Prologue - The Lord's Prayer, line one, substitution: Heaven/Hell

Welcome, you are currently intersecting circle 2.L. Lust. You may experience symptoms of arousal and spontaneous climax. Any soiling of the interior of a DI cubicle will be persecuted by DI DC Law.

Narrated a clipped female voice shuddering through a speakerphone's hexagon of perforated holes. The disembodied steel cuboid slid steadily down an in-existence shaft funneling limbo, level one, through the nine circles of Inferno. Formerly a product of the Ottis Elevator Company the cab had been abrasively sliced from Level 0, Earth's reality, charmed with sigils which twitched on its mirrored walls like tic wincing clogs and was now owned by DI Dissension Cubicles Ltd.

DI DC was co-founded by Dante Alighieri and is a transportation service for Hell, sub-spheres 0 through to 9. Aesthetically this rectangular, metallic box, is identical to the common elevator. It is colloquially referred to as a cab. Legally DI mandates official bodies use the term dissension cabs based on the case that elevation of passengers back up to Level 0. Earth, isn't prevalent.

Description of a cab in conjunction with an adjective, verb or noun with connotations of upward motion will be persecuted by DI DC Law. The minimum sentence for this is a two millennia journey in a cab saturated with cat urine, your companion a gnarly, greasy little gnome inflicted with a compulsive obsession for reciting limitless lines of data entry.

Welcome, you are currently traversing circle 3.G. Gluttony. You may experience symptoms of cannibalism or ostentation. DI Ltd. is not liable for the health and safety of any occupant passengers.

Adrienne, formally and much more anciently Adramalech, was the cab's passenger and is a god. The only god in existence equally as omnipotent as God. She has the frame and sour visage of a middle aged metropolitan French woman who'd fine tuned an instinct for consuming pastry, wine and unpasteurized cheese at a persistent calorie deficit and tan, mummified skin. She is both a functioning opiate addict and the deity forth from the top of the Hierarchy. Only five things exist with more independent power than herself, two of which she was on her way to see on a rare, as all of Level 0 worth tolerating dropped off at the last junction of the Paris ring road, dislocation from the crumpled sheets of her eighteen o five apartment featured ELLE Déco, Fr. 2001 and then again, 2011.

Adrienne's conscious mind most frequently lost apple-bobbing in an infinity of absolute truths, her awareness seeped curiously out of the cab and into limbo entertaining her as the one inch discs of the level keypad sluggishly lit red through each increasing circle of Hell.

Limbo existed before existence and is the first descending stop off a DI cubicle into absolute nothingness. No light, sound, space or time. Nothing cannot be pictured but is the consequence of ignoring the urge to picture anything at all. Dreamless sleep is a blink into limbo. Nothing, until knocking back forward into something. God once existed within Limbo like a star in the vacuum of space, if space were eraser-tipped of stars, satellites, planets, particles, darkness and no, no bright white screen swapped out for that backdrop of black. Everything that is, is a piece of God, once whole within Limbo, splitting up into chaos, forming level 0. Earth, and levels 2-9. Inferno.

Abandoned and re-purposed the couple hundred hectares of Limbus Rehabilitarium, a once mental hospital domed in wild, morass vegetation in Wandlitz, Germany, exists within limbo. Limbus is where the near hopelessly unhealthy go to stay near hopelessly unhealthy until hope can be found and their health restored. It's in limbo because once the patient is checked in they're on Limbo time, and, as Limbo has no time, neither does the patient lose time.

Structurally, Limbus is five rectangular buildings topped with pointed maroon slate turrets swaying like pollen fairies in bubbles of limbo's nothingness. Inside its hallway walls perspired salmon and medical blue paint like barbecue loosened ashes, furling the dinner-plate-size of Basilisk scales and gathering in flaky heaps atop the tile flooring. There were security bars in some window frames, others had jagged rotten planks hugged with overgrown vines which tinted incoming light an exotic bottle green as though receiving nursing care in some jungle-stationed greenhouse.

