitar lessons and end up rich and a lot more overweight, eventually drowning in a jacuzzi at the hands of two excessively playful groupies. So maybe it wasn’t fortunate that Sonny did not know that by the end of the chapter -

Sorry, I’m slipping from the point. The point being that literally seconds before his untimely death Sonny was standing at the door of his antique mini-Metro (parked as always right on the edge of the roof) with keys in hand and standing, and this is important, in the parking space next to it.

Just as he was trying to insert the key into the lock in the very small amount of light afforded by the lamp overhead placed there for just that reason, said light flickered and died. He was left standing next to his car in a vacant parking space on the edge of the rooftop car park, devoid of light and, and this is important, unseen to any passing motorists.

Speaking of which, here came one now. A flashy Volkswagen came screeching up the ramp and began circling the roof looking for a suitable space. It was being driven by a lady called Janice who was a senior managing director of some company or other (with that sort of title, you don’t need to drop any names) and she had not a care in the world. She also liked to park in the space just to the right of another car, because she had read in Bella that thieves prefer to target isolated cars. The last thing Janice wanted was a stolen car. Especially not one she had gone through so much legal trouble to get.

So, there she was, driving around this empty rooftop car park. Suddenly, she saw another car - a clapped-out old mini-Metro sulking underneath a dead bulb. There was a reassuringly dark space to the right of it, which may have contained something but definitely didn’t contain a car. The sensual rhythms of the Prodigy hammered around the interior of her car as she casually slid into the space.

Of course, the heavy bass rhythms blaring at full volume around her served to muffle the unmistakable sound of two long, bandy shins banging against her front bumper.

Now, if that had been all, Sonny would have been practically alright. A large bruise on the left shin and a small fracture in the right, but otherwise upright and very much alive. Unfortunately he happened to be standing on the edge of a rooftop car park.

The multi-storey car park was not a particularly tall one, being only four storeys high, so if Sonny had just allowed himself to smack heavily against the pavement like a sack of so much giblets, he would have been practically alright. Nineteen broken bones, a ruptured kidney and a slipped disc, but otherwise alright. Such a shame that Sonny had to twist in the air so that he could see where he was going.

In the fraction of a fraction of a second between Sonny’s head touching the ground and his neck being thrust into a rather undignified angle, he summed up his life. That done, he died.

He may have been interested to learn that Janice died seven years later after being hit on the head by a filing cabinet, and her car was stolen from the exact same spot eighteen months later, and that Sonny’s own car was stolen just over a year after his death by his own uncle’s travel agent’s best friend’s employee’s teenage son, who promptly used it to ram-raid the local branch of Asda, managing to get away with a jar of Brylcreem and a pork joint.

Not that he did learn this information, because he was dead.

"Oh, dear. Has someone called an ambulance?"

That was the next thing Sonny heard, and it appeared to be coming from a crouching person in the company of many other crouching people apparently interested by something within their little grouping. He stepped towards the little mushroom-like huddle, and tried to see what they were looking at.

"Are you sure he’s dead?" said another voice.

"Who?" asked Sonny, ignored.

"I checked his pulse," said a third, helpfully. "But it seems obvious. Necks shouldn’t bend like that."

"Let me see!" said Sonny loudly, placing a hand on the nearest person’s shoulder in order to propel himself forward to see whoever had a bendy neck. To his surprise, his hand went straight through said shoulder, he lost his balance, fell forward and ended up lying one inch above the ground, sticking right through a passer-by who didn’t seem to notice. In this uncomfortable position he saw the corpse.

"Oh," he said, feeling he should say something. "Oh. Bum."

As he floated to his feet, or at least to a vertical position, he noticed that everyone around him seemed to be wearing drab clothes and had rather pasty skin. He examined his own hands - they were still the usual peachy-pink hue. Then he noticed that the entire world seemed to have become slightly more dull - like a television with the colour turned half-way down.

"You know," said a male voice behind him, "out of the billions of memories I have of what people say when they realise they’re dead, ‘Oh Bum’ is one of the rarest."

Now that he was getting the hang of not being in the physical world anymore, Sonny allowed himself to slowly drift one hundred and eighty-degrees clockwise. Behind him was a gentleman who, although judging by his navy blue pinstripe suit was presumably unaffected by the sudden drop in colour, had a similarly grey complexion to everyone else.

"So I am dead," said Sonny flatly.

The man - he looked and spoke a bit like an accountant, or possibly a lawyer - placed an empathic hand on Sonny’s semi-transparent shoulder. "Don’t get so downcast," he said. "Many people find the afterlife rather enjoyable."

Sonny twigged. "Are you ... Death?" he enquired, sticking an ominous ring onto the last word.

An outstretched hand waggled horizontally. "Sort of. Sort of. I’m Mr. Reaper, and I’m an associate of the Confederate Office of the Lately Deceased, formerly Death and Co."

"You don’t look like the Grim Reaper."

"Got to move with the times, Mr. Catermole."

"Who?"

Sort Of Death examined a clipboard which had suddenly appeared in his bony hand. "Frank Catermole, aged 28?"

"No," said Sonny with the patience of the recently expired. "Sonny L. Sustenance, aged 28."

A veined eye swept the clipboard once again, then the hand of the attached body raised the top sheet. "Ah, here we are, Sonny L. Sustenance, aged 47, killed in drive-by shooting in Benidorm a week on Friday."

"Look, how can I be killed in a drive-by shooting in Benidorm a week on Friday while I’ve already been knocked off a multi-storey car park?"

Mr. Reaper looked around, apparently noting the street signs, and consulted his clipboard again. "Corner of Sheep Street and Misty Street," he mumbled to himself. "Right date, right time ... sure you’re not Frank Catermole?"

"I know who I am, Mr. Reaper," replied Sonny. For some reason he felt he didn’t need to mourn his own passing away, and no longer felt particularly downhearted - not because there was nothing to be depressed about, but because he couldn’t summon up the effort. He could think depressing things - he would never see his friends, family or Mini Metro again - but couldn’t quite make himself feel sad about them.

Meanwhile, the pale gentleman took a bone white mobile phone from his inside blazer pocket, pressed a single button and held it to his pale ear. "Hello? I’ve got the Catermole job here, he says his name’s Sustenance, not Catermole ... yes, that’s right ... oh, I see. Well, give them a slap from me." He slapped the little door on the phone shut. "Sorry, just been calling Admin ... apparently it’s work experience week. Anyway, they wonder if you’d mind signing it Catermole for now, and we’ll deal with Benidorm when we get there."

Hesitantly Sonny took the proffered pen, apparently made from obsidian, and signed ‘Cattermole’ as best he could. As soon as he had finished the loop on the ‘e’, he noticed the living world pause like an old video, then melt away into blackness. He and the Grim Accountant were left floating in void.

"What happens now?" asked Sonny.

He was treated to a sickly smile. "You get packed off to the Underworld, and I get shouted at."

"The Underworld?" cried Sonny in distress as he began to fade. "You mean Hell?"

Reaper didn’t look up from making a little note on his clipboard. "No, we don’t have a Hell anymore - there were several flaws in the concept, so we scrapped it. You’re heading for the First Underworld - the start of your journey."

Sonny tried to say, "My what?" but he had already vanished.

"The man who walks his journey through the Eight Underworlds alone is either very self-assured or very stupid - and being self-assured when dead is also very stupid"

- Achilles Mk. 2 User’s manual

The entrance to the First Underworld turned out to be a pub bearing the sign ‘Traveller’s Rest’. Not a particularly nice pub, either - a grotty Mock Tudor tourist trap. It floated unsupported in smoky grey void and as Sonny floated towards it he noticed it was rather fuzzy round the edges, almost ghostlike. He could not tell if it was slightly transparent because there was just blank greyness behind it, but nevertheless it indeed gave the impression of having that quality. The shingle bore a skeleton holding a Dick Whittington-esque stick with a bundle on the end pointing into the middle distance, and it depressed Sonny slightly.

Sighing deeply, he swam towards the door, finding when he neared it that it seemed to be sucking him in. When he was finally inside gravity took hold and he sprawled stupidly across the red diamond-patterned carpet. As the door slammed shut behind him, he became aware from his face-down position that, where once there had been general mumbling and consternation among the inmates of the pub, now there was silence. Keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the floor Sonny got to his feet, then raised his head with trepidation.

"Oh dear lord," he said, simply.

It wasn’t that the interior of the pub was particularly horrifying. There were nice black rafters going overhead set to knock out anyone taller than six foot, but that can be considered normal in Mock Tudor establishments. The walls were papered with flowery patterns on a vomit green background and punctuated with the occasional framed pencil drawing which, although morbid, was not particularly sickening. The bar was panelled with heavily grained wood and the rows of bottles, glasses and miscellaneous drinkies seemed perfectly normal. The barman was a jolly fat red-faced gent in a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

It was the clientele that caught Sonny’s attention. Not that they were heavily bearded leather-strewn biker types with threatening looks on their mostly concealed faces. They were not, in fact, human.

‘Monster’ would be a very lazy description, and besides it didn’t serve to identify the sheer variety of horrific visages sitting or doing the respective equivalents all over the bar. Most of the nearest booth to Sonny was filled with a huge green betentacled creature stuffed with tentacles, dribbling unspeakably into the pint of its companion, a three-foot red-skinned imp cloven of hoof. Sitting at the bar were, amongst others, a one-eyed very tall, very thin orange demon with a third arm in the centre of the chest holding its pint and a green seven-foot heavily armoured troll inspecting the blade of a broadsword.

The hordes of betoothed and betentacled monstrosities around him were bad enough, but the fact that they were all staring at him with the expressions of schoolchildren waiting for the teacher to choose someone to wipe the blackboard was really disconcerting. Since the barkeep seemed to be beckoning to him Sonny walked wobbly over to the panelled bar, and leant on it just before his legs buckled. Time, he decided, to blend in.

"Pint of Best, please," he quavered, as the orange creature clung to his arm with spindly fingers and stared up at him like a mistreated puppy.

"Why do you want a pint?" asked the landlord in a jolly, friendly fashion. "You’re dead, you don’t drink."

"Right. Right. Er -"

"You want to know what you’re doing here?"

"- Yes!"

"This is the start of your great journey."

The mention of that jogged Sonny’s memory. He had recalled reading something about South American folklore. "You mean the four year journey of the soul?"

He was treated to an odd look. "Could be four years, could be four months, depends on how fast you go," he said. "You’re here to pick up a companion."

"Eh?"

The barman gave the impression that he had made this speech, or an equivalent, many millions of times. "A helpful demon is an absolute must for the soul as he goes on his journey through the Eight Underworlds to the Land of Eternal Rest - how would anyone survive the trials and tribulations on the way without one?"

"Don’t ask me -"

The barman suddenly appeared to be wearing a pair of reading glasses as he dug out a very large and extremely over-used leatherbound grimoire, which he slammed onto the bar hard enough to send the beermugs rattling and opened it at, Sonny noticed, near the beginning. He checked the bar clock and ran his finger down the page, stopping 2.7 inches above and to the left of a water mark. "Frank Catermole?"

"No, Sonny L. Sustenance."

"You’re not supposed to be here until a week on Friday."

"There was an Admin cock-up."

After a pretty lengthy explanation and an even longer look at the books, during which Sonny noticed that the assembled freakshow were all leaning forward and listening intently, the server of drinks ducked behind the bar, leaving Sonny to offer slightly lopsided smiles to the owners of the many pairs of eyes angled in his direction. Finally the barman emerged from his hidey-hole wearing a golf visor and holding a pocket calculator, and after a stream of mathematical complications he put what looked like a voting slip in front of Sonny. "Your sin/virtue ratio is looking pretty bad, so you’re only entitled to a Mark 3. I would advise you to choose quickly." With that, he threw an obsidian pen onto the bar and went off to serve a host of succubi who were clamouring for his attention.

Sonny examined the slip. He was clearly expected to pick one of the three names on the paper which meant absolutely nothing to him - ‘ACHILLES Mk. 3!’ blared the topmost box. ‘The intelligent choice for the newly departed soul! With NEW IMPROVED ‘STEELMAN’ TENDONS and AMAZING NEW SENSE OF IRONY!’ it blagged, then it said it again in fifteen different languages.

Since the other two choices didn’t have so many capital letters Sonny chose the Achilles Mk. 3 and passed the slip back to the landlord, who examined, suppressed a snigger and shouted a complicated serial number to the thronged mass. For a moment there was silence, during which all the demons groaned in unison and slumped down in despair, then the barman shouted directly to a creature slumped face-down in a puddle of demonic nectar. It sat up in surprise, tottered a bit, then fell sideways off its stool onto the floor.

