“Shakespeare in Hell” originally appeared in the online magazine Elysian Fiction. It is a 20,000 word novella, which I wrote “just to see if I could.” Over time, I learned that stories of this length were published much more often in the past than they are today. One story that I recently reread of this length was Joanna Russ’ “Souls.” From a reader, I learned that this story, with very little change, became part of a Tor Double — and these books were often novella-length works put together.

“Shakespeare in Hell,” similarly to “Mad for the Mints,” has many literary antecedents. The “Dark Lady,” I am sad to say — could have truly been the historical figure mentioned in the story, although the story imagined is, of course, entirely fictional. As to Bob Haldeman — even “flies” may sometimes have their day.

Shakespeare in Hell

Amy Sterling

She was dark, very oddly-dressed, with black-brown hair and eyes of the same shade. She visited Bob in his dreams.

“I’m Emilia,” she said, kneeling beside his bed. “Look at this.”

In her hand, she held a red and yellow striped top, the same kind young Bob Haldeman had growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles. It was a crisp day outside, with the sky a bright, painful blue outlining the Santa Barbara Hills.

Bob would have sworn that he was asleep after two cans of Ensure and a heavy dose of pain medication, but it felt as though he was awake. He was used to visitors. Every day, they were calling and coming by. If Bob had lived his life by the newspapers, he would have thought that he had no friends, that he was one of the most hated men in America. Yet he also knew that his wife and his children loved him well. If that wasn’t living proof that nobody should ever believe what they read in the papers, Bob didn’t know what would be.

The woman put the top on the hardwood floor beside Bob’s bed, and grabbed the red wood knob that made it spin. Bob would have sworn that he’d had that exact top, back when he was just a kid, maybe five or six years old. Sometimes the medicine gave you crazy dreams. Or maybe it was the cancer. Or maybe just the act of dying. And Bob knew that he was doing that.

“Joanne wouldn’t appreciate a strange woman being in my bedroom,” Bob said, aware that, whatever this dream was, there was no real woman there.

Was there?

“Look,” the woman Emilia said. “Into the top.”

Bob laughed. He saw his face as a young man, spinning right there in the top. Then as a freckled, clean-cut teen, then as the boy in a clean blue and white striped T-shirt he had once been, so many years before.

“This is what they say,” he laughed. “Your life, flashing before your eyes.” After so long life, it didn’t seem as though it much mattered. Or at least, he wasn’t afraid. Not at all. Not any more.

The woman’s black eyes flashed in return. “Perhaps,” she said.

Bob watched the top.

“You know,” he said, sighing, watching the top spin, then begin to wobble. “It reminds me of something. You know how when you’re a kid, magic is real? You believe in it? If you just wish hard enough, there’s nothing you can’t do.”

“Magic is real,” the woman said. “You’re right about that.”

“But I’m not a kid any more,” he said. “I’m just not afraid to die.” Then, he turned to look back at her. She was gone.

“There is no magic,” he whispered.

Her voice echoed. “Stay that way,” she said. “I need you, Bob, and so does he.”

Who the hell was he?

Bob turned, painfully, and realized that he was not asleep. A car was pulling up in the driveway. Probably one of the kids.

“Joanne,” he called. “Jo!”

And his wife came running, to find Bob muttering to himself about there being no magic any longer, a toy top spinning beside his bed on the clean wood floor.

The next day, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman died of cancer at his Santa Barbara home. It was a clear November morning in 1993.

oOo

Some years before Bob died, a dark lady came to Will Shakespeare’s kitchen door. Old Will was up as he’d not been for days, enjoying a pastry. Anne was out back; otherwise he’d have asked her to see to the fellow.

Will barely had time to consider standing as the woman burst into the kitchen. The invader threw a heavy leather purse on Will’s good kitchen table, saying, “I want you to write me a play. Here is your pay, scribbler.”

Who and what she was made Will’s heart into water. “I know you,” he said. “Get out of my house.”

The last he’d seen of her was at the Globe, whoring with His Right Lord Southampton. Right before the fire. He’d heard from Jonson, of all people, that she’d grown old and ugly and had come to a bad end, swallowing a draught of poison; or as Jonson joked, “choked on poison from her own black heart.” Even with that, he’d never let her go, and ever she had been an exquisite dagger in his dreaming heart.

“You’ve come for me,” Will said, standing with effort, drawing his back straight and looking into the woman’s eyes: the blankest, darkest things he’d ever seen; ah, Will, another exaggeration, for the eyes were very like to small black pools by a stream. Nothing more. Emilia’s eyes. The Dark Lady who held him still, even in his dreams lying beside his good wife Anne, who was a good wife, and Will loved her. As man loved a good woman; despite the fire in an old man’s veins that burned and burned with the rage there, too.

“Nay,” Emilia said. “I came for a play, not you.”

“Was it not ever so?” Will laughed. He heard the exhaustion in his voice. This was the woman he’d lain with so long ago, and not thought it lying at all, but something of heaven. Yet now he looked at her ghost, thinking that he could both kiss and kill with his cracked old lips. He could not even fear that good Anne would come in at that moment and find the black woman there. Anne knew who she was; yet in her way would say nothing. He would see nothing but the hurt in Anne’s now-watery blue eyes; a hurt beyond words, even the words that he once had told so easily.

“You come too late,” he said to the ghost. “I have not penned a line these last five years. Try Ben Jonson. He still writes, and for our Good King James.”

“I know,” Emilia said, soft-voiced.

“And it was he,” Will said, standing with great difficulty, “who told me you were dead.” He pushed the purse back across the table.

Then she smiled, a bitter thing. “Once you told me that a man’s life was nothing but a dream. Well,” she said, hiking up her skirt to show one of her fine legs, “For me it was no dream, but rather nightmare. Stay you silent and this pay will go unspent. And you unconfessed, unloved, and full of rage to your grave go. As I went.”

“Haven’t you had enough of me?” he said, turning his back. He was afraid that if he turned again, he would leap at her and try to destroy her with his old man’s hands. Or kiss her. He was not sure which.

“Until we are both cast in the lake of fire together, that will be never,” she snarled. He imagined her flashing eyes. He would not turn. “Until Beelzebub himself joins us in the love we once shared.”

“The last time I checked,” Will said softly, “I was not yet dead. I still have time — ” To make his peace. Whatever that might be. Having lived so long without his writing, all days the same there in that cottage, every morning waking to Anne, his world encompassed by the walls darkly greased from her cooking, listening to the endless sounds of her cleaning; her chatter, her country ways, all things come ‘round like this, ending in the beginning.

“Aye, and all the world is nothing, Will. Scribbler!

Liar!”

“This could be said of many men,” Will replied. He thought that he was whispering. Why was he afraid of her? Why, after so long?

She threw the purse at his back.

“I will have you,” she cried. He stood there between kitchen and bedroom, looking at the stairs, until he was certain that she was gone.

“A play is not the compass of a man’s life,” he said. He turned, bending with such pain in his back and hips that he gasped, and picked up the purse. He opened it, fumbling at the leather ties. No money there, no, but something like an eddy of white water in the Avon; only glowing a bit here and there. Swirling. He watched as it swirled faster and faster, like a little boy’s top. Then his head grew light. He felt a tug, starting at the top of his skull, though there had long since been no hair there to tug, and at once he had no more breath and truly, the saying of nothing, for he felt his lips moving, saw the cottage as if he stood outside, not within, saw Anne running like a child toward the kitchen door, and watched as it all went to the finest tissue and nothingness and it was like sleeping, but not.

It was a last gasp, with a taste of copper, and the running of a dream with dream-heavy legs, for Will did run then, run as he had not run in years, out through the tissue that once was his lovely Stratford house, into the garden and right through wide-eyed Anne, her full country bosom heaving in her good cotton dress, and all the fruits of the garden spilling about her feet, the basket flung aside, tears in her good blue eyes.

“Will! Will!” she cried, as his feet took flight and he rose up above Stratford town, into the clear blue sky, met a crow, and then —

oOo

No one remembers scribblers long, least of all, Satan. Some long years after both Will and Bob passed on, Satan’s lieutenant Beelzebub, otherwise known as the King of the Liars, sat watching rehearsals for the latest Busby Berkeley extravaganza, his black pointed chin resting in his reptilian palm. Twenty thousand dancers danced. Yes, of course the demonic lieutenant had the pick of the very best dancers. Twenty thousand was little more than a sampling from the inexhaustible pool of eternally-damned hoofers.

Beelzebub was bored with Nijinsky, but Isadora Duncan still charmed. In fact, it was she who danced before Beelzebub’s wicked eyes, making real Busby’s febrile fantasy in a red silk chemise and bathing cap set with golden sulphur crystals collected each day by lesser demons for both Beelzebub’s pleasure and decorative purposes.

A flirt, that Isadora. She winked at Beelzebub as she danced. Then her head flopped unnaturally to the side.

Bob Haldeman, standing at his master’s ankle, heard the rumblings first. If Beelzebub had been anywhere but the theatre box seats of Hell itself, Bob might have taken the noise for intestinal gas, but the storm breaking over Beelzebub’s purple-black face was unmistakable. The big boy was in one of his moods and there was nothing to be done. Remembering his Navy days as well as the White House, Bob put his head down slightly and stiffened his back. After all, this was Hell. He’d given up his family for a lot of different things and none of them amounted to anything. So, why should he wonder why this was his eternal damnation?

Someone was going to get it. All Bob knew was that, if there was anything he could do to prevent it, it wasn’t going to be him.

“Isa-dora, do you ever do anything original?” Beelzebub demanded. “I mean, really. Do you expect me to sit here and enjoy some broke-neck ballerina far past her prime?”

In the distant reaches of Hell, stalagtites shuddered, then cracked from their moorings, impaling hordes of damned and tortured souls in their path. The Lake of Fire came to a boil, emitting clouds of noxious sulphur and methane.

Isadora Duncan, who hadn’t been afraid of much in her lifetime, stopped her dance, righting her head. Every damned soul there could see her fight to keep her body from quivering.

“I really hate to do this,” Beelzebub said. Bob shuddered. Every time Satan’s Lieutenant said that, someone was going into the lake of fire. And Bob had never been a cruel man. He simply had a difficult time saying “no.”

“My Lord Prince of All — ” Isadora said.

Beelzebub cut her off by snagging her long red scarf with one of his fearsome nails. He lifted her up to his eyes, at that point perhaps ten stories up, and said, “The Great Bastard Satan tells me to keep track of all of you. Every last little pitiful wretch — in your billions upon billions — and I’m supposed to think up ways to torture them. Be creative!” He snorted. “A man in my position needs entertainment to relax. But frankly, you bore me, Dora.”

Bob tried not to watch, but he couldn’t help but see what happened next from between his fingers. It was not that he was squeamish, just that he was so tired. Beelzebub took hold of the scarf and swung Isadora around three times, so fast that her red silk chemise blew off her body, then on the third round, he let go, hurling her some ten miles hence into the very center of the Lake of Fire, where her pale body hit with a splash all of them felt, though only a few barely discerned, depending upon their degree of sight; perhaps depending upon how much they’d cared about their now utterly doomed friend Isadora Duncan. Things didn’t look quite the same in Hell. Mostly it amounted to people not being able to avoid looking at things they very much wished they couldn’t see.