Passageways, opening off into operating and in-stay rooms, were of iron-railed balconies lining the prison-like cavity between vertical floors, bridging wings 1a to 1b, 2a to 2b and so on. Room numbers were painted crudely on the bumpy walls at odd angles to their arched doorways. The ceiling's cracked glass skylights were charmed with a glamour that imitated a northern European midday battling through built up moss and striking floors in beams which highlighted hanging dust particles.

Adirenne began peeking inside rooms. In twenty-one, a three and a half foot disc operating light-head cast eight lambent cylinders down on a male gnome neglected mid-surgery. The gnome's six-inch Pinocchio nose, fire engine red at its bulbing tip and sprouting great fans of straight silver hair against his meaty upper lip, erected from his perpendicular posture on the operating table. He sagged, blobbing into folds of inelastic chin which creased in long, jowly Ss from cheekbone to neck smiling vacantly. Beneath stubbly cropped hair, protruding like a radio antenna from his elongated forehead was a pair of silver forceps. Frothy bubbles of sap coloured phlegm gushed behind his double, front toothed fangs and his inner eyelids wept a painful pink as he gazed unseeingly into the light.

Twenty-two was an older operating theater, the bulbs of its surgical light burnt out, warped and melted metal. This room's walls were plastered in glistening swimming pool tiles bouncing charmed sunlight from the ragged glass enclosure above. Inches of water, a fish tank tea colour, pooled on the speckled marble floor where heaps of wiring snaked precariously sizzling and wincing hot sparks. Here a pine, fine wired Victorian wheelchair was rocking forward and back. Forward and back. This room was kept sweltering hot by rust-blushed radiators and coiling at their corners oily black and silver PET scan printouts floated on the puddling water.

Room twenty-three was small and shadowy. A triangular veil of LED light from a two-pronged bulb on a thin black spout fanned up fluid streaked wall and over a hospital bed pockmarked with ash and orange cigarette burns. Four large extractor fans rumbled loudly dominating the windowless room struggling to suck up an acrylic yellow vapor which snapped and spat into patches of purified air. On the spongy mattress, so soiled a pressed finger seeped beads of urine, was a four ninety-nine plastic wine glass. The glass' well was fed by drip from tubes dunked into pits of labeless liquor bottles.

Home video specters through the patient's eyes awoke sporadically around this room flickering as though finding friction on their film reels. From a bench looking out on an empty park in the early hours of a city morning. Waiting. Upturning the double room of a flat-share tinted an emphatically hopeless grey to find a PAYG brick phone. Desperate. Crying in that same seemingly prison cell of a room. Alone.

Partially pulling herself back to her moment, Adrienne unearthed from her coat pocket the most profound mental entity to enter hell since Einstein’s voluntary immigration. The avocado had grown itself in anticipation of these moments. Moments largely composed of mutilation and digestion one may have expected it to have a rather dim outlook on its life. It did. Heavily possessed it was also: manically excited, furious, mind-bogglingly conflicted and a touch self-conscious.

Adrienne had never eaten an avocado. Fingernails, marrow, and memories of losing one’s virginity were more her cup of proverbial tea, and indeed if the avocado hadn’t been one of the very five things more powerful than she was, she may have questioned what she was about to do.

Adrienne's kitten-esque rows of canines pierced the wrinkly black Californian berry skin and her consciousness thwacked like a tensed elastic band to patient in-stay room twenty four and, mind pinched away, her body doubled with a nose bleed.

Twenty four was a room you couldn't buy. It was given masonically to noteworthy fellow physicians. Eighteen feet high, its upper half streaked brick, its lower magnolia drywall, its signature appeal was an eighteen-piece bay of lead-lined windows. Golden, shadow netted light, puddled over the stone floor, outside an imitation blue sky peeking through gaps of silver back-lit greenery, the veined undersides of emerald leaves pressing inwards on the single glazed glass.