The barman and two winged spirits helped the Achilles Mk. 3 to its elephantine feet and propelled him towards Sonny, who was watching in horror. The barman resumed his spot behind the panelled bar. "Sonny L. Sustenance, meet your new eternal companion, Jim."

Sonny gave Jim a long look before speaking. The demon had only two arms and two legs, and more to the point one head, but there the similarity to a human ended. Its skin was a deep orangey red and the limbs were each nearly a foot in diameter. The body was tough and slablike and mercifully covered by a weird chainmail ensemble, set off beautifully by a horned leather-covered helmet. Two bloodshot yellow eyes the size of eggs stared up at Sonny over a moisten snout. "Hi," said Sonny.

Jim coughed horribly and extracted from the depths of his codpiece an aged and heavily crumpled scrap of paper, from which he began to read with difficulty. "Con-grat-you-late-eons for choosing ter-her A-chill-ees em-kay-three," he droned. "If treated well I will be a you-seh-full com-pan-ion for ter-her long trip a-head and a loy-al and rell-ee-a-bull friend for ter-her rest of et-ern-it-ee."

Sonny smiled weakly. "Well, I suppose we’d better be going," he said.

"How about a drink first?" said Jim hopefully.

One drink became two, and two drinks became seventeen, and in the end Sonny was forced to put a choke chain around the now moronically drunk Jim’s neck and drag him from the establishment. Looking back much later, Sonny couldn’t remember why he’d put up with Jim watering his oesophagus for so long. He just had a dim recollection of his companion having a very persuasive manner.

The two of them, the pockets in Jim’s clothing stuffed with secretly stowed alcoholic beverages, stepped out of the Traveller’s Rest. The one thing Sonny was not expecting to see was the same grey, blank void, so it

was fortunate that he did not see the same grey, blank void. However, in all fairness, he was also not expecting to see a featureless grassy meadow.

Blinking under a white sun, Sonny gave his surroundings due appreciation. Dew-sodden grass squelched underfoot and a bright blue sky, unbesmirched by cloud cover, stretched from horizon to horizon. The ground neither rose nor fell in all directions, and the clear air allowed him to see for miles. There was clearly very little around him.

And yet, the landscape had an oddly artificial feel. The sky was the same flat blue colour all over, not darkening or lightening depending on proximity to the sun or the horizon. The grass, although evidently organic and full of chlorophyll just as grass should be, stood perfectly vertically to a blade, except around Sonny’s feet, and was set carefully in rows. It was as if someone with a lot of time on their hands had simply inserted each blade of grass one by one into the soil.

"This is the First Underworld?" Sonny inquired. The Traveller’s Rest had disappeared, but he had been expecting that of the place.

Jim, half mummified in a complicatedly folded map which looked to Sonny like little more than a sheet of white paper with black dots of random size and position all over it, seemed to examine one particularly bespotted area carefully. "Yep," he said. "Also known as the Infinite Meadow."

Sonny cast another look around. It certainly looked like a meadow, and at first glance did betray it as infinite in size, so Jim’s mapreading skills were apparently unaffected by a million billion years sitting in a pub drinking fermented nymph secretions. "Which way do we need to go?"

Jim suddenly began bashing his temples with rocky fists. "I know this, I know this," he chanted to himself, starting to smack himself about to stimulate his memory. "They told me this at school -"

Despite himself, Sonny was interested. "Demons go to school?"

"You don’t think bottomless knowledge of the Eight Underworlds just appears out of thin air, do you? Anyway, I remember now. We’ve got to head for the Abyss of Eternal Torment."

"Sounds like fun," said Sonny, staring again at the featureless horizon. "Any idea in which direction that is?"

Jim stood on tip-toe, pointed a finger at nothing in particular, then began to rotate. Picking up speed, he was soon spinning like the finest of ballerinas. With great ceremony, and to the accompaniment of a sound normally heard when a vacuum cleaner is turned off, he slowed and eventually came to a complete stop. His finger swung wildly left and right a little then juddered abruptly to a stop, pointing to an equally featureless region of grass. "Thataway," he said.

Sonny was impressed, but endeavoured not to show it. "Then we’ll head thataway," he said. "This Infinite Meadow’s got to end somewhere." Gathering his spirits, he walked briskly in the direction Jim was still stiffly pointing.

Whereupon he smacked his head on something hard, tottered a few steps backwards and, this being inevitable, collapsed. After Jim managed to click the bones in his arm back into their sockets, he helped up his master and sat on the floor. He had been told about this, he knew, but couldn’t for the life of him remember any details.

"We’re surrounded by something," he said. Sonny slapped the empty air, hitting something very flat and very smooth and causing the landscape around him to wobble alarmingly. Like the intolerable mime artist of age he felt along the very flat, very smooth something, walking sideways as he did, before coming to an edge. The invisible wall bent ninety degrees, but he continued. After walking for a very short time he encountered another ninety-degree bend. Another five minutes past, and Sonny came to the conclusion that they were indeed surrounded by a wall that couldn’t be seen. He slapped it again. Again, the sky and the grass below wavered.

Then he noticed it, taking another look at the grass. Where once there had been completely vertical grass, unstirred and unchanging, there was now a collection of footprints. Not just where he had been walking - everywhere beyond the walls. Some distance away through the wall he saw a rather oddly-shaped dent in the grass, and he was baffled until he looked around and saw that Jim was squatting on the floor, drinking from a bottle marked ‘Olde Nick’s Spicy Brew’, forming a rather oddly-shaped dent in the grass.

Experimentally, Sonny poked at a small patch of grass near the invisible wall with his foot, and watched as a patch of identical size and shape wobbled beyond the wall in time with his motions.

"It’s a mirror," he said, twigging. "We’re surrounded by mirrors."

"I’ll drink to that," said Jim, doing so.

"I don’t get it, though - I can’t see my own reflection. Or yours."

Finally showing interest, the little demon dragged himself to his feet and wobbled over to the wall. He gave it an experimental kick and watched the surroundings with interest. "Well, you’re dead. Everyone knows dead people don’t have reflections."

"What about you?"

"What about me?"

That was good enough for Sonny. He summarised the situation. "We’re stuck in a meadow about ten foot square surrounded by mirrors. What now?"

Jim sighed pointedly and took a large and sturdy sledgehammer from his pack. Without deigning to offer an explanation, he swung it in a wide arc and hit the mirror closest to him.

Audibly there was a slow tinkle, a crack, and a crescendo of glass falling apart. But nothing happened visually - the meadow continued as its normal grassy, dewy self.

Sonny waved a hand in the direction of the invisible barrier. It didn’t connect. With slightly more confidence, he took a step forward and waved again. "It’s gone," he said. "You broke it."

"It must be a very clever mirror," said Jim casually, putting away his big hammer.

The odd couple wandered away from the now three-walled box for some distance. Turning around after a few hundred yards, they could still see absolutely nothing. It was indeed a very clever mirror. They did see, however, a small village about a mile in the direction Jim had been pointing in, and rolling curvaceous mountains beyond.

"The Underworld," muttered Sonny under his breath as he and Jim began trekking towards the structure.

"Yep, that’s the place. Told you we weren’t lost."

- Magellan, somewhere off the coast of Chile

Neither party knowing what to do next, they decided to take the obvious step which many travellers have taken and ultimately regretted. They decided to ask a local for directions.

Although perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they decided to ask the local for directions. The local pub, this being Jim’s idea. When Sonny stumbled in, dew soaking the turn-ups of the ghostly jeans which had somehow followed him into the spirit world, he noticed that the place bore a remarkable rememblance to the Traveller’s Rest, but the demons were a little less interested to see them. Sonny tried to grab the barman’s attention, who could have been the same barman seen earlier had his shirt not been green, but the jolly red-faced yeoman didn’t seem to see him. Whereupon Jim slapped his three-fingered palms upon the bar and spoke in the loudest voice he could manage without resorting to shouting.

"Good morrow, barkeep," he semi-shouted. "Might we bend thy ear to our plight?"

"Someone’s drunk," muttered a shadowy but accurate demon in the now silent bar.

"We’re looking for the Abyss of Eternal Torment," said Sonny, seizing his opportunity.

The barman, having recovered from Jim, rolled up his green shirt sleeves and rubbed his bristly chin, lower lip protruding with concentration. He stared at an apparently interesting rafter three feet behind and one foot above Sonny’s head, and licked his fuzzy chops. After about two minutes of this thoughtful display he said, "the what?"

After Jim patiently repeated the request, the barman went back into his routine. It was plainly clear after a further fifteen minutes that the man did not have the faintest idea what or where the Abyss of Eternal Torment was, but as Sonny turned to leave he noticed that a rafter two feet in front of his head and one foot above bore the sign ‘TRY THE PUBLIC INFORMATION BUREAU’.

The Public Information Bureau turned out to be another, identical pub directly opposite the first one, which had incidentally been called the Council Planning Office, but the barman (this time in a puce shirt) was a little more helpful. After a measly five minutes of umming, ahing and staring at arafter two foot behind and one foot above Sonny’s head he said "Do you mean the Abyss of Everlasting Torment?"

Sonny glared at Jim for a moment before answering. "Possibly."

"Try the Department of Civil Improvement."

The Department of Civil Improvement, the pub next door, was run by a fat, jolly old barman wearing a chartreuse shirt. After staring at a rafter two foot behind and one foot above Sonny’s head for a much shorter amount of time, he said, "I’ve never heard of an Abyss of Everlasting Torment, but I did hear the name Abyss of Everlasting Anguish thrown around somewhere."

I could go on. Upon closer inspection the village turned out to be a fairly wide collection of identical Mock Tudor public houses with strange names, each run by a barman obsessed with a certain rafter and wearing a brightly-coloured shirt with the sleeves rolled up - so far they had gone through green, puce, chartreuse, orange, cherry red, dirt brown, sunset yellow, navy blue, ocean blue, militant blue, toothpaste blue, grey, darker grey, turquoise, blood vessel purple and a rather ugly shade of greeny-browny orange. The Abyss of Everlasting Anguish transmuted into the Chasm of Everlasting Anguish, the Chasm of Neverending Anguish, the Chasm of Neverending Pain, the Cliff of Neverending Pain, the Cliff of Infinite Agony, the Fault-Line of Infinite Daffodils, the Fissure of Endless Forget-Me-Nots, the Crack of Endless Grass and the Hole of Large Quantities of Sand.

Finally Sonny and Jim stumbled into the very last building of the village, a quaint little public house by the name of Bengali Barry’s Indian Restaurant, in which dwelt a barkeep whose shirt was a fetching shade of forest green. Sonny, being driven mad, strode right up to the bar, slapped two fists upon it, winced, and said, "We are looking for the Hole of Large Quantities of Sand. Tell us now where we can find it. If you lick your lips, stare at a rafter two feet behind and one foot above my head or stall for time in any way whatsoever, I will ask my little chum here to bite off your right arm and jam it up your rectal passage."

"Grr," said Jim.

The landlord sighed pointedly and said "I think you must be talking about the Bucket Which Might Once Have Contained Sand. You’ll find it near the west wall of this very public house."

Sonny, rather embarrassed with the nice response to his angry bearing, and Jim disappointed at not biting off any appendages - he couldn’t reach the right arm anyway but anything at eye level would have done - marched from the bar and began searching for the west wall of the house. It was situated directly on the other side to the east wall.

Not only was the Bucket Which Might Once Have Contained Sand there, it was lodged between two large branches of an unidentified tree.

"Abyss of Eternal Torment, eh?"

"That’s what they told me," said Jim defensively. "The Underworld likes to play tricks. I shouldn’t worry about it."

"What now?"

"Now we get the Bucket out of the tree and see what happens."

Not for the first time Sonny wished he had not ignored so many beggars. He would have had less money, but he might have got a Mark 4 demon. On the other hand, although many companies invited you to prepare for later life, preparing for the afterlife was an exclusively religious facility and Sonny had not had much luck with such establishments.

But I digress. Getting the Bucket Which Might Once Have Contained Sand out of the tree was the easy bit. Using it to gain access to the Second Underworld was a little more of a challenge. In the end Sonny found that putting it over his head and inviting Jim to whack it repeatedly with a tree branch afforded some progress - the net result being that only his lower body was sticking out of the Bucket.

Jim thoughtfully upturned Sonny, balanced himself carefully on the underside of his master’s trainers and began jumping up and down with aplomb. It took four jumps before the two of them both disappeared into the darkness of the Second Underworld.

"That wasn’t so hard," said Sonny after dusting himself down. "I’ve only been dead a few hours and I’m already at the mouth of the Second Underworld."

"They get progressively bigger," said Jim who was rubbing the spot where his armoured underpants chafed.