Bob watched that poor bastard Busby Berkeley, who had cared about Isadora very much, cry out at the sight of her vulnerable white body splashing into the burning lake, where it stayed a moment, but only a moment, before melting into the liquid brimstone like a spoon of ice cream hurled into a steaming vat of caramel. That pair, Busby and Isadora, both gay, yet both in love with the dance, had found a kind of peace with each other in Hell. And Beelzebub, all-knowing and thrilled with himself, had destroyed that one lovely thing in an instant.

“You monster!” the choreographer screamed.

Beelzebub smiled.

“You destroyed her! My best dancer! My Dora — ”

“It’s all the same here,” Beelzebub said.

Bob Haldeman thought there might be something he could say to Busby: something that might stop things then and there. He liked Busby. In fact, pre-damnation, the living Bob had enjoyed many happy hours watching Busby Berkeley musicals. So had legions more of the damned. Bob gestured toward him, hoping Beelzebub wouldn’t notice. As soon as Bob waved, he felt alarmed at his boldness, and thrust his hands behind his back, forcing a neutral expression onto his face. There was no mistaking the red-purple flush on Beelzebub’s face; no mistaking the flames dancing in his urine-yellow eyes.

“An eternity of puerile foolishness. I’ve been watching your crap for eons... all of you!” Beelzebub raged. A thousand toupees fell at that moment in the Valley of the Producers and Directors. In the Actors’ Camp, scores of mirrors shattered and their distraught owners wailed.

Busby Berkeley stepped forward, straightening his bow tie and thrusting out his chest. His fate wasn’t that important to him, not after what happened to Isadora. Maybe, after so long damnation, it was natural that he just didn’t care.

Busby’s mouth twisted and there came a deep expression of pride on his face. “Crap?” he asked, flourishing his hand gracefully toward his chest. “Excuse me, I don’t care if you are the Prince of Darkness, Mister. Busby Berkeley does not produce ‘crap.’”

Later, Bob Haldeman thought that Beelzebub’s rage had just popped. Like a helium balloon filled too fast, or maybe a boil that had festered to the point of bursting.

“I wanted something from you,” Beelzebub rumbled, and as he rumbled, he grew. Nameless colors played across his face and chest, alternating with the purple and red of his rage. His great, scaled chest heaved. “But you just can’t give it.”

As twenty thousand dancers and Bob Haldeman watched, Busby Berkeley became a man-sized fly. He buzzed and flapped his wings, which had grown in the moment of one of Beelzebub’s breaths to burst from the back of his neat cashmere sweater.

“Buzz! Buzz!” Beelzebub said, grinning through his fury. Then he turned to Bob. “They don’t call me Lord of the Flies for nothing.” He got the laugh he expected. Bob wondered if Beelzebub could hear the fear behind the laughter, and if he could, if it made his black heart glad. Then he wondered if Beelzebub knew how unfunny he really was.

It occurred to Bob that most people who were still among the living thought that this kind of thing happened every day in Hell. It didn’t. Beelzebub was generally disinterested in the fate of any one of his countless charges. He was happy to let everyone go about their business. Sure, a few were trapped in hideous tortures too awful to be named, but most of the time life just went on. They made movies. People danced. They fell in love, or out of it. Hell even had its own stock exchange, even if it did crash according to Beelzebub’s mood.

And that’s exactly what it did at that moment, losing five hundred points, provoking the re-suicides of any number of margin traders and their minions.

Their wounded shrieks wafted across the Lake of Fire as Busby the Fly did an amazing thing. He flew up, right at Beelzebub’s face and for a few seconds, worried about Beelzebub’s slitted eyes and twisted nose.

The Prince of Darkness swatted and glared. Eventually, a jet of flame came from one cavernous nostril, singing Busby’s wings and sending him fluttering, crippled, into Beelzebub’s Ramses-sized lap.

Beelzebub put his long right middle nail against his scaly thumb and held it there a long moment, while Busby twitched ineffectually. Then, Beelzebub flicked.

“I want you to understand,” Beelzebub said, “that this hurts me much more than it does you.” Busby the Fly followed Isadora Duncan into the eternal fire.

“Exterminated!” Beelzebub exclaimed, with a hearty chuckle.

Looking over at his master’s face, Bob could see that the rage-storm had altered. The red and purple was dying down now, changing to a peevish green.

“You like that?” Beelzebub asked Bob, indicating the concentric rings in the Lake of Fire that marked the sinking of Busby the Fly.

“Uh, great,” Bob said. “Highly original.”

Beelzebub raised one razor-sharp brow. “You’re a yes man,” he said.

Bob didn’t move a muscle in his face. “Maybe so,” he replied.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Beelzebub said. “You don’t have to worry about that because I like you just the way you are, Bob. I don’t want anyone too thoughtful around me. I really don’t like those fellows with deep insights.”

“Like Niccolo,” Bob said.

“Yeah,” Beelzebub said, talking about Bob’s predecessor, who’d served as Beelzebub’s sidekick just about as long as anyone could remember, although memories were unusual things in Hell. One never knew whether they were real, or figments of the fevered imagination of the damned.

“Buzz, buzz. Busby. Get it?” Beelzebub said, chuckling as he brushed a crisped fly-wing off his lap. Bob cringed, hoping the demon wouldn’t notice. It was not only a horrible joke; Berkeley had been a good guy. He’d never done anything wrong that Bob knew about. He guessed maybe Berkeley was in Hell because he was gay. Back when Bob was alive, a younger Bob might have said “the faggot will fry” when asked about that. But mature, long-damned Bob wasn’t so sure. Not that his opinion mattered. Some things in life and death were the same.

“Ha-ha, yeah, very good,” Bob heard himself saying.

“The pun,” Beelzebub muttered, almost to himself. His voice took on a plaintive tone. “It’s about the only thing I ever invented. You would think, having fallen with the Prince of Darkness himself, that I could have come up with all the things that he — ”

“I never knew that,” Bob said quickly, because a maudlin Beelzebub was far worse than an angry one, trying to put a reverent tone into his voice. And now he knew why he’d always hated puns. And it came to him — what if the Devil had invented knock-knock jokes? He didn’t dare ask.

“Do you know, Bob,” Beelzebub asked, as the twenty thousand dancers began to disperse back to their hovels and crannies, “I’ve got an IQ greater than that of the combined intelligence of every condemned soul in this place. Billions! Why, compared to me, Einstein is anencephalic!”

“Of course,” Bob said, keeping the thought to himself that everyone knew that Einstein wasn’t among Beelzebub’s charges, so how could Beelzebub possibly know how smart he was?

“I haven’t been pushing myself lately,” Beelzebub said, examining the nail he’d used to flick Busby into the burning Lake of Fire. He picked at a hangnail, then bit it clean, spitting it in the direction of the dancers. It hit several of them, exploding with the force of a modest-sized pipe bomb. Bob winced at the shrieking of the wounded. Even from that distance, he could see the shredded flesh and it was awful. It didn’t much matter that at some point they’d heal themselves.

“No sir,” Bob said.

Beelzebub regarded him with a greenish eye that glittered with deep suspicion. “What — you’re doubting me?”

“Oh, no, I was merely — ”

“Agreeing. Good man, Bob. Keep it up and you’ll go far.” Beelzebub sighed. The nearer group of retreating dancers fell down like so many matchsticks.

“Bob,” Beelzebub said, “I feel the need for something more. Something meatier.”

“I could have Julia Child broil you up a nice Porterhouse — ”

“No!” Beelzebub growled. “I meant for this.” And he tapped his striated temple.

“Ah,” Bob said. “Some good reading material?”

“Yes,” Beelzebub said. “A great book, or a great play. We’ve been wasting time with these Hollywood and Broadway fools. Let’s pay a visit to the Cave of the Writers and see what’s popping.”

“Writers?” Bob exclaimed. “Somebody told me they were in a lower circle of — ”

“Oh, they’re here,” Beelzebub said. “Arguing and screaming at each other. Imagine: ten thousand writers all in one cave and not a single reader in sight.” He chuckled nastily. “One of my better efforts, don’t you think?”

“Without a doubt,” Bob replied. He wondered why that was so original. Maybe if it had been his job, he would have put all the writers to writing TV sitcoms. Something like “Gilligan’s Island,” or “My Mother the Car.” Then, he caught himself. What was he thinking of, making up punishments? As if he wasn’t damned all to Hell just like everyone else.

Beelzebub grabbed Bob and put him on his shoulder. “Come on,” he said, sounding merry. “Let’s see what the prating fools have been up to.”

As they strode past the Lake of Fire, for the Cave of the Writers was far on the other side, Bob observed the landscape and listened with half-interest to what Beelzebub was telling him. Busby the Fly’s unfortunate fate was still heavy on Bob’s mind. Berkeley really had been an okay guy. And Beelzebub hadn’t given him a second thought. He remembered only a week earlier, when Busby had teamed with Esther Williams, and Beelzebub had said to Berkeley, acid tears dripping from his inhuman eyes, “I love you, man, you’re the greatest.”

Now the great choreographer swam deep in the Lake of Fire with Isadora Duncan, and Bob was clinging to the Devil’s shoulder as they strode over the ruined leagues of Hell.

“They’ve got the permanent critique group,” Beelzebub chuckled. “If any of them didn’t like to hear what others thought about what they scribbled while they were alive — well, I had one of the lesser demons just set them down right there.”

“Sounds good,” Bob said. He wondered if this group was a bunch of critics from the New York Times, sitting around spouting b.s. It really didn’t sound so bad to Bob. Not compared to having your internal organs torn out and eaten by ravenous dogs each day, or having Woodward and Bernstein on your case in perpetuity. Joanne had read the Times Book Review every Sunday. Right after... he didn’t want to think about that.

“Of course, most of them are permanently out of print,” Beelzebub continued, laughing viciously. “Or there’s the worst one of all — Milton’s been writing the same sentence every ten seconds for the past four hundred years. ‘I love Beelzebub, yes I do; I love Beelzebub, how ‘bout you?’”

“Is that what they call writer’s block?” Bob asked. Milton! Bob kept the thought to himself that Beelzebub might have done even worse, considering Milton’s chosen subject matter. Satan and the other demons hadn’t come off looking very good in that poem, from what Bob recalled of his college reading. It was a long, boring poem. And boredom was Beelzebub’s major issue.

“He’s in a block, Bob.” Beelzebub thought this was hilarious, and he stopped a moment to catch his breath. Down below, Bob watched the anguished souls crying out for mercy. With an irritated snort, Beelzebub ground dozens of them into the black basalt that formed the greater part of Hell’s landscape with one sharp cloven hoof. Glancing back at the Lake of Fire, Bob thought he saw two figures rise above the fire, but a spout of flame obscured them. For a brief moment, Bob thought he’d seen them... dancing. Of course, he said nothing of this vision to Beelzebub. He told himself that it was probably another Hellish dream, which even Bob, with his Navy- and Nixon-stunted imagination, had from time to time.