Within the yawning, un-sterile and antique space was a stocky Panasonic analog television muted in the room's inner corner and an ugly sconce light set into the wall beside the door. On the television screen in grainy prime red and blue the channel 666 news flickered between the anchor-man’s slanted white eyebrows and a shabbily dressed academic of Astaroth Academies Southeastern. Sliding across the screen's lower banner read Debate: Dagon Dynasty to eliminate humanity, is there an alternative sustainable food source?

Adrienne sensed herself sniff affronted, not, avocado, she thought. This broadcast wasn't due out for six months. If it went out at all. She despised time-space independence. Flashlighted future events stepped on her turf and made her appear less prestigious and almighty.

A single foldable aluminium chair sat center room where a dome shouldered shadow sat elbows on knees. A memory. Adrienne mentally sighed. No wonder he'd had it removed, Adrienne thought. Though, she softened, he'd had it preserved.

In a rough Scottish accent, improved since it's mortal days at the turn of the sixteen hundreds when it could have been mistaken for the low growl of a feral animal with pneumonic congestion, the nobel's memory, who Adrienne knew only by reputation, reverberated in her mind as though the thoughts were her own. She should have been his to raise. They'd have thrown her a débutante ball and he'd have gone to bed with her that night. Mid-summer. At the château. The Dordogne's beautiful midsummer. The life they should have had. If they'd raised her, if he'd had her atop his knee from a wee lass their world would be first nature to her. He'd'ev been her father, her god, her lover.

He'd almost have taken her alive, not tied to him, to them, able to live a life. Almost. He was too selfish. As hard as he tried that pretty, holy love was beyond him. He wouldn't have taken her living without him. Another man touching her.

This was it then. It. This world. And it got to go on? Serve it to 'em. Live, laugh and love, if he didn't? For an eternity. Eternity gave new meaning to everything. Loneliness engorged to have more gravity than the sun.

He had her idea. Fall in love with ideas. Steal snippets to confirm our imaginings. Bate the loneliness. He'd sewn a woman out of centuries of snippets. His little girl.

Place into reality her ingredients and the recipe, God, manufactures into life. Gremory didn't have that power. Nor Catherine. Nor Lucifer. God. God! Denying him everything since mortal. He'd take this miserable world and shove it back up God's arse.

God would never have given her to him. God. Head bent on torturing them all. His fingers dragged scalp unveiling claws through the silver hair at the sides of his head. He didn't deserve her. Had done nothing in his life to warrant her. The shadow shot up with a thunderous bellow snatching the chair and hurling it against the wall. His knees fell from beneath him hitting the floor.

He was glad she couldn't hear him. See him. Prayed no one could. Pray. Pain. Beneath the skin. Inside ye bones. It extinguished from reasonable possibility the idea of the next breath. Hour. Day. Shiesera. Leviathan's curse. Fuck curses. He didn't want to be here without her. Never had.

He watched the dirt gathering on the underside of his clawed hands. He'd prayed a mortal man? How many times before each prayer became a bitter plea to something he despised? What would that bargain look like now? Could you be godforsaken if God itself was forsaken? She was the only thing he had left. The only thing of the man before the monster.

God give her to me.

Welcome, you have arrived at circle 9.T. Treachery. You may experience symptoms of height inferiority complex, manipulative tendency, a lack of loyalty and self-serving, back-stabbing inclinations.

We strongly advise that DI DC Law is one of the best defense firms in this sphere of reality and to take action against us would be at your own peril.

Circle 9.T is currently experiencing a total lack of gravity. We hope you had a suitably unpleasant journey and will never again travel with DI DC Ltd.

With an enthusiastic ping, drowned by a painful grinding of metal as the cab's doors buckled, concaved and finally popped back relieved as their radius resistance charm kicked into its highest voltage, the cab halted.

"Hm" Adrienne blinked confusedly. Fascinating, she thought blandly, and how terribly concerning. Morax will be thrilled, humbled. Oh daddy, what games you do play.