The mouth of the Second Underworld was a cavern - which could have been underground had there been an overground. Faintly purple rock stretched overhead, down the walls and along the floor as well, and little hunks of glowing crystal embedded in the wall provided the light. Human bones, moulded from plaster, littered the floor and a huge cast-iron gate barred the exit. The only other way in or out seemed to be a rather out-of-place steel vault door embedded in the rock wall opposite.

"This is indeed a predicament," said Sonny.

"Wait for developments," replied Jim.

Developments arrived not seventeen seconds later in the form of the vault door suddenly clicking unlocked and swinging aside. Sonny’s first impulse was to approach, but his second one was to do the opposite.

For emerging from the shadows on six spindly little pig’s trotters was the biggest demon Sonny had seen yet, walking with the assured gait of one who knows they are seriously imposingly unattractive, standing taller than a house (three-bedroomed) and presumably trying to suppress a grin - I say presumably because it was difficult to tell which orifice was his mouth.

Let’s not mince words. The thing was hideous. If you could imagine something which looked like the result of a poorly planned biological experiment involving a tarantula, a gorilla, and in fact sixty-seven percent of the animal kingdom, then with a few pairs of Deeley-Boppers strapped on in rather unusual places and a big bucket of phlegmy pig’s offal thrown over it, you’d have something about half-way towards being as ugly as this monster.

Sonny couldn’t speak. His arms were folded across his stomach. Never in just over a decade of horror films had he experienced something like that - not even Jim Henson could have come up with it. The ghostly partially digested food in his stomach which he had had just before his death was rising up to flick at his uvula. His eyes watered with the hideousness of the demon, and his nose began to bleed as the sickeningly malformed creature radiated putridity.

"Hi, Martin," said Jim.

"Hi, Jim," said Martin.

Sonny, who was apparently choking on his phlegm, swallowed rapidly and said, "You know this - thing?"

"This person," said Martin pointedly.

"Know him? I went to college with him."

Sonny had managed to adjust to being dead and being in the afterlife. He had just about adjusted to Jim. He wasn’t prepared to adjust to Jim having old college pals with six legs. "What now?" he said.

"Well," said Jim in a patronising manner, "we have to answer a riddle set for us by the Infernal Gateway Beast."

"It’s a badge I wear with pride," said Martin, proffering his badge for all to see.

"Can we have this riddle so we can get on with the journey?"

Sighing with disappointment Jim said, "Go ahead, Mart."

Martin drew himself up to his full, impressive height, the effect being marred somewhat by one of his mouths choosing to vomit up its share of yesterday’s dinner, and spoke in a voice like Clint Eastwood. "‘Why did God give us all two hands?’" he intoned, the walls rumbling slightly as the echoes died away.

"He does a good Roger Moore as well," said Jim. "Go on, Mart, do your Roger Moore."

"Nah," said Martin shyly.

Sonny, meanwhile, was rubbing his chin in thought. "‘Why did God give us all two hands’, eh?" he said to himself. "That’s a knotty one,"

"You’ll never get it," said Martin, rocking from trotter to trotter eagerly, making the ground shake.

"He’s right, you know," said Jim.

"Who’s side are you on?"

Sonny’s spirit brain was in overdrive. There were millions of neat purposes two hands could perform. Then again, there were also a few cracking things that could easily be performed with one. He had a feeling the demon Martin had one of those trick answers in mind. After fifteen minutes of thought, during which Jim and Martin talked about old times, Sonny came up with the perfect trick answer.

"In case one of them gets a splinter," he said proudly.

Jim and Martin exchanged glances. "Not what I had in mind," said the big monstrosity. "But you can go anyway."

"What?"

"It’s quite logical, Sonny," said Jim. "He said you had to answer the riddle - he never said you had to answer it correctly."

"Oh. Right," said Sonny, slightly disappointed.

"You know, Jim," said Sonny when they were on their way, "I’m slightly disappointed."

"Oh? Why?"

"Well, I thought the Journey of the Soul was going to be exciting. Full of danger and peril and really scary things. Flaming torches and spider’s webs and stuff. To tell you the truth I was looking forward to it. From what I’ve seen so far, it all looks rather... well, silly."

Jim nodded understandingly. "The first few trials are silly in order to lure you into a false sense of security. It gets better."

I have decided to speed up the narrative. The Journey of the Soul lasted just over a year for Sonny and a million and one stories could be told about his progress, but the focus of this book is the Land of Eternal Rest so I should pick things up a bit. The journey indeed became long and tortuous after a while, with Sonny exclaiming the words ‘not another bloody maze’ on no less than seventeen occasions, and he was a very tolerant person.

"I wonder how the living are getting on," said Sonny one day when he was dangling by his fingertips over a pit full of ten-foot maggots.

The Second Underworld took just over a week to complete, and bearing in mind that the First Underworld lasted just a few hours and that the rate of acceleration was constant Sonny did not have high hopes. The bulk of this week, in all fairness, was spent trotting around and getting thoroughly lost in a cavernous maze. Jim was vaguely aware that they needed to get something from one side of the maze and drag it to another, then take the result to another side before transferring a bucket of water to a region of the maze that wasn’t a side but was quite near one, then carry a golden statue to the very centre of the maze and do something else to it.

Quite straightforward in theory. Fifty-seven percent of the wasted week was spent wandering around relying on Jim’s fractured sense of direction and Sonny’s ‘human instinct’. Forty-three-point-nine-nine percent was spent carrying something heavy around relying on Sonny’s fractured sense of direction and Jim’s back not giving out. The remaining zero-point-zero-one percent was spent trying to figure out what to do with the golden statue, but it was a significant fraction of a percent because Jim lost two fingers and half a square metre of skin.

This could be considered an average excursion. The very worst maze they encountered was about half-way through the Sixth Underworld, which took the best part (meaning all) of a month to complete. I won’t bore you with the statistics, but needless to say they were very staggering. Think of the most staggering statistic you ever heard - even more so than that.

The journey was quite a strain for our two heroes. Jim, as well as the aforementioned stuff, sustained damage which could have effortlessly killed a person. Twice. Luckily demons are regenerative, else Sonny would have found himself carting a lump of misshapen flesh around. Sonny himself took no damage at all, but he did lose a large portion of his left sleeve. He was placed in afterlife-threatening situations quite a lot, the afore-mentioned maggots being a mild example. Although a dead soul cannot die, reincarnation is a possibility - and not a pretty one. When dead, returning to Earth is the very last thing most people would want to do, especially as a baby. Putting aside the unpleasant birth and having to share a womb for nine months with a placenta (which is not a stimulating conversationist), you’d have to go through the tedium of growing up, potty training and Winnie the Pooh all over again. Not to mention puberty...

In short, a soul cannot be considered safe when dead. But I digress. Sonny and Jim, having lived (bad choice of word I know, but let’s not complicate matters) through the most terrible journey anyone (and everyone) has ever taken, finally popped out of the underside of the Eighth Underworld and plummeted a seemingly infinite distance towards their final destination.

"Did you hear something?"

- Lazarus, the Ninth Underworld

Sonny’s outstretched palms felt rough concrete. The kind with those tiny bits of grit in which get stuck up your fingernails. It was also slightly warm, as if the weather had been nice. His searching hands found a crack, perfectly straight, such as the ones you get between paving stones, the same ones children and sensible businessmen endeavour to avoid, the latter when they think no-one’s looking. For an instant Sonny entertained the notion that he was lying on the pavement near a certain multi-storey car park, and that the last year had been a rather nasty dream. But then the feel of a chainmailed demon lying dazed on top of him and the presence of rather nice, warm weather in the middle of a British November deterred this thought.

"Wake up, sir, it’s over," said a voice.

A pair of spiritual human eyelids flickered and their demonic equivalents did same, and soon Sonny and Jim were both blinking rapidly in the light - they hadn’t seen proper light since the First Underworld - and trying to focus on the woman standing over them.

She was quite the most amazingly attractive woman Sonny had ever seen. She just seemed to radiate perfection, from the soles of her sensible shoes to the top of her golden head. She was like Denise Van Outen plus Courtney Cox multiplied by Posh Spice to the power of ten squillion.

Jim, however, saw a rather plain, dumpy lady with unkempt hair and an unflattering beige dress.

"The nightmare’s over, sir," she said. "Welcome to the Ninth Underworld."

Sonny, who by now had dragged himself into a sitting position, stared at his demon who sat next to him and stared back. "We did it, Jim," he said levelly, not wishing as yet to embarass himself. "We’ve made it to the Land of Eternal Rest!"

"Oh," said Jim, not wishing likewise. "Good."

The woman, whose name badge colourfully proclaimed that HER NAME WAS ‘DEIRDRE’, examined a clipboard in a hand which was to Sonny a slender creation of a kindly God and to Jim a collection of frankfurters with painted nails. "Says here ‘Catermole’ but it’s work experience week again -"

"I love you," said Sonny, mind wandering. He quickly tried to rectify the embarassment, but ended up doing the equivalent of trying to remove a chocolate stain with a peanut butter sandwich. "Sustenance is the name. Sonny Sustenance. As in Sonny and Cher. Sonny L. Sustenance."

DEIRDRE checked the page underneath, then the next. "Simon Lionel Sustenant?"

"No, Sonny Lazarus Sustenance."

"Oh, yes. Time of death -"

Sonny decided to leap in before the Administration monster struck again. "November the 17th, 2002, seven-seventeen p.m." He had long ago worked it out perfectly whilst trying to evade the Nineteen Appendaged Thingy Of Somewhere-Or-Other.

"Cause of death," continued the woman, "drive-by shooting in Benidorm."

A long pause followed. "Yes, that’s right," said Jim.

DEIRDRE handed an envelope to Sonny and went off to talk to someone else who was lying nearby under an orange demon with three limbs and long spindly fingers.

As Sonny was opening the envelope, Jim’s overbearing presence suddenly caught his attention. "What are you still doing here?"

"Oh, that’s a nice thing to say to your only friend for the last twelve months."

"I didn’t mean that - I just thought that you would only help me get through the Eight Underworlds then bugger off somewhere."

Jim seemed genuinely upset "What? Nah, your demon is for eternity, not just for the Underworlds," he said, misquoting. "Besides, you don’t think demons get eternal rest too?"

Sonny, meanwhile, had already opened his envelope and taken what was within. These turned out to be a letter, a pamphlet and a key with a tag labelled ‘Noah Apartments’. Putting the key and the pamphlet away for later, he unfolded the letter and read it aloud for his companion, who had never learned to read properly.

"‘Dear Mr. Sustenance,’" he read. "‘Congratulations on your passing away and welcome to the Land of Eternal Rest, the Ninth Underworld. You are doubtless extremely tired from your great journey and will want to get some of your aforementioned Eternal Rest. You will find that the enclosed key opens Apartment 645 of the Noah Apartment Block, 16 Moses Avenue. We hope your quarters will be to the liking of you and your demon, and wish you a happy afterlife. The enclosed pamphlet will provide all you need to know about the Ninth Underworld. Sincerely, the Confederate Office of the Lately Deceased.’"

"C.O.L.D," said Jim, smiling. "I like that. What’s the pamphlet say?"

"Let’s find this apartment first."

The Land of Eternal Rest reminded Sonny a lot of what the early American film and television industry seemed to think America was like. Since these similes don’t mean anything outside the Earth realm a description shall have to be provided. Here goes.

Think of a street in San Francisco. Any street at all. Remember to add the big hills, cable cars and newspaper stands, but just hold on to the key elements here - a road, with two pavements either side and with big, fancy buildings looming high over everything.

Doubtless you have pictured the buildings as flat, grey blocks. Not so in the Ninth Underworld. These are streamlined architectural masterpieces, millions of miles high, curvy and brightly coloured, but not gaudy - hued tastefully in cool melds of blue and green here, fiery blends of red and yellow there. These are the kind of buildings you can imagine smug tossers like Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen standing proud in.

You may also have imagined the inevitable things that come with cities - litter, dirt, vagrants - forget them. The streets are completely empty of things people don’t want to see - the concrete and tarmac all have a kind of well-scrubbed look about them, even though they have never been cleaned in all eternity. As for vagrants, forget them. Everyone here is beautiful - even the men stir certain long-forgotten feelings in other men. Their skins have a golden, almost waxy sheen and their eyes have that come-to-bed sparkle. They’re all dressed in marvellous, gorgeous clothes, the sort people in the sixties thought we’d all be wearing by now but are nevertheless really neat. Oh, and everyone’s followed around by a demon, size and shape varying from minute to Martin. Everyone in the Ninth Underworld is beautiful - from the point of view of the opposite sex, that is.

That’s about all the description you need for now. There is something else important, but I’ll leave that for later - I think that’s called an enigma.