At last they rounded the Lake of Fire and a series of low, hideous, tooth-like hills rose before them. Bob saw the dark mouth of a cave set in the hills, about at Beelzebub’s eye level, which was to say, at Beelzebub’s comfortable traveling height, some fifty yards above the basalt floor of the Valley of the Lake of Fire.

The cliff was glass-sheer. Nobody was getting out of that cave without getting pulped. You might not die in Hell, but you could definitely be hurt. Over and over again.

“We should hear them momentarily,” Beelzebub said. “They’ve been in there trying to shout each other down ever since I threw Sophocles and Euripedes in with Homer. And that guy who wrote Beowulf. Or was it a gal? So hard to tell with all that hair.”

Bob didn’t hear a thing except for the distant moans of a few lost souls wandering the wasteland.

“Yes, we should hear them hollering right about — ” Beelzebub paused. He cocked his pointed ear. A cloud of flies flew out of it, worrying about Bob’s face before setting out across the wasteland to find some unfortunate soul with an open wound in which to lay their eggs.

“I don’t hear anything,” Bob said. “Of course my ears aren’t anything like what yours are, oh great one.”

Beelzebub grimaced. “Cut the sycophancy, Bob,” he said. “Truth is, I don’t hear anything, either.”

There was absolutely no sound coming from the Cave of the Writers.

“I wonder how long this has gone on?” Bob said.

Beelzebub shrugged, nearly hurling Bob to the basalt plain below. “It could have been any time. There’s a bunch of new guys in there, like Hemingway, O’Neill and Faulkner. Sidney Sheldon. Jackie Susann.”

“I’ll be,” Bob said. So Hemingway was in Hell. Of course he was! Everyone who blew off back of his head with a 20-gauge shotgun ended up in Hell. Jackie Susann! Well, of course. Were there bestsellers in Hades? It boggled the —

“They just can’t do this,” Beelzebub cried. “This is their punishment! Their eternal damnation!” With a roar of fury, he leapt toward the mouth of the cave, balancing himself against the cliff with his gnarled hands, peering inward. From Bob’s vantage point on the Devil’s shoulder (Bob had taken hold of some of the hairs growing out of a truly evil-looking mole), he could see huddled forms inside the cave. And they were totally silent.

“Just what do you think you’re doing?” Beelzebub demanded. “You’re supposed to be screaming at each other at the top of your lungs!”

Stirring. Muttering. Moaning. No coherent words of any kind.

“Sophocles! Get your old Greek carcass out here! Milton!” Beelzebub paused. “Right. You’re in the block. Stay in the block, Milton. But that doesn’t excuse you — Pope! Byron! Shelley!”

No one came forth. There was no way to distinguish the forms of the huddled writers in the darkness. They seemed all one: shades of a single color and forms of a similar shape.

Beelzebub cleared his throat. The figures in the cave bent nearly double. Bob watched hundreds of them massed together, trying to stay on their feet in the flaming draft.

“Will Shakespeare, you are called. Come here now or there’ll be — ” Beelzebub paused once more, saying softly to Bob, “I was going to say Hell to pay. Just goes to show you that demons make mistakes, too.”

“I don’t see that it’s necessary, sir,” Bob said, even as his mind was reeling. Shakespeare? In Hell? Didn’t the Devil have any respect for anything? Bob shunted that thought aside: no — he didn’t.

And still, from the cave, no one came forth. In fact, the figures shrank away, and not one distinguishable word could be heard from them, though there were anguished moans from the souls who were crushed with the gust from Beelzebub’s throat.

“All right,” Beelzebub said, and Bob looked over to see that his master held three shining golden cards in his right hand. “You see these? You might have gone gibbering mad on me — fine — these things happen. But you can still see what these are, can’t you?”

Bob could. He’d never actually seen one of them before, though he’d heard whispered tales. Get Out of Hell Free Cards. Bob’s stomach fluttered. He wondered if he was going to be sick. After all, it had been a long, rough trip out to the cave. But even with his shreds of imagination, Bob knew what the feeling really was. Hope. When you didn’t feel something for a long time, maybe it made you sick, he thought. Or afraid. With those gold cards, you could... go to... well, the best Bob could come up with was blue skies, cottony white clouds, and a bunch of cherubim and seraphim.

“I have a deal for you chicken scratchers,” Beelzebub continued. “So listen up.”

Bob thought that the figures might have moved slightly forward. And maybe that they thought the same thing about those three golden cards: the promise of salvation.

“I’ve been bored sick,” Beelzebub said. “I’m ready for something good. I’ve decided: a great play.”

The figures moved ever so slightly closer. Beelzebub held the cards so they glowed into the cave, illuminating the shadowy forms of the writers. Bob saw hundreds of downcast faces. Only a few dared look boldly at the cards, and fewer still at Satan’s lieutenant.

Then one of the writers stepped forward. Bob cringed at the sight of the man. Accustomed to damned souls as Haldeman was, he had still seen few faces to match the rotten green sore-covered face of this fellow, pocked here and there with darker spots the color and texture of spoiled liver.

“What are you offering?” the man asked.

Beelzebub squinted into the cave. After a moment, he smiled, driving back all of the writers save this single man.

It couldn’t be Shakespeare, Bob thought. The clothes were all wrong. A bright-colored waistcoat, narrow trousers, and a silk shirt tied at the neck? Looked more like Dickens, except he was a big guy, really tall —

“Why Oscar, good to see how well you look,” Beelzebub exclaimed. “How are you?”

“Well enough,” Oscar Wilde replied. He straightened his waistcoat and held his lapels out jauntily, still the dandy, even in Hell, and even with that face. “You’ll pardon me if I ask again, what is it you’re offering?”

“Where’s Will Shakespeare?” Beelzebub said, very slowly, as if Wilde were retarded.

Wilde put one finger to his cheek, in a travesty of thought. He sighed. “We haven’t seen him in a long while.”

Beelzebub cocked his head, staring hard at Wilde; a look that would have melted many a lesser soul, but which drove the writer back not one inch. “Don’t lie to me Oscar,” he said. “I’m the one who does that around here.”

“Among my vices, that was not one,” Wilde said, very precisely.

Beelzebub sighed. “No, it wasn’t,” he said. “Except for the one time.”

“More fool me,” Wilde said.

“Exactly,” Beelzebub said. Bob wondered what Beelzebub meant. Oscar Wilde — “the love that dare not say its name” — was that it? He was just gay, like Busby Berkeley. Gee, hadn’t Joanne been in some play in college? “The Importance of Being Earnest?” Very funny. Had the man lied about being a fag? Bob couldn’t blame him if he had. He guessed he would have, too. He’d lied about much less important things... well... that was another place Bob just didn’t want to go.

Oscar spoke up again, his hands on his hips. “You want us to write?” he asked.

Beelzebub nodded. He flashed the cards. Bob thought he saw a flicker of hope in Wilde’s eyes, quickly replaced by a mask of bravado.

“Look, if you can’t come up with Shakespeare, I don’t suppose I really care,” Beelzebub said. “After all, any of you would do. Why not make it a group project?” Beelzebub paused, waiting for something. Bob wasn’t quite sure what that something might be. In a moment, Beelzebub turned to him and said in as close to a whisper as he could manage, “They can’t even begin to work together. You wouldn’t know that, considering your nature, but I do. This will be... something wonderful!”

Bob knew, looking at the crowd’s reaction, that they’d heard every word of the Devil’s brief aside. Wilde crossed his arms. Soon another, smaller man came forward. This time, Bob instantly recognized the moustache, the pale, dark-eyed, hollow-cheeked face, the loosely-knotted cravat, and the worn black waistcoat of one of the most famous ruined Southern gentlemen.

“I didn’t ask for a poet,” Beelzebub snarled.

“I didn’t ask to be here either, sir,” Edgar Allan Poe said in a light, honeyed Southern tenor. He was looking directly, and hungrily, at the golden cards.

Bob braced himself for the onslaught. One of the only writer’s he’d ever thought was any good, and here the guy was about to go the way of Busby Berkeley and Isadora. But all Beelzebub said was, “What if I don’t let you?” Bob didn’t like the way that sounded at all. He nearly spoke up for Poe then, but of course he wasn’t brave enough. Not even close.

Marveling that he could still feel it, Bob’s heart leapt with a small twinge of pride. Even though Poe had been miserably cashiered from West Point, he had a sort of military demeanor, and, Bob saw, not a small amount of physical courage. Just as did Wilde; though Wilde was a homosexual like Busby Berkeley, but again, Bob reminded himself — maybe those things weren’t as important down here in Hell as they had seemed during Bob’s human life.

“I believe that means damned if you do, and damned if you don’t,” Poe said, bowing his dark head. “If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’ll take that second card.”

Beelzebub smirked. Bob couldn’t believe it — he was going to let Poe have the chance. “I still have one card left. If the best one among you won’t come forth, then it’s free for the taking,” he said. “I hope you all know who I’m talking about.”

Then he turned and whispered to Bob. “They all think they’re better than Shakespeare. And even he wasn’t all that great!”

“Really?” Bob asked.

“One of the secrets of Hell,” Beelzebub said. “Don’t tell anyone.”

But there was no Shakespeare forthcoming.

“I will,” came a light, clear voice. A lovely woman stepped forward, dark of hair and eye, in Elizabethan costume.

Bob couldn’t remember any well-known female writer from that time — heck, he couldn’t remember any female writers at all besides Jackie Susann, and this sure wasn’t her. He wracked his brain. The gal who wrote Nancy Drew? Was she real, or a trademark, like Betty Crocker?

Then Bob remembered that he had seen this woman before. She’d come to him the day before he died. And spun the top. The red and yellow top.

Kids believed in magic, he’d said. And she told him that magic was real. Bob wasn’t sure what he thought about that, but he knew that he didn’t trust her. During his life, he’d been blind to truly evil people. That happened if you just looked at the facts, and didn’t want to see into a person. Since then, he’d learned. A little.

“Emilia,” Beelzebub said, his voice soft and gentle. “So good to see you again. Now, why can’t you flush Will out of wherever he’s hiding? I’d love to see another play from him, provided he doesn’t screw it up the way he did Hamlet.”

“He’s gone mad, Master,” the dark woman said.

Bob couldn’t contain himself any longer. “Who is she?” he whispered in Beelzebub’s ear.

“Why, the Dark Lady,” Beelzebub said. “Emilia Bassano. No one remembered her name in years after... excepting me, of course. She’s always been quite close to my heart. As she was to my friend Will’s. But surely you recall her visit, Bob?”

Bob nodded as Beelzebub laughed. “She almost had your job, Bob. Imagine that! She had to do some quick thinking to avoid it. But then I surprised her. I put her back in this cave.”

That was one thing that Bob preferred not to think about. His job. It was a limited-term contract. And what happened when the contract expired was just about —

Bob thought of Shakespeare’s famous sonnet about the Dark Lady. This woman’s hair didn’t look a thing like black wire, so there was the answer to the old “was it literal?” debate. She must have done something awful to Shakespeare, he thought, to inspire a poem that cruel.

“You know I’m a better writer than he,” Emilia said. “So why not give me the chance?”

“The chance you never had during your human life?” Beelzebub asked, voice mellow and smooth.