Adrienne, mouth rolling with unpeeled avocado, effortlessly willed her feet to stay locked to the stained and trodden carpet.

Polished, mosaic tiles stolen from the Middle East pooled from the cab's exit, their surfaces dancing with the burnt amber lights of a cosmos warping around a single, dense black cavity dominating the sky. Beelzebub, second from the top of the Hierarchy, was intensely uncomfortable with anything modern. Modern relative to Beelzebub meaning the pestle and mortar. He'd just about been able to stick around in Ararat long enough for the wheel before deciding things may be getting out of hand too quickly. The larger proportion of Beelzebub at any single point in time-space preferred to drift around singularities which function as Material Recovery Facilities i.e. they transmogrify deceased living things into reincarnated living, living things.

Beelzebub's distaste for humanity's God Play did not, however, outweigh his appreciation of the beauty of Middle Eastern architecture which he enjoyed, either to dress up in or to decorate his immediate space with. The silvery laced, oil-like substance of Beelzebub semi-corporeal lethargically swayed, defying all laws of gravity, within a dislocated fountain plucked from a piazza in Lebanon which now spiralled calmly in the black hole's orbit. Every so often Beelzebub would bubble and plop with acute afterlife indigestion and spit out a tar globule of several hundred thousand souls into the singularity's wake ready for recycling into whatever form he so chose. Most commonly flies.

Two feet above the Beelzebub saturated fountain span a large, square, re-foldable piece of cardboard. Stout, two inch, silver figurines clung to the card’s checked and colourful surface by a rudimentary factory charm which when present within an atmosphere oozed an acrylic, plastic odor. The CAL Game of Life was commissioned by the fates, Clotho, Atropos and Lachesis several centuries ago in an effort to lighten their workload. The mass-produced, and cheapest, edition is obliquely rudimentary with only six varieties of life. The popularity of the game is largely considered to be the underlying cause for the repetitive and unremarkable nature of human existences.

This particular edition was not the more common. A collector's item now it was produced slightly under a hundred years before the crucifixion. Upon the allocated day of Christ’s demise, the player with the highest point score dictated the details of what happened, the rest is poorly documented history. The resurrection was the consequence of the triumphant player not having read the instruction manual which clearly stated in large, bold letters: ONCE DECEASED DISPOSE OF PIECE. It was thought do not place back on board to see if you can beat your own high score was common sense.

There is an amusing pop culture debate as to whether the fates foresaw and plagiarised Milton Bradley, the creator of the human version of the game, or whether, as the fates claim, he was simply another example of enough chimps plus enough typewriters equals Shakespeare.

Seeing as air is obligatory for sound, even for deities, the following is conducted telepathically.

"Adramalech" Lucifer, his greeting filling Adrienne's considerable consciousness, moved a stout, Hispanic figure with a bushy mustache three places across the board throwing him into an unfortunate re-mortgage.

Adrienne watched the elasticated sludge which was Beelzebub musing at the irony of a meeting on level 9.T and then across the board to the hollow space where Lucifer wasn't "You do this to me?" even telepathically, Adrienne didn't drop the French accent "Le moi? I have traveled nine levels. I had to take the metro to the nearest Ottis. And you, you, cannot even corporealize your iconographical amalgamation of stolen non-catholic heretics arse?"

In a plop of levitating tar Beelzebub half restrained a laugh.

Adrienne threw out a sweeping exasperated hand her thin nose upturned "Clearly you do not want to hear what I have to tell you. You have no respect. You mock me. Slap me with benign dismissal. You egotistical morceau de merde-

"Oh for the love of God" Lucifer, materialised.

The black hole hiccupped and nervously regurgitated a meteorite.

The board tilted to one side. The figurines slid off. They plopped soundlessly into Beelzebub’s inky depths. A sink-hole erupted in Buenaventura, Colombia. Six died instantly.

Beelzebub, anxious nerves shortened by several isolated millennia of hatred-blunted rumination, began fizzing apprehensively.