Anyway, down this street and surrounded by people Sonny thought of as gorgeous and Jim thought of as rather plain came our heroes, the taller of the two occasionally glancing at the letter.

"I don’t get it," said Sonny. "We’ve been looking for hours, I don’t see any ‘Moses Avenue’."

"Don’t look at me," said Jim. "I’m a demon of the underworld - I don’t know diddly-squat about the Land of Eternal Rest."

They had indeed been walking around for hours. If they had been lost to start with, they were really lost now. Neither of them had been keeping track of their progress, Sonny because he was still adjusting to all this, Jim because he had a stubborn bit of phlegm in his demonic oesophagus.

"Excuse me -" said Sonny to a beautiful woman.

"Oui?" she said, obviously equally pleased to see him.

"I’m looking for Moses Avenue -"

"Quoi?"

"Moses Avenue?"

"Moo -"

"Moses -"

"- Avenue?"

"Yes. Oui."

"Non."

"Merci. Au revoir."

"Bye."

Sonny and Jim asked fifteen gorgeous passers-by between them and, although Sonny gained the phone numbers of seven and Jim gained the spiritual aura address of four succubi, neither of them were any closer to finding their new homes

In the end it was suggested that they ask one of the taxis.

A ‘taxi’ turned out to be an angel in wings and a halo standing on a flying bed - four poster, brass frame, feather mattress - and apparently steering the thing by praying. Sonny was half-way through flagging it down before he noticed the unusual qualities of the thing, but by the time his hand had dropped the driver had seen him and had pulled up.

"Can I take you folk somewhere?" asked the bearded chappy in the wings.

Sonny and Jim looked at each other with perfect comic timing, then the human said, "Could you take us to Moses Avenue?"

The angel frowned. "You mean Goering Road?"

"No... I mean Moses Avenue."

The angel shrugged, losing a few feathers. "Hop in."

Sonny and Jim lay side-by-side on the bed, pinned into place by G-force, occasionally offering worried glances to each other. The bed was very comfy and the sheets were velvety, but they could take no comfort from this as buildings and people zipped past too quickly to possibly be controlled. The angel just knelt there at the end, head bowed, eyes tightly shut and hands clasped together in prayer.

"They really take this Eternal Rest thing seriously," said Jim.

Sonny didn’t say anything. He had intended to, but he lost his voice when the bed narrowly missed another bed with pink drapes.

GOERING ROAD (Read the sign)

FORMERLY MOSES AVENUE

"Oh," said Sonny. "How curious."

"Who’s Goering?" asked Jim. "Who’s Moses?"

"What’s going on here? Moses was a great religious figure. Goering was just some Nazi."

"Some what?"

"I’ll explain it to you later."

Noah Apartments were also elusive to find, mainly because they had been renamed Fò hrer Towers, and it was around about this point that Sonny noticed that important something I mentioned earlier.

High above them, draped across buildings and in many cases obscuring the old signs, were red banners. Most of them bore the unmistakable visage of a white circle with a few bent black bars on it - the Swastika, symbol of Nazi Germany. One of the pictures, however, told a different story.

The face was that of a pleasant, jolly gentleman, bearing the twinkly-eyed charm which said ‘everyone’s favourite uncle’. A big, lovely smile was plastered over his face, but even behind this rose-tinted view there was no mistaking that forelock, and that small, square nugget of facial hair. It was the twentieth century’s most notorious villain, the byword for evil, the Grand High Lord of wrongdoing.

"Who’s that?" asked Jim, pointing.

"It’s Hitler, Jim!" said Sonny with wonder. "It’s bloody Adolf bloody Hitler!"

"Nice-looking bloke."

If someone had told Sonny L. Sustenance that just over one year after his death he would be living (unfortunate choice of word yet again) in a magnificent luxury apartment seventy-five thousand floors up he would have given them a strange look and refused to buy anything off them.

And yet, here he was. A magnificent luxury apartment seventy-five thousand floors up. Sonny, who had had bad experiences with this kind of arrangement, was startled to come in and discover the place furnished with stuff you only see in glossy magazines or catalogues bearing price labels with lots of noughts on them. Most of one wall was occupied by a six-foot-square television screen with a zebra-skin sofa positioned in front of it, coffee table between the two at just the right height to be used for eating off or putting your feet on. The carpeting throughout was thick enough to suck at Sonny’s feet, and an ornamental Japanese archway led the way into the fitted kitchen - fitted with every labour-saving utensil Sonny knew of. He opened a few of the panelled mahogany kitchen cabinets. Stuffed with all of his favourite foods - chicken and mushroom Pot Noodles, Sugar Puffs, grape juice... even the microwave had a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie in it, which was timed perfectly so that the bell went just as Sonny approached.

Tucking into his pie he inspected the rest of the establishment. The bathroom was full of black and blue marble and those fancy clam-shell ornaments. The taps on the bath and sink were cast in purest gold, and even the air freshener in the toilet bowl was practically glowing with its pleasant smell.

Next to the bathroom was one of the bedrooms. This place was not papered, the walls rough-hewn and stoney. Flickering torches illuminated the scene and the bed was a slab of wood on the floor with a hessian blanket thrown over it. As Sonny watched, a big fat hairy spider scuttled from one corner to the other.

"Jim," he said, "I think this is your room."

Jim, who was drinking out of the toilet bowl, tottered over to his master and looked through the door. "Woah," he said. "That’s what I call classy!"

"I just saw a spider."

"Black Widow?"

"Red-kneed Tarantula, I think."

"No expense spared, eh?"

Glad to get away, Sonny inspected his own bedroom. Naturally perfection. The duvet on the massive double bed was red and yellow striped and the pillows varied in size and shape from the usual boring rectangle to red hearts. A bedside cabinet was loaded with, Sonny noticed to his delight, a stack of international porn, and a million and one Japanese anime videos filled the wardrobe. A top-of-the-range computer with infinite megahertz on a stylish desk in one corner was loaded down with all of Sonny’s favourite games.

In short, everything Sonny loved, even the things he only liked from a distance, knowing he could never have them, was present in the apartment.

"This can’t be right, can it?" he asked rhetorically. "How can someone like me live somewhere like this?"

"Stop trying to torture yourself," said Jim from the living room/dining room. "You’ve been through a lot. You deserve it."

Sonny returned to the front room and admired the decor a bit more. Jim was sitting at the dining table reading the big-print copy of the pamphlet Sonny had been thoughful enough to write for him. "That’s interesting," he said.

"What?"

"Says here that there’s no such thing as money in the Ninth Underworld. Everything you want’s already there before you even know you want it." Jim was speaking in the manner of the proud parent boasting all to another proud parent.

"That sounds useful," said Sonny distantly, who was reading the telephone-directory-thick TV listings.

"But you still have to get a job."

"What?" said Sonny, now really listening. This he had not been expecting. "Why?"

"Society doesn’t work unless people occupy jobs," said Jim. "Apparently you have to go to the regional C.O.L.D. office as soon as possible."

Sonny put on the trenchcoat by the door. It was a perfect fit. "Might as well go now, then," he said.

"Go to the rooftop car park first."

"Why?"

"Don’t know. Says you have to go to the rooftop car park as soon as possible."

Sonny was a little baffled as to why a million-storey building would have a rooftop car park. Who would have the patience (or the petrol) to drive up a million storeys? Only someone trying to break a world record and other loony-brains.

By the time the light-speed elevator had taken him to the top, he was a little unsure if it was a car park at all. It looked more like a carpet showroom.

"Sonny L. Sustenance?" said a bearded angel standing nearby.

"Er, yeah?"

"Happy motoring."

A roll of carpet was handed to him. Sonny eyed it critically, then rolled it out onto the floor. It just looked like any old six-foot-by-four-foot rug patterned with Volkswagen Beetles and with frilly edges. Sonny sat on the big red circle which read ‘Sit Here’.

"Oh, right," he said to himself. "A magic carpet. I did wonder. How do I get this thing to take me to the C.O.L.D. office?"

And without warning the contraption took off and moved in a westerly direction at a hundred miles an hour.

As it moved along an unspecified skyway along which other magic carpets rocketed back and forth, Sonny clung to his new carpet with his eyes screwed shut. He didn’t want to look over the side, fearing certain reincarnation, but he needn’t have worried - the cloud level was just fifty feet below him, and since a soul has no mass he could, indeed, walk on clouds. This didn’t occur to him, however, as air particles hammered at his clenched teeth.

After fifteen unbearable minutes which seemed like hours, and not particularly nice hours at that, the carpet parked itself on another rooftop car park on an almost perfectly cylindrical building. Sonny prised himself off the nylon, shook off the static electricity, and followed the signs.

"Society is based on labour. I’ve seen it with my own eyes."

- Cheops, site of the Great Pyramid

"Frank Catermole?"

"Sonny L. Sustenance."

"Sorry. Work experience week."

Sonny glanced around the office. It was a nice office, there was no denying that. In fact, ‘nice’ would be an understatement. To compare this office, with its immortal potted plants, water feature and black marble fixtures and fittings, to another office would be like comparing Sonny’s new apartment to most of the Seventh Underworld. Like comparing Sugar Puffs to excrement. Like comparing British sit-coms to American ones.

"Now then... you were killed in a drive-by shooting in Benidorm..."

Sonny had been reminded of this so much in the last few hours that he was willing to admit that maybe he was killed in a drive-by shooting in Benidorm and had simply dreamed the multi-storey car park while he was in the coma.

Where was Benidorm, anyway?

"Yes, that’s right."

"You’re in Noah Apartment 645 and your demon’s an Achilles Mk. 3..."

"Yep."

For a moment pity flashed over the face of the female angel. She was, to Sonny, staggering beautiful but he had managed to control his ghostly hormones by now. She took a brown paper folder from a bewinged filing cabinet and handed it to her client. "Your job. You start on Monday."

Sonny read the first paper aloud. "‘Computer games magazine journalist,’" he said. "That’s exactly the job I’ve always wanted."

"Jolly good. Off to the office with you, then."

"How does this society work?" asked Sonny just before he left.

"Pardon?"

"I mean, society relies on street sweepers, but who would want to be a -"

"There’s no litter in the Ninth Underworld."

"Alright then, primary school teachers -"

"There’re no schools."

"Okay, farmers -"

"Food appears when you need it."

"Traffic wardens?"

"No such thing as a traffic warden. Basically, if no-one wants it, it isn’t here. That’s the rule of thumb."

"Worth knowing."

When Sonny got back from another lip-stretching ride Jim had his feet up on the coffee table watching the TV (that is, he was watching the TV, not the coffee table). He was holding a bowl full of little black crunchy things and patting the space next to him. Sonny sat himself down, put up his feet and removed his trenchcoat, leaving the latter splayed across his seat.

"Dried locust?" said Jim.

Sonny examined the bowl which was being offered to him. The contents were black and had the hint of many legs. "I’ve just turned vegetarian."

"Suit yourself."

"What’re you watching?"

"Dunno. What does ‘propaganda’ mean?"

Sonny had evidently caught a programme half-way through, but he picked up the gist of it. It was a live transmission of a parade going down Himmler Street - formerly Holy Ghost Way. As Sonny watched, a perfectly choreographed block of five-by-twelve soldiers marched with an unpleasantly rhythmic sound.

Each man was dressed in a completely white uniform with peaked cap and jackboots, and their upper arms bore a familiar red armband with swastika. As they goose-stepped between hordes of eerily silent crowds, a gentleman on a podium performed the Hitler salute. Quite appropriate, really, seeing as it was indeed Hitler.

"That can’t be Hitler, can it?" asked Sonny to himself. "He’s actually smiling."

"Who is this Hitler bloke, anyway?"

Eyes not leaving the screen, Sonny told his demon the speed-version of the history of Nazi Germany. Basically this incorporated a few keywords strung together with a load of pronouns and verbs and adjectives, two of the keywords being ‘massacre’ and ‘slaughter’, but the message was well received.

"So he was a bit of a bastard, then," said Jim when he had finished.

Sonny tried to get his head around this. Calling the most hideously evil man the modern world had ever had the misfortune to see a ‘bit of a bastard’ was like calling the sun a ‘bit hot’ or Jeffrey Dahmer a ‘bit weird’. Sonny not having the word power to express this, however, opted to say, "Pretty much."

"So presumably you don’t want him ruling the world."

"Quite. Shut up now, he’s making a speech."

They had missed the beginning of the speech but they got the gist of it. "My fellow dead," went the epitome of evil, "I am flattered once again to hear your great welcome for me, your humble servant -"

"That’s never Adolf Hitler," said Sonny. "Never. He never spoke like that when he was alive. It was all shouting and slagging off Jews."

"- shopkeepers, if you wouldn’t mind shortchanging your Jewish customers every now and again -" continued Adolf Hitler.