“Yes,” she said. “They would not listen to a woman in my day. But I was better than him, and the others, too. Always!” Bob noticed the expression on Poe’s face — loathing. And Wilde’s ugly face sagged in pity; or perhaps contempt.

“No, give it to me!” another voice called. A short, wizened bald man pushed his way through the crowd. Looking at him, Bob wondered if his extraordinary ugliness might have been his Hellish torture, for the man’s eyes were so small and so stupid-looking that, on close inspection, if he put the two together he might get one normal eye out of it. Bob dubbed him Cyclops.

Cyclops shoved his way past Emilia, glaring viciously at Wilde and Poe. “You heard me,” he said. “I want that card. I’m as good a writer as any of them here.”

“Ah,” Beelzebub said. “You are? Tell me what you’ve written?”

The man shifted back and forth from foot to foot. “That doesn’t matter,” he said.

“I thought you said this was the cave of the writers,” Bob whispered in Beelzebub’s ear.

“The word is ‘wannabee,’” Beelzebub said.

Wilde and Poe didn’t seem to know the fellow, but Wilde looked him up and down once, then he leaned over the smaller man and whispered something. “Shall we, Edgar?” he asked aloud.

“I believe so,” Poe replied.

Wilde grasped Cyclops firmly by the back of his tab-collared shirt and propelled him to the opening of the cave.

“What are you doing?” Cyclops asked, voice rising into piping, near-feminine hysteria. “You can’t do this, you faggot!”

“I can’t?” Wilde asked mildly. “Faggot is something one throws in a fire. Perhaps you were searching for the word somdomite?” Bob at that point realized just how large and strong Wilde was. Nearly six and a half feet tall, and far more muscular than he had at first seemed.

“Let go of me!” Cyclops struggled, but to no effect. Wilde dwarfed Cyclops, handling him like a child. Poe stood nearby, guarding any avenue of escape. Though he was small, he looked mean. The other writers moved closer. Many had eager, greedy expressions on their faces. Emilia smiled softly at the sight.

“I’ve beaten far better men than you,” Wilde said. “Please allow me to show you the door. I’m dreadfully sorry we’ve had such a short — ”

Cyclops shrieked like a woman as Wilde shoved him over the edge of the cliff past an obliging Beelzebub.

“Visit,” Wilde said, following the body’s precipitous descent with interest.

Bob watched the white-shirted body tumbled down the sheer, glassy cliff to the rocks below.

Squinting, Bob watched the ravening creatures of Hell’s wastelands approaching from both air and land, to tear at the would-be writer’s freshly steaming entrails. In a few more moments, agonized shrieks carried themselves up to the mouth of the cave like the distant cries of a bird.

“Why, Oscar, thank you!” Beelzebub said. “I know you’ll find it difficult to believe, but I really did try to separate that type of person out. They’ve got their own pit on the other side of the Lake. A legion of my demons demand daily that they write something good.”

Beelzebub smiled, buffing his sharp nails on his chest. “Of course, they can’t. They are then held up to public ridicule in a variety of humiliating positions.”

“It was nothing,” Wilde said. “I have beaten better men than that for honor’s sake.”

“Sir, well done,” Poe said, shaking Wilde’s hand. A few of the huddled writers clapped feebly. Emilia rushed forward, kissing Wilde’s cheek.

“You’re very strong,” she said. Bob didn’t like the expression he saw on her face. It reminded him of many faces he’d seen during his Watergate days.

“Anything for the admiration of a beautiful woman,” Wilde said, then he took her hand and kissed it.

“Oscar!” Beelzebub cried. “You’re not relenting at this late stage?”

Wilde shook his head. “I never objected to beauty in any form.”

“Nor I,” Poe added. “Beauty was never moral.”

“This one certainly isn’t,” Beelzebub said, looking at Emilia. Then he prepared to leave.

“I leave you to it,” he said. “You three — you have two weeks to finish a play that makes some improvements upon Hamlet. Would you like further instructions?”

“Please,” Wilde said.

“All right,” Beelzebub replied. “Just remember that Hamlet should have come back and killed Claudius immediately. It just wasn’t — ”

“Of course,” Oscar said. “It wasn’t at all.”

“That’s it! That’s the spirit,” Beelzebub said.

“He speaks of course of Hamlet’s father,” Wilde said in a soft voice, winking at Poe. Bob caught the look of astonishment on Poe’s face, but didn’t comprehend its source.

Beelzebub looked into the cave sharply, his eyes narrowing. “You mock me, sir?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Wilde said, smiling with his torn, ragged mouth. Poe jabbed him in the ribs, but he kept on smiling.

“Don’t even try,” Beelzebub said. “If you’re very good, I may not just give you the card. I may just make you young again, and beautiful.”

Wilde gently inclined his head toward Beelzebub, nodding.

And as Beelzebub strode off with Bob Haldeman on his shoulder, Wilde turned to Poe and whispered, “so I have dreamt it will be in paradise.”

Poe closed his large, sad eyes, sighing. “Where my wife Virginia dwells.”

“As does mine,” Wilde replied.

Poe raised one dark brow at this.

“Yes, friend, I loved her,” Wilde said. “And my mother Speranza. Over long years I’ve come to believe that there is a love of the spirit that nourishes more than any other kind.”

Poe grinned with his crooked mouth. “Spirit as in Hamlet’s father?”

Wilde’s face changed. “I didn’t know you had that sort of levity in you,” he said, laughing, and his laugh was a wonderful thing to hear in that damned place.

“I must say one of the shocks of damnation was the discovery that Beelzebub had such a paucity of imagination,” Poe said. “I’d always thought he would be grand. Or at least phantasmagorical.”

Wilde leaned close to the shorter man and put his hand on his shoulder. “Don’t credit the beast with what our Lord gave you,” he said. The two men regarded each other a moment.

“What did the Lord give me but pain?” Poe asked.

“Oh, God,” Oscar said, touching Poe’s arm. “He gave every creature who ever lived pain. To some few, such as you, he gave treasure.”

Poe’s face registered shock. “Sir, it was a curse,” he said. His brow furrowed, but before he say more, Emilia stepped forward.

“We’d better get to work,” she said.

Poe and Wilde stepped away, Poe glaring, and Wilde looking sadly at her.

Wilde spoke first, shaking his head. “We won’t be working together, madam,” he said. “We can’t. I never really wrote a great play. And Edgar? To his poems I bear absolute allegiance, but — ”

“I’m no playwright, ma’am,” Poe said. “I was boasting before, catching sight of those cards. If it were a poem he wanted, then perhaps, but a play?” He shrugged.

Emilia leaned forward, her hands formed into furious claws. “I’ll write it then,” she said. “I once wrote a whole book to answer those damnable lying scribbles of Shakespeare. Think you I spent my days on the virginals and lying on my back?”

Poe winced. Wilde showed no reaction, then he suddenly said, “Madam, on your back seems much the best place for your talents, does it not?”

She screeched, as the other writer-shades gathered close. Poe and Wilde saw dozens of famous faces, and still dozens more that had been forgotten even as they lived, crowding them, staring hungrily. They all wanted out. Each wanted one of those cards.

Wilde cleared his throat, looking over the crowd. He used his size then, seeming to grow taller and more imposing. “We need William Shakespeare to have any chance,” he said. “Beelzebub wanted him. It can’t be done without him. Have any of you seen or heard tell of him?”

The crowd jostled, then parted as a great bear of a man clad in an elaborate gown of golden tissue stepped forward. “I’ve seen him. He does not speak.”

“To you, that is,” Emilia said, dark eyes glinting wickedly.

“Nay, and not to you either, Madam,” the big man said.

“Ben Jonson,” Poe said. “You were his good friend.”

“Of a sort, and more to him than this guinea hen,” Jonson replied.

Emilia cried out and slapped at Jonson with her fan. “I’m no prostitute!” she shrieked.

Poe took her arm gently. She tore away from him, eyes flashing. “You’re all fools. He’s brought the great prizes to us. Don’t look to that old wreck of a creature. I was always better than he — always!”

“Small wonder the Great Dissimulator loves you, lady. Mayhap ‘tis you should sit on his shoulder, in place of that nidicock,” Jonson said.

Wilde turned to Jonson, ignoring Emilia. “Where is he?”

“Back there,” Jonson said, indicating the farthest reaches of the cave. “I have not seen him in a long while. But with God’s grace, you may find him.”

Wilde nodded. “There’s none of grace here save what we make,” he said.

Something of wonder came over Jonson’s broad features. “Wrote you well, man?” he asked. “I know not any of you who came after me, you understand.”

“So some said,” Wilde replied. “But I rather forget.” He took Poe’s arm, and led him through the crowd of fading, grieving writer-shades, toward the very bowels of the cave.

“I’m coming with you!” Emilia cried.

“No,” Wilde said, turning back. “If you try, you’ll find yourself following the path of that man we threw from the cave.”

“Lady, you should have,” Poe added. “And I do not say such things without reason to one of your fair sex.”

Emilia’s face twisted in fury, but Ben Jonson grabbed her shoulder and turned her around to face him. Wilde and Poe could not hear what was said, but it was clear from the anger flashing in Jonson’s eyes, and from Emilia’s newly-meek demeanor, that whatever the second playwright of the King’s Men, later masque-maker to the King, had said, the Dark Lady would heed it. For the moment.

Long Wilde and Poe traveled through the cave, meeting many strange writers. None had seen Will Shakespeare, though old Homer thought that once he’d shared a meal with him and traded tales.

Then they came to the end of the cave. The critique group was nearby, the only ones who had kept talking through the silent decades.

“God Damn It,” they heard Hemingway’s booming voice as they passed. Yes, that was where the great man had ended up, arguing with writers a fraction of his stature. “A little humor will not improve Francis Macomber!”

Hearing this, Poe said to Wilde, “I don’t think he’s back here. This whole place reminds me of Fortunato’s catacombs. Nitre. So much of it. The demon’s got something unspeakable in mind.”

Wilde, shivering, nodded. “Even so, we’ve got to keep on,” he said. Then, he paused. “Fortunato and Montresor — your famous tale!”

Poe nodded. “Yes, so it was. I dreamt it all of a piece.”

“This is like to that,” Wilde said. “I did nothing like that; but you — Oh, God — you . . .”

Poe looked up at Wilde, eyes wide. “I never meant for that to come real,” he whispered. “It was but a tale, told for money.”

At the very end of the cave, damp and dank, not hot at all as one might think Hell would be, Poe and Wilde discovered a figure huddled beside an outcropping of basalt.

“His costume,” Poe said. “They were wearing such clothes as they went into the catacombs. Masquing.”

“I know of masks,” Wilde said. “Why did we write of them, when it was what lay beneath that we should have — ”

He stopped, because the figure with a parti-colored ruff about his neck, wearing a cap with bells, and bells upon his toes, turned his face toward them. Will Shakespeare smiled insanely from beneath his fool’s cap.

It was Poe who knelt at his side, while Wilde reeled back in despair and shock, clutching at his chest.

“He’s mad,” Wilde cried as Poe leaned close. Poe was not afraid of the mad; he’d known enough of the wild, keening call of lunacy himself.