Ankle propped on his knee in slim-fit and crisply seemed tuxedo pants of a luxurious fabric seemingly one-third ruby, another blood and a last velvet, Lucifer tipped his diamond planed cheeks and jawline left and then right releasing steady streams of white sand from his pointed ears. Of various shades of platinum, jacketed in rich, rose-printed McQueen and hugged by a three-inch opalescence, Lucifer was regally elvish, gender fluid, strikingly beautiful and mostly wore an overly widened and piercingly razor-sharp animation.

"You did that" the impression of Beelzebub's voice brought along a heady perfume of boiled plums, sultanas, spices and honey "because I was winning" 

"Yes" Lucifer exclaimed jollily "Heard Morax on the way down, Addy dear? B old boy's all touched. Hopeless. Keeps Shakespeare on a star-side singularity"

"The poet or the collected works?" Adrienne asked Beelzebub

"Both" Beelzebub conceptually shrugged

"Lovely" Adrienne spat in a manner which suggested she was being bored to death with information she already knew

Lucifer cocked his arm on the armrest of a chair which also wasn't there and lent towards Adrienne "I always preferred Byron and the others more Wilde-ly mischievous"

Adrienne blinked, decided that was enough of an attempt at conversation and bristled upright "The last generation of nobles have been conceived"

Lucifer dropped a single nod "I know"

The knuckles of Adrienne's fingers turned white as her hands clawed at her sides "One is approaching salvation"

Lucifer's eyes danced "I know. I damned her" Lucifer held up his fingers in a pinch "Just a little. Morax, Addy? I needed a play piece. A king on a board 'o squares" Lucifer turned to Beelzebub "Sappy. You'd love it. I love it. Faith. Love. The humanity his Scotts honor clings to. I'm not that bad, really, look I can love 'n everything" Lucifer leaned in beaming, spearheads of teeth raking over his thin, white bottom lip jubilantly hissing "Faith. Gives that boy something to live for! And I need him to fight for this world. My world. Have Faith in our world" Lucifer shot Adrienne a cautious side glance "Addy darling you know this"

Adrienne gaped her glance falling. She didn't. This was it then, the end was nigh.

Lucifer fingered the board's edge "He's her daddy. The bitch I put inside her. Boy pumped nasty thoughts into a plastic cup" Lucifer opened his arms wide "I'm too pedigree for posterity. I'm feeling very sentimental. I've had my eye on her. Nanny's witch. Never fancied her undergoing gash work, it'd be like watching a board member play hide the salami with my ward and Faith's frame's too fine for more than one incestuous lolita fetish"

Lucifer looked off thoughtfully "Poor lamb. Imagine that Rise 'n Shine come womanhood? You could bottle it. Run a family-fun infomercial. A PC damnation skipping the unseemly bed-spreading. Wakey, wakey Faith-y, up 'n stretch, ye a she-demon now. No mess. No fuss. Morax'll never look to her the way Gremory looked to him. Up, up, into his rapist's eyes. Prolong her seeing the monster. He can pretend the man. Never Sir knight's courtly shine be thwarted"

Beelzebub felt stony "Damnation is a mentality, Lucifer"

Lucifer cocked his head left "Yes" and then right "No"

Adrienne took a step forward "It has not helped. And cette fille is not the only risk. The others too" Adrienne inspected the space above her appearing as though she was going to cry "I blame this, television" she waved a delicate hand "And this, inter, contraptions. They are wiser. They are told stories on morality. Of course the stupid ones are violent and power hungry with their plastic joy stick remotes. Many are not that stupid though, they are given formulations at birth"

"I've heard of these formulations Lucifer" Beelzebub's deep voice murmured ominously "If they are not damned, if they turn against their families, we will lose Revelation"

Lucifer's narrow platinum eyes skirted between Beelzebub and Adrienne. He held up a careful hand to them "you both need to get out more"

A dozen new, molten mercury figurines bubbled into life on the playing board's surface. Lucifer plucked one by the head looking over its length lovingly.