"There you go," said Jim, chewing on his locusts.

"That’s definitely him," said Sonny uncertainly. He was thinking - perhaps he had fallen victim to the British propaganda machine. Perhaps Hitler wasn’t as bad a bloke as everyone - no, no, he stopped that train of thought in its tracks. That man in the white suit and cocked hat with the white cane and the little moustache killed millions and millions of innocent people for reasons best known to himself. If you start thinking he’s not such a bad bloke you might as well try and argue that the Teletubbies were heterosexual.

What was going on here? Was this mass-murdering warmongerer really ruler of the Afterlife? What sort of twisted system allowed that sort of arrangement? Slowly the logic set in - Hitler wanted to rule the world, therefore he ruled the world. Doubtless when Bill Gates or Richard Branson pop their respective clogs Hitler’ll have to move over, but for now here he was in all of his megalomaniac glory, ruling all he surveyed.

Now he came to think about it Sonny could see that perhaps bad people make much better rulers. Was not Pol Pot leader of the Khmer Rouge? Was not Stalin leader of Russia? Was not Bill Clinton - actually, let’s stop that legal minefield right there. Sonny tried to think of a monarch of England who was really virtuous. Harold of the 1066 eye-arrow incident? Well, at first glance the exception that proved the rule, obviously. But I bet he embarked on the occasional fox-hunting jaunt himself.

Not a day after fighting through a physical maze full of peril in the Eighth Underworld, Sonny was fighting through a moral maze. Should he just stand by and watch all this happen gormlessly from the sidelines? What if it ended like the last time Hitler was in a position of power? What would happen to the Jews and the Communists and just about everyone for that matter? Should he just leave well enough alone and enjoy his final reward?

"Fancy a brew?" said Jim, getting up.

Well, that answered that. "You mean tea, I hope."

"I mean what?"

"Just get me one of those brown bottles in the fridge."

"Right."

While Jim did serious damage to the kitchen Sonny watched the rest of the feature. Some bloke who had apparently always wanted to be a commentator wittered on as the crowd flatly refused to go ‘Heil Hitler’.

"Well, what a big turnout there was today..." went the speaker, clearly desperately trying to say something good about this situation, threatened with reincarnation was Sonny’s theory. He pictured Goebbels holding a gun to the commentator’s temple. It made him smile for a bit.

"So, what’d they give you?" asked Jim, bringing in a medium-sized cauldron full of bubbling green stuff and a small brown bottle with droplets of cold water all over it, just as in the adverts.

"Computer games magazine journalist."

Jim stopped draining the crucible and wiped his jowls. "What’s that?"

Sonny had lost all patience with his predicament. "I’ve no idea. I’m going to bed."

And there we must leave our heroes for a while. Sure, it might be fun to describe in detail all the fun Sonny had in the Land of Eternal Rest, doing exactly what he wanted all the time and writing witty reviews for the local computer games magazine. Not to mention the things he got up to with those phone numbers I mentioned earlier.

It might even be fun (if not a little sickening) to hear about the incident involving Jim, two succubi, a hairbrush and a large raspberry lollipop. But the tone of the novel may be played down.

Hell, I could have written a load of garbled bollocks about Sonny’s later afterlife, maybe throw in a few paragraphs on his thoughts on the Hitler situation, but the fact of the matter is that Sonny, like everyone before, gradually came round to the idea, seeing that it was by definition impossible to make the Afterlife not nice. Let the man have his fun, was the general consensus. He’ll be down here like everyone else when Rupert Murdoch mercifully snuffs it.

No, I’m not going to thicken the book with that. I’m going to thicken the book by focusing on someone else for a bit.

The someone in question lived not a million miles away from Sonny. In fact it was just under nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand miles above him. Coincidentally he existed in the same building, occupying the penthouse suite, which was just like all the other suites but also had an indoor swimming pool, which could incidentally be filled, at the flick of a switch, with a choice of water, champagne or spaghetti hoops in tomato sauce. It had been there when he’d arrived and, although the legions of the Ninth Underworld had taken it direct from his innermost desires, he wasn’t sure what it could be used for. HE DIDN’T.

This chappy was currently lying on his back in a massive water-filled paisley double bed, snoring loudly and contentedly, wearing one of those humorous nightcaps with the little fluffy bobble. With each snore the little furry blob rose and fell like ... good cue for some innuendo there but I’m determined not to lower the tone. This should be taken with all seriousness because the sleeping man was none other than the most evil man the twentieth century had ever seen.

Yes, sprawled there over pillows smeared in dribble was Adolf Hitler himself, his afterlife-wife Eva next to him, trying to ignore the noise of her husband.

Hitler talks in his sleep. Every single night, snatches of wordage were heard between great throaty, phlegmy growls. At first listen they could just have been gibberish, but Eva had been listening hard over the last few years.

"Denrub eb ton tlahs uoht," sleep-said Adolf. "Erif eht hguorht tseklaw uoht nehw."

Eva nodded to herself. Isaiah 43:2. Backwards as usual. She didn’t need to check anymore, because she had been checking nightly for ages now - last night had been Isaiah 43:3, and the night before that 43:4. There was no ignoring it - her hubby was definitely progressively reciting the Bible backwards in his sleep. She wouldn’t mention it to him - he was trying very hard to put his past behind him.

When Hitler had made it to the Ninth Underworld (after a very difficult journey - he hadn’t qualified for a demon, just an artichoke) he had been horrified to learn of his status in the Land of the Living as the demon in human form who had terrorised the world. All he had wanted was to create a master race, was that too much to ask? Surely everyone in the world has at some point wanted to sieve out the scum from the gene pool.

Why should he be considered such a complete and utter loony-brain just because he wanted to allow the finest of the human race to reclaim the Earth as they were always meant to? What had happened to the good old days when women shouted out his name whilst giving birth? He just had a vision of a better world for everyone.

Providing they weren’t Communists.

Or Jewish.

Or disabled.

Or Russian.

Or anyone from Eastern Europe, for that matter.

Or anyone who didn’t think he was the best thing since chloroform.

And what in hell (bad choice of words again) was wrong with that?

Adolf got up first, as usual. Eva preferred to sleep in - for some reason she never seemed to get much sleep throughout the night. He fastened up his fluffy white dressing gown, donned his peaked cap, puffed up his cheeks and walked out into the dining room.

As usual Eva’s demon Colin had laid out breakfast and gone back to his room to leaf through this morning’s stack of French porn, so once again Adolf was mercifully spared looking at the wretched creature. Of course Eva had a certain affection for the thing, who wouldn’t after two years traipsing through monster-infested labyrinth together, but Adolf had very little patience for giant millipedes.

Hitler sat himself down in front of the tray and took a slice of toast from the rack, withdrawing the butter plate with the other hand. He intended to eat half of the food on the table and take the rest to his wife that afternoon, just as he had done the day before. And the day before. And every single day before then. His psychiatrist (a friend of his image consultant) had said that getting into a strict routine helped you forget the ... troubles of the past.

When Adolf had heard about his reputation he was determined to turn things the other way round. No-one wants to be seen as the Ultimate Villain, in league with the Devil and all that, so naturally he had wanted to make people see him as they used to - nothing so extreme as a God on Earth, but just a likeable old gent. The sort who ran a sweet shop and organised excursions for the local children. Everyone’s favourite uncle.

Some weirdo whose dream job was image consultancy had considered this a labour of a one-armed Hercules, but could see the determination in the Fò hrer’s eyes, and had accepted the challenge with some trepidation. He told him to stop shouting profanities and waving his arms about when making speeches. He told him to smile a lot and make the moustache a little more curved round the edges. He told him to wear a white uniform and walk with a special cane he could pose with. He told him to keep his opinions about certain groups of people to himself. He told him to add a bright red highlight to his forelock, whereupon he told him to bugger off, and he told him that perhaps he should speak to a psychiatrist.

Adolf began buttering his toast thoughtfully.

The chap whose dream job was evidently psychiatry was now a firm friend of Adolf’s. It was Simon (for twas his name) who had reunited Adolf with Eva. It was Simon who had found him a vacant plot which was a perfect spot to build a sweet shop in. It was Simon who had begun a vigorous programme of ‘letting bygones be bygones’.

Now Mr. Hitler was a stone’s throw away from becoming the ‘nice guy’. Now all that stuff about being in league with Satan was dying down. It was only this silly little rumour that was standing in the way of people not looking at him and seeing Belsen.

This silly little rumour cooked up by people who didn’t like him.

The Jews.

The Communists.

The Resistance.

Why couldn’t those ugly bastards leave him alone? Why did the path of his life have to be polluted with these impure criminals? Because they were nasty and spiteful and horrible and everyone hated him and he had to kill them all HE HAD TO KILL THEM ALL! KILL THEM ALL! KILL THE -

Adolf fell off his chair.

He pulled himself to his feet and bashed himself in the temples. He couldn’t afford to have that sort of thought any more. That was behind him. A long way behind him. He was not a mass-murdering loony-brain. He was a nice, friendly old gentleman who really liked children.

If they were Aryan chi -

"Nein!" shouted Adolf, getting to his feet. "I am not a loony-brain! I am a lovely man!"

He discovered he was waving his arms about, and stopped. Then, with some trepidation, he looked down.

Even though the butter was partially melted, there was no mistaking that pattern. His mind had wandered. He shouldn’t have let himself go like that, now he’d have to talk to Simon again. His subconscious brain had made his buttered knife trace a pattern.

A five-pointed star, each point joined by a straight line.

The pentagram.

"Ach, nein," mumbled Adolf Hitler. "It’s happening again."

"How do you spell ‘Revolution’?"

- Louis XVI, the palace of Marseilles

This little scene wasn’t happening. It wasn’t happening in the darkened basement of a building used for adult education courses. There most certainly wasn’t a circular table squatting under a spotlight, and there was a definite absence of hooded figures sitting round it.

"‘Six men sat on the edge of Hell,’" quoth one hooded figure who wasn’t there.

"‘One was a lawyer,’" said the next one who also wasn’t there.

"‘One was a traffic warden,’" said someone else who was there but only to give the place the quick once-over with the hoover.

"‘One was a celebrity chef,’" spake another silently.

This little ditty went all the way round the table, ending with "‘The last was Jeffrey Archer, but only allegedly."

Suddenly, six weapons were trained on this last speaker. "It’s supposed to be ‘The sixth was Jeffrey Archer."

"What’s the difference?"

"Quite a lot. Take him away and throw him out."

"No!" cried the slipper of tongues as two beweaponed guards dragged him off.

"You know, Jez," said the second speaker to the first, "I can’t help thinking you’re overdoing the security here."

"I told you to call me Mr. Orange."

"Call this a Resistance?" said the fourth, by way of explaining the scene. "I’m going back to professional tennis. There’s a bit more action there." He, or possibly she, it was hard to tell, stormed out, and the rest of them exchanged slightly bruised looks.

"What’s his problem?" asked Jez/Mr. Orange. "Harriet, what’s wrong with him?"

"‘Harriet?’"

"Sorry. Mrs Chartreuse, what’s wrong with him?"

Harriet-cum-Mrs Chartreuse sighed. "Look, Je - Mr. Orange, this is supposed to be a revolutionary group."

"Yeeees..."

"We never seem to DO anything."

Jez looked at his colleague expectantly. He couldn’t see the problem. "What do you call this, then?"

"I call it exactly what we’ve been doing for the last hundred years."

"And what is that?"

"Goddammit, must you always be so bloody understanding?" said Harriet levelly, containing herself.

"Look, what is this all about? And don’t swear."

The rest of the ruthless rebels, sensing a gap in which the metaphorical crowbar could be inserted, all started to clamour their arguments all at once.

"It’s all bloody committee meetings -"

"- and minutes -"

"- and agendas -"

"- and coffee -"

Jez raised two hands to silence his minions. "Look, I appreciate we don’t do much revolutionary work. I appreciate you’re all eager to vanquish the forces of evil, but if we fight violence and terrorism with more violence and terrorism then it’s a bit of a hypocrisy -"

Mr. Lavender slapped two palms on the circular table. "I think that Someone Up There would be prepared to turn a blind eye just this once,"

"Anyway, we firebombed that nightclub last year,"

"Yeah, exactly, last year. And I could hardly call a match a firebomb."

"Especially since you didn’t light it."

"Well, someone could have been hurt!"

Not for the first time, his companions were struck with the possibility that maybe they had backed the wrong yeti.

Adolf was a happy man. He had just returned from the yeti races and had fetched quite a nifty sum from the 2:32, plus he had had a mentally strengthening phone call with Simon who had assured him that he was a cloud floating in an unstirred sky, and that all the little red men with forks were a long, long way below him. Hitler couldn’t help his thoughts straying towards an image of the Luftwaffe dropping big cylindrical metal thingies with indigestion problems onto sleepy English towns, but he had managed to whack these impure thoughts away.