“You don’t precisely know me,” Poe said to grinning Will. “But I know you. Poe’s my name. I was a poet.”

“‘Tis right,” Will said. “And fitting, in the French manner.” Then, he laughed, toying with his beard. His eyes, eyes that Poe thought once must have been quite large and beautiful, shone in sick, dim nitre-fed light.

Poe realized that Will was speaking of his name, making a play on words. Leaning still closer, he whispered in Shakespeare’s ear: “are you quite mad?”

“I am mad but north by northwest,” Will said. Then, he winked.

“Oscar, come close,” Poe said, grinning. “He’s not insane!”

Wilde knelt beside Poe and took Will’s hand. “Sir,” he said, his voice full of respect. “I loved you. Yet, there’s something I must know.”

“What, son?” Shakespeare asked, looking into Wilde’s face, his brow furrowed as he tried to comprehend the meaning of the sores and wounds that marred Wilde’s good countenance.

“The young man of your sonnets,” Wilde said. “Did you love him?”

“Aye, and to my heart,” Will replied.

“Was it... Willie Hughes?” Wilde asked. Poe glanced over at his friend, astonished. Willie Hughes? Who in the world was that?

“Willie Hughes, the boy actor?” Will asked. “Nay,” he said, getting to his feet and brushing his clownish trousers free of dust, the bells on his cap and his toes jingling. “My Lord Southampton, who nearly died in the Tower waiting our Queen’s pleasure. ‘Twas well for him that she was not, as she fancied, possessed of immortal life.”

“Oh,” Wilde said, looking powerfully disappointed.

“And you know who she was,” Will said. Wilde and Poe exchanged looks — the Dark Lady — Emilia. “It’s amazing that you should, you know. Know my lines. I never meant them to — ”

“We need you, Sir,” Poe said. “There’s no time to waste.”

Wilde broke in. “Beelzebub has come, offering us three chances out of this place. If we write him the best play he’s ever seen. In two weeks.”

Shakespeare looked between Poe and Wilde and took hold of both their shoulders, laughing. “Why our Queen Gloriana asked for little less; she wanted the Falstaff play in the space of three Sundays. For which she paid five whole crowns.” This last Will stretched out as if it was a large amount of money, though both Wilde and Poe knew that it could not be so.

“The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Poe said in a sepulchral voice.

“Oh,” Wilde said, frowning. “That one. I wrote for money, but never on such short time.”

“Not my best,” Shakespeare said. “As you both seem well to know.”

“The great liar wants us to make something of wonder for him,” Wilde said. “Edgar and I gave ourselves as volunteers.”

“Methinks there was one other,” Will said. “I had it in a dream.” His face looked unspeakably sad.

“How could you know? A dream?” Wilde asked. “We know her. The Dark Lady. We wouldn’t let her — ”

“Mayhap,” Will said, turning away, his expression becoming vague and mad-looking once more. “Mayhap you may not have the saying of it.”

“Without you, there’ll be no sound or saying at all,” Poe said.

A look of grief marked Will’s face. He shook his head; the bells jingled, their merry sound at odds with his expression.

“I cannot,” he said, after a moment.

“What do you mean? If you cannot, then none of us could. Not a line — a word!” Wilde exclaimed.

“It is not that,” Will said, looking at his hands. He held them toward his companions. They both saw the tremor in his fingers.

“Ben mocked me,” Will said. “Said he, ‘he never scratched out a line.’ ‘Twas all I did for some ten years; scratch out lines. At the end, it became too much.”

“Palsy,” Wilde said, shaking his head.

“Writer’s cramp,” Poe replied.

Will smiled wanly. “It was not so bad as a wormed pastry and watered ale. I said all I had to say.”

“More than any man ever had or would,” Wilde exclaimed, taking Will’s hand. “But can’t you think, just a little, and try?”

Will sighed. “I have the knowing of it,” he said. “But I would not see that woman, nor speak with her. For she is why — ”

“Why you’re here?” Wilde asked.

Will nodded. “She’s the compass wherein I lost my way. I suppose — I never forgave her for that. She was a poison that I must drink. As she did herself.”

“I know that feeling,” Wilde said, thinking of Bosie, who he had loved, and for whose sake he’d lost everything.

“Will,” Poe said. “Beelzebub has offered us three chances for paradise. There can be one for each of us. Don’t you — ”

“Marry,” Will said, “I do. But do either of you think that these chances be real, or merely fantastical lies?”

“He is the Prince of Lies,” Poe said, his voice dark.

“It’s a chance, a hope,” Oscar said. “I can’t believe we’d be made to suffer like this without any hope of redemption.”

Will looked deeply into Oscar’s eyes, then into Poe’s downcast face. He sighed.

“It’s no good,” he said at last. “I said all I had to say; that’s the truth of it. There’s simply — nothing more.”

“But can you not speak of the undiscovered country?” Wilde asked, unwilling to give up. “Is this not where we are? A land beyond death, beyond dreaming?”

“Who knows whether we sleep, or wake?” Will asked. “Who knows whether this place; all we see — ” and he gestured around the dank confines of the very end of the Cave of the Writers, “is but fantasy. Ours, or the Devil’s own?”

“I dreamt waking enough when I was alive,” Poe said, nodding. “I think this is real, so far as I can tell.”

“Mayhap,” Will said. Then he paused, staring past Wilde and Poe to the end of the cave.

“Holy Mary, mother of — ” he said, and his eyes flew wide. The bells on his cap jingled madly as he searched for something, finally fixing his eyes on what looked like a heavy oval splotch of nitre on the cave’s dank wall.

“It is her,” he said. “Anne.”

“Who is that?” Poe whispered to Wilde.

“His wife,” Wilde answered. “He sees her, like Hamlet saw the ghost of his father.”

“It was ever thus, from my youth,” Will said, holding out both of his hands. “Anne, look not so dark on me. I swear, I never meant to leave you this way.”

“Poor soul,” Poe whispered. “It’s a phantasm.”

Wilde stepped forward. “Is this your wife?” he asked. “What is it she wants from you?”

Will shook his head, and did not answer. Then Wilde turned in fear, for Poe had cried out as well, and was moving toward the nitre himself.

“Virginia!” he cried. “My Virginia!”

Both Will and Poe were at the wall now, gesturing at shades as if they were as real as their own flesh; that Wilde could not see at all. Then, Wilde wondered, would his wife come for him? Or — a far less comforting thought — What if it were Bosie who came? Bosie, damned for certain, but who Wilde had never found in the Cave of the Writers. Not in all those long, dead damned years since his dying breath in that French hotel. An old, unloved man, dying by himself, sans beauty, sans dignity, yet not, Oscar thought, sans his wit, which had sustained him all his life and into what lay beyond.

“I suppose the dreams were more real for you than for me,” he said, turning to leave them to their private sights, or imaginings, or whatever they might have been seeing against the wall of the cave. “It was all words for me. I thought I could make myself — ” He paused.

Turning to see Bosie before him, as he’d looked in early life, delicate features, large, beautiful eyes, and pale, lily-like hands.

“My heart,” Oscar said, even as his heart pounded against his ribs, and his body filled with an overpowering mingling of rage and desire.

“Oh, Oscar,” Bosie said. “You’re so ugly. How did this happen?”

How? Oscar fought down the urge to slap the beautiful young man. Why, Bosie, how? By your use of me, which wore me out, my friend, my love. It was I on that stand in the courtroom, Wilde thought. I who endured the ridicule; I who spent those long, cruel years in Reading Gaol. I who could not, afterward, write.

“Imagine,” Oscar said to Bosie, “that you had a single piece of paper each day upon which you could write. And imagine also, having more than you could ever possibly say, each day, that you could fill the paper with cramped, crabbed lines, and not have one iota written true to what was in your heart.”

“I was so sorry for you, Oscar,” Bosie said.

“Which is why you so often wrote, or came to visit, as Robbie did.” Bosie, of course, had not visited the gaol at all; to see the great sinner, Oscar Wilde, whom he had tempted himself with his own soft red lips to long years of living purgatory and exile. Oscar Wilde, who had once held all of London — even the world — in the palm of his broad pale hand.

“I could kill you,” Wilde said to the young man.

“Oh, Oscar,” Bosie said. And he began to cry.

Then, as quickly as he’d come, Bosie grew pale and insubstantial, like a thin tissue, and finally faded to nothing at all. Oscar reached out, but Bosie was gone.

He turned back, and Will Shakespeare was right behind him.

“You know what your sin was,” Will said.

“I was too vain,” Wilde said, “and I could not believe on our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Will shook his head. “So books might tell you,” he said. “Your sin was much as mine. You could not let go of your hate.”

“I loved him,” Wilde whispered. “I love him still.”

“As I do Emilia,” Will said. “Every moment since my lips first tasted hers, an agony, as if adders stung my flesh in all the creeping minutes since. Here — ” he gestured around the cave, “a thousand times moreso.”

“Perhaps this is so,” Wilde said. “All these years, he said nothing. Destroyed me, stripped my children from me — my art — my beauty — everything — then did what? Ran off and got married! Now he — why now do the shades come to haunt us? We have been dead long years. We stopped talking. Why now? Why this?”

“There is only so long any man can dream and not wake,” Will said. Wilde did not understand this; he looked toward Poe, who was still conversing with the figment of his dead wife that only he could see and hear.

Poe burst out with, “No! No! You mustn’t leave me again. I can’t bear it. I’ll kill myself. I swear it, Virginia — no!”

Then he turned, his pale face a gaunt mask of misery and held out his hands to Will and Wilde. “She’s gone,” he said, his voice breaking.

“Edgar,” Wilde said, gesturing toward his friend. “We have all seen such things as — ”

“I’ll kill myself!” Poe cried.

“Nay,” Will said. “How can that be, when you are already dead?”

Poe shook his head violently from side to side, as if he was trying to clear it, or as if he heard an echo of his dead wife’s voice, and could no longer bear the sound. “Dead, dead,” he said. “What does it matter if I still hear? If my senses still assail me with what I wanted to forget? Where is there a drink in this place?”

Will walked toward him, bells jingling at his toes.

“Those bells! God, give me some whiskey!” Poe cried, retreating to the back of the cave.

“It is he who is mad,” Will said, turning back to Wilde.

“I think,” Wilde said, “it has ever been so with him.”

Will grabbed Wilde’s hand. “Listen, man, there’s something in this,” he said. “Something to be learned.”

Then, he turned to Poe, grabbing his shoulder and staring intently at him until Poe opened his tightly-shut eyes, and his nervous quivering calmed.

“Yes,” Poe whispered. “I’ll try. But my Virginia... I cannot forget.”

“If you ask me,” Wilde said, now smiling, the shivers from Bosie abating, “It would seem that each of us suffers from an excess of the imagination, as I think it was termed in my day.”

Will laughed, heartily. “Aye, and he hath been so since his youth.”

“Macbeth,” Poe said, nodding. “That was my favorite.”

“Of course,” Wilde said, smiling and joining Will at Poe’s side. He took his friend’s hand and smiled at him. “The witches.”

“Hecate,” Poe said. “The dagger.”

“A dagger of the mind,” Will said, tapping his broad, handsome temple.