Around his neck he wore a big plastic apron bearing the words ‘Kiss the Fò hrer’, and rubber gloves covered his gnarled hands. He was half-watching a daytime documentary about the indigenous life of the Fifth Underworld but most of his attention was devoted to his current project.

Adolf didn’t like to do much work by way of ruling the dead universe. He would devote an hour or two each afternoon to talking to his government, hearing the news and outlining his ideas, but most of his time would be taken up talking to journalists, watching daytime telly or just, generally, wasting time.

As many people know, Hitler enjoyed his painting. He didn’t do too much now he was dead - a brush in his hand and a wandering mind provided too much opportunity for the ... Bad Things to come through and make themselves known. So, he had taken up a new hobby.

Cooking.

Slightly limited, admittedly - his repertoire consisting of cheesy bakes and not much else - but at least chopping, whisking and stirring kept him distracted from the Bad Things.

Today he was experimenting with a new idea of his - cheese, potato, onion and herby bake. He had one synthetic block of cheese, one synthetic potato and one synthetic onion, and he was busy chopping them up.

Chopping was the second most monotonous part of the preparation, the first being the actual cooking, and therefore the second most dangerous. These were the times when the evil which was still alive inside him tried to take over.

The television had stopped showing the very interesting documentary - apparently three researchers had been reincarnated in its making - and was now showing a news broadcast.

Good, thought Hitler. Perhaps I’ll be on it.

He wasn’t on it. The first item was about some form of vandalism in the town square - someone had apparently dropped a bottle of ink in the fountain and erected a banner saying ‘HITLER OUT NOW PLEASE’.

Wasn’t that just typical? Could none of these people see that he had everyone’s best interests in heart? Perhaps that plan to reincarnate all the Jews - on the basis that most Jews reincarnated themselves sooner or later after catching a glimpse of who was running the show - wasn’t such a great thing to include in the press release. There was always that little crowd of misfits eager to leap on the slightest mistake he made.

The Jews.

The Communists.

The Resistance.

They didn’t understand. Adolf kept trying to remind himself that - they just didn’t understand what he wanted this world to be. Ignorance, however, was no excuse. If he had his way all those ignorant subhumans would be marched out into the street and reincarnated right there. Yeah, that’s a great idea. Shoot every last ugly one of them. Shoot them all. SHOOT THEM ALL! SHOOT THEM -

Adolf’s own left hand, in a desperate attempt, leapt up and slapped his face as hard as it could muster.

Then, screwing his eyes up tightly in despair, he lowered his head. Only after counting to ten did he consider taking a look.

Then he counted up to twenty.

Thirty.

He had a look.

The cheese, the potato and the onion had each been chopped into six equal pieces.

Three sixes.

The number of the Beast.

"Oh, schwein," said Adolf Hitler.

"Where have you been?" said Genghis Khan, who was waiting at the doors to the Government building. "We’ve been sitting here like lemons since two!"

"Apologies, Herr Khan," said Hitler as he tried to untangle his cane from the brass bedframe of the taxi. "I had anozzer episode zo I spoke to my psychiatrist."

"I don’t see why you have to place so much priority on public image," said his deputy. "When I was alive, skewering seven peasants on your broadsword did the trick."

"Zings move on, Herr Khan."

By now they were on their way to the main conference room. It was a strange establishment, the Government building, seeing as a person who always wanted to rule the world will do so for a few years then let the next one have a go, so some of the fixtures dated back to as many as seventeen different rulers. Khan himself had had a crack for a little while ages ago, and the occasional scrubbed skull dangling from a chain reflected this. Gothic paintings of people not enjoying themselves much almost obscured the tasteful blood red-painted walls.

It was expected of every ruler who passed through to leave a little momento of his stay, even if the occasional goody-goody cleaned them all up after a while (a rarety - a nice person who wanted to take over the world was logically not a nice person), so Hitler had naturally thrown up a few paintings of himself looking dashing or meeting little children and curtains decorated with swastikas. The latter served to cover up a few of Genghis’ wall posters which portrayed sex and death in, quite frankly, not a nice way.

Throwing both double doors akimbo in a way that made him feel powerful Adolf entered his conference room. Once again everyone seated around the varnished mahogany table stopped their casual chatter and craned their necks to watch their leader, who smiled.

The original Government of the Ninth Underworld - St. Peter and that rabble - was lost in the mists of time. Of course, when you usurp someone you did feel entitled to give them a job on the Government, just to keep them quiet, but it wasn’t long before all the originals had been squeezed out.

What a mixed bunch sat round the table now.

Hitler had thought about getting the ‘lads’ together - Himmler, Goering, Hess, Goebbels and all them - but had decided against it, on the basis that they probably didn’t have the same intention as Adolf to reform. It didn’t matter, anyway - owing to the aforementioned usurping system the Government was decided for him.

As well as Hitler and Khan, there was Judas Iscariot twiddling his thumbs on the far side of the table, clearly uncomfortable with his company. There was Rasputin, nicking all the bread rolls. There was Robert Maxwell, making notes for his memoirs. A sorry, sick bunch over whom Hitler had very little control.

"Right, first item on the agenda -" said Khan, prompting Rasputin to hurl a crusty roll at him. Like Hitler, Khan was prepared to make amends after seeing his reputation, but always gave the impression that he had been bullied into it. He was rather meek and weedy, and lots of other words with a double ‘e’ in them, but he tried to disguise this with macho comments and it took a lot of imagination to compare this hapless creature with the leader of the Mongol Hordes all those years ago. "First item on the agenda," he continued bravely, "is the apparently increasing resistance movement."

There was a lot of sudden shouting and slapping palms on the table, the general consensus being ‘WE MUST CRUSH AND REINCARNATE THEM ALL!!!!", so Genghis blocked his ears, waiting for the rabble to settle down. It was a long wait.

"We have to think of the PR," he said, silencing the room if only because half of them didn’t know what PR stood for. "If we just keep massacring the people, surely the resistance will grow!"

"Not if we keep massacring the resistance,"

"That won’t work, Rasputin."

"Consider the lily in the field," said a weak voice. "You can cut off the head, but a new one’ll grow."

There was metaphor-induced silence for a bit, then Khan said, "Shut up, Judas."

"Yessir."

"The point is," continued Genghis, "that if we just storm the resistance and murder everyone then it’ll get rid of the immediate threat, but a new resistance will form eventually."

He had made the mistake of using too many long words, so the rabble had continued regardless.

"Sod it," shouted Hitler, suddenly standing. "None of you are taking zis seriously. Ze point is zat, alzough ve haff gained ze majority of public trust, zere is still a group off people who dislike ze idea of ze bad guys in charge. Ex-bad guys, I should say. As soon as ve’ff assured ze whole vorld zat ve’re ze best vons for ze job, ze problem vill be solved. Massacres just don’t vork."

"Fair enough," said Stalin from a distant corner.

"Sounds good."

"Makes sense."

Hitler nodded at Khan, who smiled back. "Item two on the agenda - No, that covers everything. Any other business?"

"Who’s got my coffee cup?" demanded Pol Pot. "I always have the beige ceramic cup with the flower pattern. What’ve I got this for?" He waved around a red tankard with one of those yellow smiley faces.

"Sit down, Polly."

"Any other sensible business?"

The assembled mass exchanged glances, shrugged, and shook their heads collectively.

"Jolly good. Same time next week then, chaps."

"I don’t know why we bother spying on them, Jez, they never say anything useful anymore."

"That’s Mr. Orange to you."

"Me? Head of the YMCA?"

- J. Dahmer, Ninth Underworld Job Centre

Jeremy was a relationship counsellor. That had been his dream job for years. The trouble with the Ninth Underworld, however, is that no-one asks people precisely why certain other people want a specific job, and this in the past had led to rather embarassing incidents - bestialists becoming zoo-keepers, paedophiles becoming volunteer daycare centre workers - and Jeremy was one of those embarassing incidents.

Still, the scene going on in this lovely office wouldn’t be out of place on Monty Python’s Flying Circus, he reflected as he shuffled his papers. Like Khan, he was a nervous and stammering man but, unlike Khan, he made no effort to disguise this.

"Now then, Mr and Mrs Hitler, is it?" he quavered.

"Jawohl. Yes."

"And what is it exactly placing a strain on your marriage?"

Eva coughed petitely. "It’s been a problem for a while now. Adolf does try his best to make up for his past, but for some reason the Evil keeps trying to break through, and that can be a little annoying."

"In what way does the Evil try to break through?"

"Oh, anything - pentagrams on his toast, the number six occuring in threes, reciting the Bible backwards in his sleep ..."

"You never told me zat!"

"Well, you were trying very hard, I didn’t like to."

Jeremy steepled his fingers and leant back in his chair. "I hope you realise that personally I don’t think getting married after death is a good move," he said. "Very few people have the patience to put up with someone for all eternity, and it inevitably ends in messy divorce, and if you’re not happy with your husband being tempted by the Devil, this can only speed up the process."

"I suppose I wasn’t thinking."

"Mr. Hitler, if I could turn to you for a moment - you have been identified as the most evil and power-mad warmongerer the twentieth century has ever seen, and you’re naturally upset about this - could it be that you are placing your image in a higher priority than your wife?"

"Ja, vell, I suppose you may haff a point zere... I do seem to spend more time viss my image consultant..."

"Don’t worry, Mrs. Hitler, I know what it’s like for someone close to you to be preoccupied - my father was a rabbi, you see -"

Suddenly Hitler was sitting bolt upright in his padded chair. "You are Jewish?"

Jeremy had that funny feeling that he may have revealed more than was good for his immortal soul. "Y-yes," he wobbled. "Does this bother you?"

Remembering himself, Hitler tried to calm himself down. He closed his eyes and did some breathing exercises, gripped the ends of the armrests and opened his eyes again. "No. Nein. Please continue."

"Okay. So, this evil trying to break through - how has this affected the, er," Jeremy rubbed his neck and swallowed hard. " - bedroom?"

There was a long, accusing silence.

"Don’t be afraid to go in really, really close detail," he continued uneasily.

Eva decided to butt in, her husband beginning to look like a kettle on the boil. "We haven’t actually done that since our deaths."

Jeremy was genuinely surprised. "Really? Well, might I recommend it? We’re dead, so there’s no risk of pregnancy, no risk of disease, it’s just done for a bit of a laugh, but it can cement the building blocks of a relationship."

"We don’t want to just yet, Mr. Lutterworth -"

Jeremy rather unwisely patted Hitler’s hand clenched around the armrest. "Tell me the truth," he said tenderly. "Is it a problem downstairs? Because if it is, I could recommend a very good specialist, or, and I appreciate you might not fancy this idea, I would be happy to substitute -"

Hitler suppressed himself with superhuman effort. "No," he said levelly. "Zere is no problem in zat area."

A biro rattled rather quickly against the desk in Jeremy’s sweaty palm. "So why have you not, er, strummed the old one-stringed banjo then?"

Eva tried to exchange glances with Adolf, but he was too busy staring into the middle distance, sweating and vibrating slightly. "We just ... don’t think it’s that important."

"Not important?!" Jeremy’s attitude was one of someone who had just been told that the sun was an excellent place for a skiing holiday. He checked his watch. "We’re coming to the end of the session, now, so you go off, get at it, then come back here and tell me all about it, okay?" He seemed to be sweating as much as his male patient by now.

Suddenly, a splinter flew across the room and ricocheted off Jeremy’s glass of water. With an almight splintering crack Hitler’s left armrest suddenly detached from the rest of the chair, his hand still clamped around it. After a few seconds his wobbling hand opened and the armrest fell out in bits.

"I should put that on the bill," said Jeremy.

Now Hitler was on his feet, red in the face and shouting. "Now look here, you. It’s people like you who really let down ze human race. Vy don’t you just reincarnate yourself like all ze others, you ignorant, perverse, money-grabbing JEW!!!!"

"Adolf! He was making a joke!"

"Vot?"

"There’s no money in the Ninth Underworld!"

Hitler suddenly gave the impression of waking up, as if he had acted on reflex action. He lowered his accusing, pointed finger, the colour drained from his face and he lowered himself back onto the damaged chair. "Yes, right," said Jeremy, who was pinned back into his seat. "We haven’t made much progress this week, have we? See you next Thursday, then." With superhuman effort he raised a hand and waggled the fingers in a ‘bye-bye’ gesture. "Bye-bye."

Adolf didn’t get much sleep that night.

This was partly to do with his worries. He’d lost count of how many times the evil inside him had tried to make its presence felt recently - the toast, the cheesy bake, the incident at the relationship counsellor’s, it was too clear to ignore now. Despite his best efforts the forces of Darkness were filling him up - and it wouldn’t be long before it indulged in a little coup d’etat. This was partly why he didn’t get much sleep.

However, he mostly didn’t get much sleep because of the fireball floating above his bed.

Hovering twelve or so inches above his knees was a circular ball which bathed the chamber in an eerie, flickery orange light. The fire seemed to dance inwards into a centre too bright to be looked at directly, as if this tiny circle a foot across was some kind of swirling portal to somewhere else. Somewhere Adolf wished to know nothing about.

He lay there, silently terrified, clutching and creasing the blankets in his nervous hands. Beside him Eva slept on, oblivious, snoring gently. As Hitler watched, the shimmering ball shifted to the left a few inches, then back. For an instant the fire flowed in the opposite direction and he got the impression that the thing was gesturing, and it was pretty obvious what at. Hitler tossed aside the covers and kicked his legs over the bed, slipping his feet into a pair of nearby white jackboots.

The ball made a little loop-da-loop as if to say ‘ah, you cotton on at last’ and zipped in a no-nonsense fashion towards the door, where it made little motions towards that instead.

As in a dream, Hitler allowed himself to be led from the bedroom, down the hall and into the main living room. There the ball disappeared with a puff of smoke and a whiff of sulphur. The place was pitch black now, so Adolf fumbled for the switch until the spherical ceiling light filled the room with a gentle glow.

"Ah, Mr. Hitler," said a voice.

Adolf tried to reply with something along the lines of ‘who the hell are you’ but when his mind had digested the voice and the appearance of its owner it had second thoughts. To begin with the former, the voice was deep and gravelly, the sort of voice which would have intimidated Columbo.

As for appearance, that will take a fairly lengthy description. Sitting with steepled fingers - in an intimidating fashion, unlike Jeremy who did it with an effeminate flair - and legs crossed in Hitler’s favourite chair was the most frightening figure Hitler had ever seen - even more so than that thingy from the beginning of the Second Underworld. Not that this person had fifteen mouths and oozed despicable slime. He seemed like a rather handsome gentleman, with a little goatee beard and a chest so wide as to hinder access through any door you care to name. The man’s muscles strained under clothes of exclusively black leather - boots, trousers, shirt, trenchcoat, all alike, but still not in a truly horrifying fashion. It was the aura that caught Hitler off guard - deepest red dotted with little sparkly bits, forming an outline around the sitting figure, shimmering like the fireball did. That and the fact his eyes were black from edge to edge, but for a pinprick sparkle of red as a pupil.

"Wh-who are you?" stuttered Hitler.

"I have many names," boomed the newcomer, who seemed to be holding a saucer in one hand and a cup of tea in the other, little finger sticking out like the safety catch of a big gun.

Hitler was not an unintelligent man, and for some reason it was obvious to him. "You are Satan?"

"Damn straight," he boomed. His accent seemed to hint at the American Deep South.

"Vot do you vant from me?"

"Stop using that accent," snapped the Prince of Darkness, dropping into a posh British dialect. "Both you and I know that accent and language are purely optional in the Ninth Underworld."

"Sorry," said Hitler in a backstreet Liverpudlian accent.

Satan took a sip of his tea. "Something troubles me, Adolf," he said upon smacking his lips. "We have tried to infect our influence on you, but you are of remarkably strong resolve these days."

Hitler tried to gather his dignity. "You are no longer welcome here," he said. "I owe no more allegiance to you, Satan."

"Oh yes you do, Adolf Hitler. You seem to forget that little contract you signed when the Nazi Party was at an all time low ...?"

Satan produced a rolled-up piece of paper tied with a ribbon. Not apparently owing to any black magic - he just proffered his hand as if to show that it had been there all along, but had gone unnoticed. With great ceremony he burned off the ribbon and unfolded the paper, which he read aloud. "‘I, Adolf Hitler, do hereby pledge my soul to Beelzebub for all eternity in exchange for limitless charisma and supreme oratory skills.’ There’s a lot of legal rubbish dressing that up, but you get the idea. Your soul is mine for eternity, Adolf, not just until death."

"Is there no way of contesting it?"

"Mr Hitler, you have access to some of the most skilled solicitors in the world, but I think you’ll find the clause is completely airtight."

Hitler, realising his fate, flopped down into the armchair opposite the one currently occupied by the Devil. "So, what more do you want from me? I am ruler of the Ninth Underworld, what more do you want?"

Satan vanished the contract and blew out sharply through his lips in that time-honoured dismissive farting noise. "The Ninth Underworld is no great prize for me," he said. "Practically mine anyway, but I’ll get to the point. My role in the universe has been exceedingly small since Hell was closed down, and I think you know that if there’s one thing I can’t get enough of, it’s power. Like yourself, Adolf."

"Go on."

"The ultimate prize, Adolf, is right on top of our heads. The origin of us all. Yourself from your parents, me from the belief of God’s followers."

"You can’t mean the Land of the Living?"

"That is exactly what I mean."

Adolf didn’t know what to say. It seemed superfluous to ask exactly why Satan wanted the Land of the Living, so he expressed his uncertainty with a raised eyebrow or two.

"Obviously I can’t take it over myself - I exist only as metaphor up there. But one of my souls could."

"Satan, you could have done this centuries ago. Why now?"

"It is only now that the sins and disbelief in God on the part of mankind has risen to a high enough level to afford me enough power to complete my master plan."

Hitler stood up and went to look out of the window. He needed some distraction away from this ultimate situation of his - there he was, making deals with the Devil. This is exactly the kind of thing he was type-cast in doing. "No."

"Sorry?"

"I won’t do it. I won’t be your puppet, Satan. Do what you like with your contract - you can’t do anything without a Hell."

Satan almost smiled. "I never expected you to agree first time, Mr. Hitler. I ask you to think about it. This is an opportunity to return to the good old days, Adolf. When you were a living God. When your every blink was marked on a calendar. When, indeed, women yelled out your name while giving birth."

"The good old days?"

"The good old days. Think about it, Adolf. We will meet again."

Hitler tried to ask, "When?" but Satan had already vanished. Head spinning, he returned to bed and was quickly asleep, continuing his alternative recital of the Old Testament.

And there, once again, shall we leave Mr. Hitler. His final decision shall remain a mystery for now, but no doubt if you haven’t worked it out now you’ll have an idea soon enough.

Time now to return to the plight of your friend and mine Sonny L. Sustenance, who had now been at work at the local computer games rag - Games for the Dead - for several months. The time is approximately two weeks after the above event, when the aftermath of Hitler’s decision is now fully in operation.

"A computer is just an abacus with a dust cover,"

- Pythagorus, the Ninth Underworld Job Centre

Sonny hit the ground running, rolled to avoid a high laser beam, scissor-jumped to dodge a low one, and threw himself round a corner.

Not for the first time, he realised that the system of the Ninth Underworld had a few flaws in it.

When he had been alive Sonny had been excrementally bored most of the time. He would go to work, work, come home, watch TV and go to bed. Unless there was nothing on telly, in which case he would rent a video and go to bed. Since the Ninth Underworld catered for your every whim, the underlying power had obviously been concerned that Sonny would lead exactly the same kind of afterlife, so now from the moment he parked his magic carpet to the instant he set foot inside the Games for the Dead office every security robot and laser turret in the building turned against him.

This usually meant a reincarnation-defying chase through miles of obstacle-filled corridor and laser burns more often than not, but after a few weeks Sonny had started finding the morning adventure invigorating and, after a few more weeks, rather enjoyable. No doubt in a few weeks the thrill of the chase would become boring as part of the daily routine and the Ninth Underworld would come up with some other ingenious way to keep him interested.

Today, Sonny was trying a different route, via corridors A79B, L26K and the canteen. He was finding the trip a little more of a challenge, there being more ground to cover, but took it all in his usual stride. He ran down corridor F81P, arms and legs going like pistons, a horde of football-sized guard robots with mounted rocket launchers in hot pursuit, and skidded round the corner.

To find himself facing a collection of courier droids apparently having a convivial fag. One of them pointed, yelled something in binary, and every automaton in the little platoon drew a vicious-looking laser pistol. Solid surfaces to his left and right, armed guards in front and behind, metal floor beneath, all seemed hopeless until Sonny noticed an open vent in the ceiling just above the courier droids. With renewed vigor he dashed towards the advancing group, then launched himself into the air seconds before they fired. Using one of the robots as a springboard he sommersaulted upwards into the vent and scrambled into the horizontal shaft. He crawled as fast as he could, elbows becoming rough and bruised with every movement, until the floor was shot from below him by one of the rocket-launching droids and he tumbled back down into the corridor. He was almost immediately on his feet, however, and soon high-tailing down towards his destination - the door with the picture of Pac-Man on the frosted window. He ran like a man possessed, the distance between himself and his robotic pursuers becoming smaller and smaller, before he judged himself close enough and leapt towards the door.

As Sonny discovered, some fool had wedged it shut, but this only slowed his process slightly as the flimsy wooden door erupted into fragments around him. Now he was in the office, the robots suddenly lost interest and got back to their mundane business but still Sonny got to his feet as soon as possible, ignoring the splinters which drew spirit blood from a few small cuts and paying no heed to the horrified passers-by, and ran through into the main area. He finally skidded to a halt, breathing heavily, at the desk of one of his colleagues.

"Phil, quick," he gasped. "My carpet’s double parked and I forgot my card!"

Without looking, Phil proffered his card which granted him use of the rooftop car park and Sonny snatched it, throwing himself back through the door to the sound of laser fire.

The collective journalists got back to work.

Sonny finally got to his desk - with his misspelt name on the front - and hurled himself into his swivel chair which then descended itself right to the bottom, the locking mechanism having undone during the night.

So, here he was, back in the chair after another hairy moment and still, mercifully, dead. But that didn’t matter now - computer games were his afterlife. Even before the unfortunate car-park incident he had keenly played them day and night. This, he suspected, was linked to his want for adventure but now since he narrowly avoided reincarnation every morning they were beginning to lose their appeal.

The computer games industry in the Ninth Underworld was a somewhat strained affair, seeing as even the most timid of games relied on things like zombies, vampires, demons, all the things that it was acceptable to include in living person’s games because of the uncertainty of whether they exist or not. Now that the people of the Land of Eternal Rest were dead and had learnt that not a single case of a person returning to their own body after death had been recorded those games just didn’t scan anymore. Although demons did exist, the Underworld Inhabitants Guild would be down on a software publisher like a ton of bricks if they were portrayed as vicious creatures.

The most vicious game that had been produced in the Land of Eternal Rest - and had brought with it a storm of controversy - was entitled House Of The Living and had almost been denied a certificate after showing a demon hitting someone quite lightly over the head with a sockful of sand.

Sonny, who had been brought up with the likes of Buckets of Blood on his old ZX81 and the more recent Buckets of Blood 2000 on his PC, was a little disappointed at the archives when he had arrived, and if it weren’t for the convivial atmosphere and the early-morning fun he wouldn’t bother turning up.

Just as he had flicked on his computer and was about to inspect the drawer which new review copies were banished to, Phil turned up at his shoulder with a memo.

"Guess what," he said.

"You’ve got genital warts."

Phil gave Sonny a look of astonishment then rapidly changed it to a don’t-be-silly gurn. "Nope," he said, allowing the memo to flutter onto Sonny’s cluttered desk, "you’re doing the letters page this month."

"What? It can’t be the second Thursday of the month already -"

"Carmel’s off sick. You’ll find the letters in your right-hand desk drawer, and the e-mails have been re-routed to your terminal."

Sonny leant on the booth partition as Phil skipped off to harass someone else. "Phil, don’t do this to me!" he called, but no-one heard. Resigned, he flopped back down into his chair and, swallowing hard, opened the right-hand desk drawer.

Not so bad, this month. Just ten or fifteen to wittle down to a choice few he then had to insult in the centre pages. He tore open the first one that came to hand, and settled back to read.

"Dear Mailbox," it read. "I was playing Invasion of the Living last week, and guess what I found? If you type the word ‘GERMANY’ approximately fifteen seconds after killing the cannibal accountant on level 24, a fish bearing the face of Lionel Blair swims across the screen singing a song about artichokes -"

Sonny sighed, and dug out his old review copy of Invasion of the Living from the debris on top of his desk. He quickly booted it up and reloaded his saved game during the now legendary battle with the cannibal accountant. A piece of cake after you’ve gone through it a million times - use the egg-whisk until he drops his umbrella, then pour everything you have into him until he’s standing on the edge of the cliff, at which point poke him in the eye with the barrel of the AK47 - but Sonny never tired of the beautiful animation. As commanded, he counted to fifteen and typed ‘GERMANY’.