“Do we dream all of this, then?” Wilde asked. “Even the Devil? Even the shades that haunt us?”

Will looked once around the cave, as if he feared a return of his daughter’s ghost, or of something worse, then he looked at Wilde and Poe in turn. “It may be. I had not thought so before, but something of this vision tells me that this may all be a dream; of ours, or of someone else’s.”

“Beelzebub’s dream?” Wilde asked. “He plays us for fools?”

Will shrugged. “Nay,” he said. “You’ve spoken with him. Think you he has the imagination to create all this? Hold us captive for so long in fevered fantasies?”

“No,” Wilde said. “I think not. But what of her — the Dark Lady?”

Will shuddered. “Yes, what of her,” he said. “For what I spoke before holds true. I would not see her or speak with her.”

“Which of you,” Poe said, seeming to recover some of his composure, “did not dream your life as you were to live it? If we dreamed ourselves here, perhaps we can dream ourselves away.”

“Yes!” Oscar cried. “Yes, through the play!”

“The play,” Will said. “It is engendered. Let us go, then, and get to work.”

“The play’s the thing,” Wilde could not resist saying as they strode back through the cave. But neither Poe nor Will laughed.

“It is,” Poe said, instead. “Indeed, it is.”

“Gentlemen,” Wilde said as they struggled past the permanent critique group, where they caught a glimpse of Hemingway holding his ruined head in his hands in despair, “we must to it immediately, and write our own salvation.”

As they walked through the cave, Beelzebub was perched some five miles away, holding a spyglass to his eye. He snapped the spyglass shut viciously and turned to Bob Haldeman.

“Those ungrateful turds! How dare they? I, have not enough imagination? Why, I’ll make them dance! I’ll make these puppets squirm!”

“Seems to me they’ve got a good chance of writing a pretty good play,” Bob said. All the while he was thinking of what Shakespeare had said, and wondering. Were those cards real? The Get Out of Hell Free Cards? Was he, Bob Haldeman, a bigger fool than anyone for going along with Beelzebub the liar?

“Gah! Idiocy! I don’t care if they write a good one or not. Now that Will Shakespeare’s up and about, full of life like some squirming bug that just won’t die, this ought to be quite enjoyable.”

“Sir, are you meaning to — ”

“It’s not for you to question,” Beelzebub said, gesturing out over the wasteland of Hell, indicating thousands of shrieking souls as he did so. “Don’t forget, Bob. You’re... replaceable. I can revoke your contract at any time.”

“Yes,” Bob said. “Right.” He climbed up on Beelzebub’s shoulder once more as the Black Prince rose to return to the Cave of the Writers.

Once there, Beelzebub grew to twice his former height, now looming over the glass-sheer cliff and roof of the cave. He made an enormous, horny fist and punched a hole in the cave’s roof, leaning over and peering in.

From inside the cave, all anyone could see was a great, lambent yellow goat’s eye. And of course, they all began to choke on the Devil’s breath; a thing scarcely more palatable than his abominable peristalsis.

“Minions, you frustrate me. How much have you gotten done, eh? Lazy! That’s what you are,” Beelzebub hooted into the cave. The demoralized crowd of writers cringed.

Poe, Wilde and Shakespeare stepped forward. They’d managed to avoid Emilia, the Dark Lady, up to that point. But Shakespeare saw her approaching through the crowd, and he quailed.

“Friends,” Will cried. “Cover for me! Mayhap there’s a rock.”

“Emilia!” Beelzebub boomed at her approach. “Why, I do believe your friends here are... how shall I say it? Trying to cut you out of the action.”

“No!” she cried. “A deal’s a deal. What’s fair is fair. You took the three of us on. He,” she said, staring hard at Shakespeare, “is no part of this.”

As Poe and Wilde watched, a change came over Shakespeare. Where he’d been half-hiding behind Oscar’s broad back, now he stepped forward into the yellow light of Beelzebub’s eye.

“I would not keep her from wherever her journey takes her,” he said. “You have my word, as a gentleman.”

“Will!” Wilde cried. “We were going to write — ”

“It’s true,” Will said quietly. “I’ve said all I had to say. Let others write the play.”

“Oh, that’s fine coming from you, you great gas-bag,” Emilia said.

“I will not write with this woman,” Poe said, casting his eyes down and folding his arms.

“Nor I,” Wilde said.

“So the deal’s off,” Beelzebub said. “I expected nothing better from you cretins. It’s been five hours; you’re already at each other’s throats.” And Beelzebub lifted his head from the roof of the cave, letting the red light of Hell in, and he laughed. The floor of the cave rocked; bits of nitre and great hunks of rock fell about everyone’s head and shoulders.

“However,” Beelzebub said, sticking his giant claw-hand through the gaping hole in the roof of the cave, “I still have the three cards.”

The Get Out of Hell Free cards gleamed golden. The writers uncovered their heads and gasped in wonder.

“Let us all try on our own,” Emilia said. “You choose which is best, and which of us will get the cards.”

Beelzebub withdrew his hand, then put his eye to the hole once more. “And you expect me to go through that great mass of crap? What do you take me for,” he said. “An editor?”

Throughout the cave, there were many mutterings and a few peals of laughter.

“Don’t insult me!” Beelzebub roared. “You!” he added, pointing at Will, “it’s no accident you’re wearing a fool’s clothing. I see you still persist in your half-witted imaginings. So, whatever happens, you had your chance, Shakespeare. You’re out.”

“So be it,” Will said, bending his head as the bells of his cap jingled.

Beelzebub grinned. Bob Haldeman clung to his shoulder, and at that moment he became certain that the cards were a sham. It was all another of Beelzebub’s tricks. He saw Poe below, indecision marking his pale face. “Edgar!” he began to call. “Don’t listen to him!” he thought to warn. But he stopped himself before a word came out of his mouth.

“I suppose it’s every man for himself,” Poe called up to Beelzebub.

Beelzebub nodded, causing another downfall of rock and nitre. “You’ve got it, poet,” he said.

“And all men know that comes naturally to such as us,” Wilde said.

“All men,” Emilia snarled. “Don’t you mean every one?”

“If we’re to believe you, you’re the one who knows all the words, not me,” Wilde snapped.

Bob fought back the nearly overwhelming urge to cry, “Don’t listen to this demon! He’s lying! That’s all he does!”

Beelzebub would never let a one of them out of that cave, unless it were to pitch them into the Lake of Fire like Isadora Duncan and Busby Berkeley. Bob began to wonder if Beelzebub even could let anyone out of Hell. Perhaps he couldn’t — not at all!

“Master,” he said, softly. “How clever you are. You have no intention of — ”

“Sssshh!” Beelzebub said, holding one black-clawed forefinger to his foul lips. “You want to spoil the game?”

“I have an idea for a play,” Emilia said. “It’s a revenge play, where a scorned lover murders the one she loves.”

“Sounds like my kind of topic,” Beelzebub replied.

“Emilia,” Will called. “I know that you hate me, but can’t you see he’s lying? He’ll ruin you, just as the — ”

“Leave me be, you... old horned goat! You were never half the man he was. And you know it,” Emilia snarled. “You never gave me any credit. Never for a moment imagined I might be as good as you. Might be able to scribble as fast, with better ideas and better lines.”

“Then go you to it,” Shakespeare said, his voice full of regret. He looked toward Poe and Wilde, because he truly did not know which way they would choose.

Poe smiled his crooked, melancholy smile. “I can’t write a play,” he said. “I suppose I’m out.”

“And I never wrote a truly fine play,” Wilde said. “I never took that seriously. My dreams I saved for other matters.”

“Let us retire then, gentlemen, and leave them to their labors,” Shakespeare said, taking Wilde and Poe by the elbow and leading them through the crowd.

“Gentleman! Ha!” Emilia crowed. “Well I remember your payment for your coat of arms, Will Shakespeare. Your father was a pauper, and you a glover’s man!”

“Don’t listen,” Wilde said. “She’s just trying to force you to anger.”

“That she already has,” Will said, as they walked away. “If I be honest with myself.”

They heard Beelzebub’s further instructions as they walked through the crowd, but none of the three turned. More writers had come forth to join Emilia; two dozen or more. And eagerly, they listened to Beelzebub.

As soon as they were clear of the crowd, halfway between the front of the cave and the permanent critique group, Will stopped the others and took their hands in his.

“Now it starts,” he said.

“What?” Wilde said. “I thought we’d just given up all hope — like men, well enough, but still — ”

“Nay, we must take the journey,” Will said. “At long last.”

“Journey?” Poe asked, dark eyes growing large with wonder.

“Why, to the undiscovered country, man.” Will looked at Wilde, smiling. “You said — go there — to that place. Remember?”

“To dream our lives as they ought to have been,” Wilde whispered. “Yes, I remember. To face in full what we have done. The only question is: which of us shall be the first?” The three men looked at each other. Wilde’s hands were at his side, large and white, not looking nearly as strong as they really were, just as they’d been in life. Poe reached toward his cravat, fiddling with it nervously. Will’s hands had formed into fists. He stood as if ready to leap off a great height into —

None of them saw the tiny fly that had followed them. Beelzebub had absented himself from the roof of the cave, and in the space of a few moments, had turned to Bob Haldeman with a vicious glance, and transformed him, not into a human-sized fly as he’d done with Busby Berkeley, but into a tiny creature with Bob’s head on a fly body, and had unleashed him into the cave.

“Follow,” Beelzebub told Bob. “And watch them for me. I’m going to have lunch. I’ll grant you a few powers until I get back.”

Bob, unhinged by the transformation, was flying blind and in despair through the cave until he came upon the three writers and hovered a few feet from them, feeling like some sort of bug planted to eavesdrop. As if he hadn’t had enough experience with such things during his human life. He wished for oblivion.

“Fly my little creature, fly,” Beelzebub said, speaking inside Bob’s head. So, though Bob tried to shut his eyes and ears, he flew, knowing that while at his lunch, Beelzebub was hearing every word that Poe, Wilde and Shakespeare spoke through the infernal device of his transformed body.

“Poe,” Will said. “You saw your wife before. You called her. It is something with her for which you are damned.”

“Virginia,” Poe whispered. “My life, my love.” He began to turn toward the wall.

“Wait, friend, wait,” Will said quickly, stopping Poe. “The question also is — who brought these shades to us? Was it the Great Dissimulator? I think not. He is like drink; he provokes falsehood and holds forth the promise of things that can’t be.”

“For many moments there, I believed I could write a play,” Poe said.

“Yes,” Will said. “Exactly. And one thing more — Wilde, you’ll understand this. We wrote as for the audience, and we liked our pay well, but as you wrote, man, tell me true that when you did your finest, it was not other men for whom you wrote, but for yourself.”

Wilde stood silently. Poe began to wring his hands. Will Shakespeare stared resolutely at both of them, waiting for their answers.

Wilde’s eyes shut; his mouth twisted. He put his hand to his forehead, then drew it away. “Once or twice,” he said.

Poe’s head was down. He would not raise it. “I wrote for money,” he said.

“Aye, and so did I,” Shakespeare said. “I was partner in the theatre and had my home and fortune to consider. My good name as a gentleman and that cannot be had but by money and deeds.”

Poe’s shoulders were trembling. “I wrote what I must,” he said. “As it sounded, as it came. Yes, what you say is true. But you understand, Sir,” and his voice broke, “I had no choice.”

Will took both of them by the hand, forcing them to look into his face. “Now you must do it like that,” he said, “and you do have a choice — the greatest one you will ever have to make, because it is the choice to redeem or damn your own souls forever more.”

“Then I’ll try,” Poe said, grimacing. “Though thinking of Virginia is the deepest pain I can imagine.”

Poe closed his great, dark eyes, lowering his mournful head once more. Long black and silver hair fell over his cheeks. He was silent, with only his lips moving as if he prayed, and Will and Wilde stood expectantly for long moments. Then, suddenly, the three men stood not in the vile Cave of the Writers, but beside a small brook that ran through a green spring forest of young trees. Birds flew past their heads. None saw the tiny fly at their shoulders.

And beside the stream, a delicate young woman sat, a white kerchief wrapped around her head. She held some knitting, and it seemed as though she gestured for them to join her.

Wilde and Shakespeare stood back while Poe went to her.

“Virginia,” he said. “My life; my love.”

“I’m knitting this for you,” she said. “To keep you warm this winter.”

“I wish I had more to give you,” Poe said. “It’s bitter cold. Remember how sick you were last winter? I thought you might not — ”

“Don’t worry about me, Eddie,” she said. “It’s nothing. It’s you who should keep warm.”

He kissed her lightly on the lips, then reclined, putting his head in her lap.

She stroked his hair, then after a moment said, “I’m dying, Eddie. You’ll have to say goodbye soon.”

“No!” he cried, burying his head in her lap and clinging to her dress.

“Yes,” she said, softly. “Promise me one thing. After I’m gone, you won’t despair. You’ll find another girl, a healthy one, and marry her and be happy. Have what I can’t give you.”

“Never,” Poe said. “I wrote you, worshipped you. You’re my darling girl and I’ll never love another.”

“You wrote me? You can’t write a person, Eddie,” Virginia said. “You have to take them as they are.”

“No,” he said. “No.”

Wilde and Shakespeare watched in horror as Virginia’s young, delicate face seemed to wither into a death mask, while Poe clung, all unknowing, to her skirt.

Wilde stepped forward, but Will held him back. “Whatever it is,” he whispered, “he’s got to go through it without our help. This is what I mean.”

“If you die, I’ll die with you,” Poe said.

“Look up,” Virginia said, and her voice was the voice of something from a grave.

Poe, trembling, looked into her dead, wasted face.

“Virginia,” he whispered.

“This is death, Eddie. The worms are in me.” And at that moment, a worm burst from her pale gray friable cheek and traveled up into the corner of her filmy eye.

“There is no beauty in a corpse, though you tried to make it so.”

“Virginia!” Poe cried again, and plucked the worm from her eye, flinging it aside in disgust.

Looking at the dead girl, Bob Haldeman buzzed, and felt hungry. He felt an overwhelming urge to fly to her ruined eyes and lay eggs in each of them, but he held back.

“My teeth are not beautiful,” Virginia said, and she pulled out two of them to show him.

“Oh, God,” Poe exclaimed. “How, why?”

“Neither is this,” she said, pulling at her cheek to reveal ruined, rotting flesh, red-purple and vile.

“Nor this,” she said, and her stomach swelled as Wilde and Shakespeare watched to a dreadful mockery of pregnancy.

“Shall I burst?” she asked Poe.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Oh, God, no, my love.”

“When the men died in battle in their millions, it was not beautiful, Eddie. It was misery, agony and disgust. Not the stuff of poetry, but the stuff of the charnel house.”

And then, she did burst. Bob Haldeman flew forward eagerly, despite himself. Poe shrieked, an unearthly cry, and hid his face in his hands as she writhed, shreds of rotten flesh writhing with her.

“Virginia!” Poe screamed, and he tried to put her ruined body back together. Wilde and Shakespeare clung to each other. Wilde wept. Shakespeare, who had seen many bloody things in his life, kept very still, but a low noise issued from the back of his throat.

“He’ll go mad,” Wilde said. “No man could take this.” He started forward to try to pull Poe from the horror, but Shakespeare held him back.

“He was mad,” Shakespeare said. “He must stop this to escape his damnation.”

“You died in a gutter to join me,” Virginia said through her ruined mouth. “Here,” she said, holding out a handful of teeth. “Aren’t they pretty? Like pearls, or jewels.”

“My Christ,” Wilde said, burying his head in his hands.

And to Shakespeare and Wilde’s amazement, Poe leaned forward, taking his ruined bride in his arms. Gently, he took the teeth that she offered. And he kissed her face, the face of a five-day dead corpse.

“I should not have died as I did,” he said. “I should have tried. For your sake, Virginia.”

And then she sighed, the foul breath of death exhaling from her mouth, but Poe did not flinch. “Yes, you should have tried,” she said.

“I did not try — at all,” he said.

Virginia’s near-toothless mouth smiled. “No, Eddie,” she said. “You did not. You never loved me. You loved my image.”

“If I had loved you better,” he said, “I think I ought not to have married you.”

“This is my image,” she said. “And no, you should not have married me. I was young and weak. Just a girl.” She put her fleshless head on his shoulder. “I was happy. I loved you more than life itself. And that was what doomed you.”

He shook his head. “No, Virginia,” he said. “I doomed myself.”

“Happiness can’t last forever,” Virginia said. “It was bound to end.”

“I thought that by dying and joining you, we would be happy forever, side by side in our graves.”

“That was your imagination,” she said, tapping his broad forehead with a charnel-house finger.

“I thought,” Poe said, weeping, “that if we died then things could not change; everything would be eternal. And I would have you forever, my lovely girl.”

“But no happiness was ever made through destroying yourself,” she said.

“No,” Poe said. “It is not. Was not.”

“Do you love me as I am?” she asked. And, Wilde and Shakespeare thought, no man could love such a thing as she was; a corpse covered with shreds of rotten flesh, toothless, her eyes decaying as they watched, spilling over her ruined cheeks.

“Yes,” he said.

“No,” she said in a voice as dry as sand blowing across desert dunes.

“Dream you... other wise,” Will said in a fierce whisper.

But Poe took his ruined Virginia in his arms. Teeth scattered about. A rib broke loose.

“Dream you other wise,” Will said slowly.

“Sweet Lord Jesus,” Wilde said, and he sounded Irish

then — so Irish.

And as they watched, Poe and his corpse-bride froze, his hand about her spine, fingers curled around her lowest rib, her grave-rotted fingers at the back of his neck.

“Eddy, you wore your best suit,” she said.

“They buried me in it,” Poe replied, voice full of love.

“Man,” Wilde said, crying out as Will held him back, “you were buried in a pauper’s grave!”

“Think ye other wise,” Will whispered, but he knew it was of no use.

“I love you thus,” Poe said.

And before their eyes, the scene faded. Poe, with Virginia in his arms, became transparent, as did she. The brook stopped running. The grass no longer waved. The leaves of the young trees held still for a long moment, then all faded to nothing, replaced by the shadowed gray wall of the Cave of the Writers.

Wilde looked about frantically. Poe was gone.

“He’s gone!” Wilde exclaimed.

“To a darker place,” Shakespeare said.

“I never dreamed there was one,” Wilde said.

Shakespeare grasped Wilde’s lapel and pulled him close. “Do you comprehend? He did dream so, and there it was.”

Wilde’s destroyed face reflected a hundred feelings in that moment, but all came in the end to despair.

“How,” he whispered. “Will Shakespeare, I am so afraid.”

Bob Haldeman, buzzing nearby, heard Beelzebub’s voice in his head. He had watched the whole scene in deep despair, and not a little terror and disgust. All elements of Poe’s tales, if he gave that some thought, which he was wishing he could avoid.

He was sure that Beelzebub would be thrilled at Poe’s failure, but instead, the demon was angry.

“That little traitor! A poet! A poet! How did he think he could defy me?” Beelzebub screamed.

“Well, it was his wife, sir. It seemed like — ”

“Wife, schmife! Strife! That’s what was called for. That little occult ass-wipe — I don’t know how he managed it. It wasn’t because of me, I’ll tell you that.”

“It wasn’t?” Bob asked, more thoughts flickering in his fly-sized brain. Why, if it didn’t have anything to do with Beelzebub, who or what did it have to do with? Poe had seemed trapped, but Bob was sure that the corpse-vision had come from Beelzebub.

“Bob, we’ve got to get this thing back on track,” Beelzebub interrupted. “There’s no way I’m letting that butt-buddy get away with this type of insubordination.”

Bob cringed at the crude term. “Wilde? But he — ”

Sometimes his current boss reminded him more than a little of his former one, Dick Nixon. “Butt buddy?” That could have come straight out of Nixon’s mouth. In fact —

“Don’t start along those lines, Bob,” Beelzebub said. “I know it’s hard for you to believe old Dick Nixon isn’t down here, but he isn’t. Which should tell you something if you think about it.”

Bob tried to think about it. But for all he was worth, he couldn’t parse the meaning of what the Devil meant about Nixon.

“I’m not going to tell you,” Beelzebub said. “We don’t say that kind of stuff down here. Not ever.”

“What kind of stuff?” Bob asked.

“Why that bastard Dick Nixon isn’t in Hell. It wasn’t a Get Out of Hell Free card, I’ll tell you that.”

“Oh,” Bob said. “Of course not. I imagine he cheated his way out.”

Beelzebub snorted. “Cheated! Nobody cheats Satan or his minions,” he growled. “It’s worse than that. He did it the honest way, the old lying, election-stealing, Watergate-bugging, dirty tricky... dog!”

“He did have pretty clean personal habits,” Bob said.

Beelzebub’s roar silenced Bob, making his tiny fly-head reverberate like a toy drum. “That’s enough of that filth! Now go and worry Wilde! Worry that prick Will Shakespeare!”

“Yes, sir,” Bob said. He flew around Shakespeare’s head, completely dispirited.

At that moment, Shakespeare had turned his attention to Wilde. “How came you so?” he asked, pointing to the vile sores and raw flesh on Wilde’s.

“I was vain,” Wilde said, rubbing his cheek, then grimacing at the wetness on his palm.

“Vain like a woman? Think you that you are damned because of your... peculiar condition? I knew a man once thus; I am certain he is here, though I’ve not seen him in all these years. Kit Marlowe. Mayhap our Beelzebub has him somewhere else, for he not only wrote plays and poetry, they said he was a spy for Walsingham.”

Oscar shook his head. “Men are vainer than women, Will. You know that. Before today, I would have said yes about my ‘peculiar condition,’ as you say, because I loved other men, and that they have always said is a sin against God and nature.”

Shakespeare raised one of arched brows. “So they say,” he said. It did not sound as though he believed it.

“I know it’s my turn now,” Wilde said, sighing. “Will, if I go as Poe did, where will that leave you?”

“Leave me to my own fate. I would say whatever your practices, I know a good man. A gentle man. That thou art, Wilde.”

“I think,” Wilde said softly, “that I lost my way. And I betrayed — ” he paused.