Immediately the speakers burst into song. "Artichokes, artichokes, the nicest thing about artichokes -"

Sonny blinked, reloaded, killed the accountant once again and this time, in the spirit of enquiry, typed in ‘REPUBLIC OF IRELAND’. Again, the jolly little song echoed around his little booth. Phil noticed, and started making his way towards his employee.

Sonny reloaded yet again, invoked violent death upon the razor-toothed yuppie and this time typed in ‘KZZJL<N". As he expected, the song started again.

He closed the game and started up the word processor. Heading his document, he composed a reply. "Dear Mr. ‘Baboons On Cheesy Sticks’," he wrote, silently wondering about these callsigns twelve year olds seem to delight in. "I have tested your claim and indeed my office rocked for a moment as the computer sang the praises of the humble artichoke. However, this overlooked design flaw also seems to apply if you type in any member of the European Union or, in fact, anything at all. Furthermore the fish bearing Lionel Blair’s likeness was just a product of your diseased brain."

"Programming another virus?" said Phil.

"Just testing a claim," said Sonny, who made no secret of disliking his editor.

"Well, hurry up. There’s an important review for you. In the drawer."

Sonny obediently extracted a brown paper package from the drawer and tore it open. Inside was a plain white box with just an uninspiring black logo on the front.

"‘Vile Triumphal Sways, by Reichsoft,’" read Sonny aloud, inspecting the box. "Doesn’t appear to be any details. Nothing about the game, the developers, nothing."

"Nah, there wouldn’t be," said Phil, leaning on the self-assembly desk which wobbled under his touch. "You know Doubting Thomas Productions?"

"Yeah?"

"This is them. The government took them over."

"What? Why?"

"You know what Hitler’s like. If something’s fashionable, he’s in there."

Phil went away to lean on someone else’s desk, at which point Sonny stuck the CD - again, with only a logo - in the drive, and it booted up rapidly.

No installation procedure, thought Sonny. A rarity.

Something told him to give this one his undivided attention, so he ejected the CD, put it in a little carrier bag and hid it under his chair. That done, he continued with the letters page.

Pausing only to pick up Jim from the local demon-friendly bar, Sonny burnt frills on his carpet all the way back to the apartment, whereupon he seated himself in front of the computer and turned it on. Jim pulled up a chair behind him and chewed on what looked like a two-foot dead millipede.

"Whatcha doing, Sonny?" he asked, spraying legs.

Sonny’s eyes didn’t leave the screen. "Some weirdo game," he said. "Have to review it for the next edition."

By now the title screen was displayed, which made Sonny and his companion lean forward and stare with perverse astonishment. "Vi-lee-try-ump-hant-sways," said Jim. "That’s an interesting logo."

Sonny looked down. There was nothing in the box except a scrap of paper detailing the basic controls. No manual. No plot. No explanation. Not even, and this is unheard of, a registration card and catalogue of upcoming products. But there was the title screen, with its little picture.

"A young lady being attacked by a minotaur," mused Jim.

"She’s not being attacked, Jim."

"What do you call that, then?"

Sonny told him.

"Is that allowed?"

"I’m not sure."

Mercifully, the title screen was removed to be replaced by a loading screen. Unmercifully, however -

"Now I’m certain that’s not allowed."

Then the game began.

Sonny later found it difficult to describe exactly what was in the game. Certainly he found it enjoyable, but it just radiated this pink glow that made him happy. He knew he had played the game - he had vague recollections of shooting models on the game, and every time he did so a wave of pleasure went through him - but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what he shot at or where he went to do so. All he knew was that he loved every minute of it.

Jim just sat and stared, mouth open, bits of half-chewed millipede making a break for freedom. He absorbed everything, missing nothing.

And then Sonny woke up the next morning, still seated stiffly in front of the computer, fingers still brushing the keys, screen blank white. The CD had apparently ejected itself and was lying on the thick-pile carpet. Jim was nowhere to be seen, but this problem was rectified when he stumbled in. "Er, Sonny," he said slurrily. "There’s a big red pentagram on my bedroom floor and I can’t remember how it got there -"

There was also, as it turned out, a big red pentagram scrawled across the kitchen ceiling, not to mention a few rather unpleasant images all over the nice wallpaper. "What in the Ninth Underworld is going on here?" asked Sonny rhetorically.

"Maybe we were burgled," said Jim.

"You can’t get burgled in the Ninth Underworld."

"Oh yes."

Sonny slumped down in front of a bowl and a box of Sugar Puffs. "It’ll take ages to clear this up," he said, pouring the cereal into the bowl in front of him.

"We could call a cleaner," he said wistfully.

"No cleaners," said Jim. "No-one wants to be a cleaner."

Sonny sighed, and reached for the milk.

Then he stopped.

Then he picked up his bowl and stared at it. The Sugar Puffs at the bottom of the item of crockery seemed to have huddled into three little islands, each of which contained six individual Puffs.

Three sixes.

"Something is going on here," announced Sonny. "And that game had something to do with it."

Just as a precaution, Sonny and Jim wore mirrored shades while they dissected the game. First they put the CD in, bypassed the autoplay and explored the contents of the disk.

The first thing they checked was the sound files. There were millions of them, but patiently they worked through every one, trying to find something that wasn’t immediately apparent. This almost turned out to be a fruitless exercise, as all the sounds were either guns being fired and people getting seriously hurt, but Jim did notice something about the dying scream of the most common bad guy - the grunt.

"When I heard that sound," he said, "I suddenly felt very happy."

"I know what you mean," said Sonny. "I’ll slow it down."

He did so with some audio software, but only when the file was slowed down tenfold did they hear it - a voice speaking at normal speed and pitch, mingled with the rest of the scream.

"You are very happy," it said. "You feel extremely good about yourself."

"Soppy," said Jim flatly. "Get rid of it."

Sonny nodded and deleted the little snatch, speeded up the sound again, and played it. This time, they did not hear angels singing in their inner ears, they heard a gutteral roar of agony which made them both cross their legs. This was all they found in the sounds folder, so they moved onto graphics.

One file - a bitmap image - caught Sonny’s eye. It was called SUBLMNL.BMP and it was linked to a text document.

"According to this document," he said when the file had been opened and duly perused, "the image is projected on the screen for one hundredth of a second every five seconds."

"You wouldn’t be able to see it," said Jim logically, who had found a bag of crisps somewhere.

Sonny opened the image. It was hardly a picture - just some writing in block capitals, white on a black background. "Hitler is Lord," it said. "Embrace Evil and Recant thy Blind Faith."

"Subliminal messages," said Sonny thoughtfully. "They go past too fast to see but your subconscious mind stores it. But I thought they weren’t allowed."

"Delete the image, then, and let’s play the game again."

Sonny did so, reprimanded Jim for spraying crisp crumbs, and started playing.

It was quite the most appalling, the most grotesque game Sonny had ever had the misfortune to encounter. The gameplay and graphics were decades behind current capabilities, and the content was too controversial for words. There was no plot to speak of - the player was just expected to shoot bishops, priests and rabbis. Lots of rabbis. Lots and lots and lots and lots...

Sonny played, stomach aching, as he removed the spleen of the Pope with a machete, then made a nutritious and filling stew from it. He played for an hour before the sub-game made him turn the thing off in disgust and destroy the disk underfoot. Armed with a crossbow and a sniper scope, the game invited him to nail Christ to the cross.

"That was disgusting," said Jim after he joined Sonny in the living room. "I’m surprised the government allow it."

"They didn’t just allow it, Jim," explained Sonny patiently, "they commissioned it."

"What? Why?"

"I don’t know. But I intend to find out!"

Jim watched the human stare into space for a few minutes, then trotted discreetly back to the computer room, attempting to remove the dirt from the CD Sonny had stamped on.

"Blu-tack’s a marvellous thing,"

- Solomon ‘Sonny’ Lazarus Sustenance

This next portion of the narrative will be taken from two perspectives. The first shall be that of Sonny’s, who had assigned himself to discovering the elusive truth, and the second shall be that of Hitler and his emergency council.

Sonny so far hadn’t made much progress in his search for the truth. The only clue he had was that it was apparently ‘out there’. Since ‘out there’ in the Underworld encompasses roughly four billion squillion trillion to the power of four billion squillion trillion square miles, he had started in the most obvious place - the government building.

The extremely helpful receptionist had given him two words - one was a profanity and the other was ‘off’, so Sonny had decided to go with the discreet approach. Which explains why he was now trying to scale the back wall.

Unlike many buildings the Underworld Reichstag was rather short and squat, stuck between two monstrous apartment blocks like a sparrow drinking at a pond frequented by vultures. Unlike such a thing, however, the establishment just seemed to radiate menace in a way that suggested that vultures could flee or be damned. Luckily, such buildings often have a million and one hand and footholds in the form of gargoyles, elaborate pillars and window-boxes full of dope.

One hand clutching the pride and joy of a male stone gargoyle, the other resting on a window-box, the left foot planted on a windowledge and the right dangling in space, Sonny reflected that he may have overlooked something vital one has to consider when scaling buildings.

He had now finally climbed as far as his targeted window which had seemed ajar from the pavement but was now emerging from the apparent optical illusion. His knuckles rattled on the firmly closed window pane, and he muttered an expletive which shocked a passing microbe.

The roof it is then, he thought as he put his weight on an ornamental statue and placed a hand on the windowsill above. Such a pity that the same microbe had chosen to settle there along with ten billion of its mates, forming a lump of frictionless slime which Sonny unwisely tried to shift his weight to. It was also rather annoying to feel the nipple on which his left foot was settling break off.

Fortunately, his hand managed to catch the ledge below as he descended, which happened to be situated near a narrow precipice along which a passing hero could conceivably walk stiffly along.

His back to the wall, eyes fixed on the artificial moon far above, Sonny edged his way along the tiny ledge with a stiff gait. Then he reached the edge of the building, so he craned his neck around and saw his quarry - an open window. The ledge did not continue to that little architectural treat, so he was forced to take a gamble.

Repenting what sins still applied down here, Sonny raised a foot, swivelled on the other, launched himself into the air, bent his frame around the edge of the building, flung out a hand and ended up dangling from the windowsill, spirit heart pounding like a baboon in a small box. First allowing his breath to gingerly return to his body, Sonny summoned up all his strength and pulled himself onto the sill, through the window and ended up curled in a ball on the inside. It was his dignity’s turn to be summoned, so he got to his feet and brushed down the trenchcoat he seemed to think he needed.

He seemed to be in some kind of bedroom, perhaps where a visiting dignitary would stay. The walls were unpatterned in blood red shades, the carpet was a darker blood red, and much of the wooden furniture was mahogany. The evil in power really know how to live, he thought. The bedspread was patterned with swastikas and all cupboards and cabinets had a tight, locked air to them. A room where a visiting dignitary would secure his treasured possessions?

Speaking of visiting dignitaries, one appeared to be occupying the bed along with his wife. They weren’t asleep, unless they were both serious somnambulistic cases, but fortunately they were too busy to notice a passing self-employed spy. The door was locked from the inside, so Sonny undid the bolts and sidled out. Then, because he was an agent of justice with a sense of humour, he wedged the door open in case anyone came passing by.

Sonny took a home-made blackjack - a bit of leather from another trenchcoat tied up into a bag and filled with sand - from his inside coat pocket and tip-toed down the corridor.

Somehow Genghis Khan and Judas Iscariot had found themselves walking up to the conference room together. Both were engaged in complicated whinges, and both were unaware of each other’s.

"I don’t see why he feels we should have a meeting at this time of night," said Genghis.

"Why should I be in the government?" moaned Judas.

"What’s so important that it couldn’t wait until morning?"

"I’m not an evil chap, I don’t see why I should be seen as one."

"Maybe he had that dream again," speculated the Mongol.

"OK, I betrayed Jesus, but he wouldn’t have died for all our sins if I hadn’t."

"I told him, go and talk to that psychiatrist you seem to hold in high regard."

"Two more weeks and he’d’ve gone out of fashion. I reckon I did him a favour."

"He is the leader, I suppose -"

Judas stopped in his tracks. "Did you hear that?"

Finally the dastardly duo were paying attention to each other. "Hear what?"

Judas went over to the window. "Sounded like someone tapping on the glass."

"They’ve gone now."

"Ah. Right." Judas continued walking, oblivious to the antics of the good guys.

Meanwhile, Sonny had cocked things up. The plan was to sneak around the building, rifle through all the papers he found, note down anything interesting on the back of an old envelope and run like the clappers. In fact, the only part of the plan he had gotten right so far was the last bit, as he was indeed running like the proverbial clappers. Admittedly he wasn’t trying to get out of the building, if only because he didn’t know the way, but he was being chas