“Go,” Will said. “Face you the wall, and your spirit. Be strong. Do not go Poe’s way. Imagine what is right, and make it so!”

“Make it so,” Wilde repeated, turning to the cave’s blank wall. Then, he turned back, looking over his shoulder at Shakespeare. “Tell me this once, though, before I go. Did you not love Willie Hughes?”

Shakespeare laughed. “A fine boy,” he said. “But that is your wish, not mine.”

“I had so hoped,” Oscar said. “It was a particular dream of mine.”

“Yes, I know,” Shakespeare said. “But do not so dream, because the truth is — ”

And he paused, for the cave had become a richly-decorated private dining room. Gaslight flickered over a table laid with thick red velvet cloth; set with a gold-plated service, a pair of Wedgewood plates, and a pair of Irish crystal goblets.

A blond, feminine-featured young man waited at the table, delicately sipping red wine.

“Oscar, I’m so bored,” he said. “I thought you’ve never come. By the way, have you got a twenty, old shoe?”

Wilde retrieved a twenty-pound note from his trouser pocket and handed it to the young man, then he sat beside him and took his hand.

Avidly, Shakespeare watched as Wilde’s ruined face healed itself and became smooth once more, even handsome in a heavy, large-featured way, not noticing Bob Haldeman the fly that had returned to buzz about his fool’s cap. And, as Shakespeare did not notice the fly, Wilde no longer saw Shakespeare.

“I’m sorry, Bosie,” Wilde said. “I was out there with Shaw, and he wanted to fight. You know I can’t let people down that — ”

“Oh, Oscar, he’s such a bore. Look, there’ll be festivities tonight, down on Bond Street. Maybe we should — ”

“Not tonight, Bosie,” Wilde said. “I have to write. A Woman of No Importance isn’t half done and I’ve got to finish.”

“Oscar!” Bosie cried. “I suppose you haven’t gone over those poems of mine yet.”

Wilde shook his head, sadly. “Not yet, dear,” he said.

“Well, I know they’re better than that play. You told me yourself that your plays were just for money. Honestly, you’re a fine poet, but I don’t know why you waste your time on the theatre.”

“Hyacinth, thy locks fade,” Oscar said.

Bosie’s blank young face bore the look of utter confusion. “Why, I just washed my hair,” he said, pulling at a curly blond hank of it.

“Of course you did,” Oscar said, caressing the young man’s hair.

“So, you think your boring play is more important than my poems, or having fun.”

Oscar shrugged. “You like the money well enough.”

“Oh, money, it’s always money. Oscar, you’re so bourgeois. Maybe you forget that — ”

“You’re Lord Alfred Douglas? No, Bosie, I don’t forget. You make me feel like a royal mistress to a bastard Lord.”

Then, at once, Wilde’s face began to change. He put his hand to his cheek, and, bringing it away wet, looked about anxiously.

Bosie screamed. “My God, your face, Oscar. What is — ”

“If you saw me inside, what would it be?” Oscar asked him.

Bosie shrank away in the booth, trembling, holding his hands in front of him. “You’re — a monster,” he said.

“So I thought,” Oscar said. “Isn’t it true that in truth, there’s beauty? Well, I’ve been a very great liar, haven’t I?”

“Oscar,” Bosie whimpered. “Please, don’t touch me.”

Wilde shuddered. “How I’ve feared you saying that,” he said. “How I did everything in the world to keep that from happening.”

“Horrible,” Bosie said, putting his pretty head in his hands and hiding himself. “Horrible.”

“I did love you,” Oscar said. “But you never loved me.”

“Oscar,” Bosie whined.

“It was all in my mind,” Oscar said. “The pure love between two men. One older, one younger. The golden youth. You’re really nothing but a cheap gilded frame, aren’t you? With not a thing inside it... save corruption and that’s what’s on my face.”

“How can you say such things?” Bosie asked, uncovering his face. Oscar’s face was beautiful once more, and, hesitantly, Bosie smiled to see the change. Will, watching, shuddered, for as Bosie smiled, his own smooth, youthful face was changing, growing more hideous than Wilde’s ever was.

Oscar looked on Bosie and did not flinch.

“What you are,” Wilde said. “What I thought I loved so much.”

Bosie laughed, and even he heard the wetness and the strangeness in his voice. “Oscar?” he asked querulously.

A round glass hung upon the wall beside the booth. Oscar lifted it from its moorings and held it up to Bosie.

“See yourself,” he said.

Bosie wailed as though every demon in Hell was after him.

“No,” he said. “No!”

Shakespeare, from his vantage, could see that instead of Bosie’s monstrous, twisted face, there was nothing in the mirror at all.

“I did love you,” Oscar said. “Even now, I think to kiss you. But there’s nothing there — to kiss.”

“My face!” Bosie cried, standing and trying to run. Oscar caught him by the wrist, whirling him around effortlessly. The difference in size between the two men was obvious; Wilde towering over the smaller man with the hideous face.

“Bosie,” Oscar said. “I have something to tell you. You must sit and listen.”

“No,” Bosie screamed. “No! I’ll run to mother. I can go — ”

“Sit,” Oscar said, forcing him into the booth and holding his shoulders.

“You made me betray my wife,” Oscar said. “And that was a bad thing.”

“You wanted to,” Bosie snarled.

“You made me abandon my children, though I loved them more than life itself, and that was a thing worse,” Oscar continued.

“I never made you do a thing,” Bosie said.

“And the most evil thing of all is that you made me betray my gift,” Oscar said. “Always writing plays; never time to think. Never time to think on what it was I really wanted to say.”

“Oscar, I tried to get you to stop working like that,” Bosie said. “You never listened.”

Around them, the room glowed a deep, dark red. Wilde took the round glass and looked deeply into it. He felt along his smooth cheek and looked at his once-again handsome face in amazement.

“It seems to me,” he said, after a long pause, “that I’ve been given another chance.”

“To do what, Oscar?” Bosie asked. “You’re nothing but a broken-down old faggot.”

Wilde did not immediately reply, but merely smiled into the glass. “A faggot is a piece of wood,” he said.

Shakespeare watched as the red glow in the room faded, growing darker.

“I could have spoken truth, as did my friend Shakespeare,” Wilde said.

“Shakespeare? Your friend? Have you lost your mind, Oscar?” Bosie asked.

Will realized with a thrill that things must be as they truly were during Wilde’s life. This was a conversation which had once happened. And, if Wilde could change it, then he would be free. Will clenched his fists and wished for Wilde to find the courage; somehow — somewhere — deep inside.

“You betrayed me, Bosie,” Wilde said. “But ever before that, from the very first day, I betrayed myself.”

“Oh, poppycock, Oscar,” Bosie said.

“Yes, perhaps,” Oscar said. “But Hyacinth, you were ever thus,” and he held up the glass to Bosie’s face once more, where it showed... nothing.

“Liar!” Bosie shrieked. “You loved me! Why, you can’t live without me.”

“It was not what I’d call living, no,” Wilde said. “Not in Reading Gaol. Not after.”

“Because you didn’t have me,” Bosie smirked. “You were an old, broken man and no one wanted you.”

“Because,” Wilde said, standing, “I no longer had the word.”

“I was a better poet,” Bosie said.

“You’re welcome to think that,” Wilde said. “You’re welcome to think anything you like.”

“I do!” Bosie said. “I think I’ll go now. Old man.”

And he stood, as if there was not a thing wrong with his face, straightening his waistcoat.

“Wilde,” Shakespeare whispered. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then, Wilde’s face turned hideous again. He did not appear to notice, but Will felt something cold and ugly growing in his belly.

“Wilde, there’s something more,” he said.

“Here’s to you,” Wilde said, raising his glass. “May your tiny, wretched little soul be damned for all eternity, Bosie. Never came. Never cared. All that, for nothing. Nothing! But I’ll be free now. I can — ”

And then he caught sight of his face in the mirror, worse than it had ever been. His mouth opened, as if he would scream, but instead Shakespeare heard a hollow chuckle.

“I had my life,” Wilde said. “My days in the sun, my boys like lilies.”

“Oh, you fool,” Bosie said, turning one last time.

And Wilde leapt up, his large hands flying to Bosie’s neck.

Shakespeare watched as Wilde strangled the younger man; it took a long while.

Once the body was on the floor, Shakespeare heard footsteps, as if made by heavy boots. Someone knocked on a door that Will could not see.

“Constable!” a voice cried. “Open up in there!”

Slowly, Wilde turned, grinning. “You’ve come for me,” he said. “I shall be happy to go with you. And I trust you have my old cell ready? I have given this much thought, and I know that you would never hang an artist like myself.” He held out his arms to receive irons that Shakespeare could not see.

“No,” Will said. “No!”

But it was far too late. Wilde’s monstrous face beamed as the scene froze, and he and dead Bosie and the constables faded into the rich wallpaper of the rose-red room.

“Oh, black day,” Shakespeare said, alone in the darkness of the Cave of the Writers. And it had grown very black there, and bitter cold.

“It is engendered,” he whispered.

Not one more line came to him. No thought, no idea, no imagined or fancied character. He stood in the cold, holding his sides. His fool’s cap had come back to his head, the bells jingling from time to time.

“God, I am so afraid,” he said. “I have nothing to defend me and not a single word for my own sake.”

And he bowed his head.

Whereupon a fly came buzzing. He slapped at it, but it merely flew out of reach. He thought, squinting, that it perhaps had the head of a man; though it was tiny and the cave was very dark.

And, as if by some strange miracle, the fly spoke.

“I might not have understood all of your plays,” the fly said. “But I... they amazed me. Took my breath away, when they were supposed to. And I laughed. You were a great writer, Mr. Shakespeare.”

And all Shakespeare could think was, here, at the end of time and at the end of the universe, deep in the bowels of Hell itself, here was yet another playgoer with stars in his eyes.

“Thank you,” Will said, keeping these thoughts to himself, for he was, whatever else he might have been, what throughout time has been called a gentleman, despite his father’s profession and that he had been both glover’s man and actor. “You are most kind, Sir Fly.”

The fly buzzed madly. “Beelzebub is coming!”

Will smiled. “I imagine so,” he said. For Wilde and Poe had gone to worse places, and Will was the only one left.

“Think yourself into one of those things,” the fly said. “You know, like the other two did.”

“I cannot,” Will said. “The saying of it has left me. And... their ends were not what I’d wish for myself.”

“You’d better,” the fly said, and then he took off with a mad buzz. “He’s coming!”

Will already heard the rumblings. In another moment, the yellow slitted eye appeared in the gaping hole in the roof of the cave.

“Now what do we have here? Your little pals take a powder?” Beelzebub asked. He was looking directly down at Shakespeare.

“Aye,” Will said. “And Godspeed both of them,” he added, though he knew that where they went, God would not be there.

“You know what?” Beelzebub said. “I’m getting kind of bored. Maybe I’ll just go back to making movies. They go a lot more quickly. They’ve got some life to them, some — ”

“Not a thing wrong with that,” Will said.

Beelzebub snickered. “No, I don’t suppose there is.” He leaned further into the cave. Somehow, he got his enormous head and one of his shoulders inside and gestured toward the milling crowd of writers at the front of the cave.

“You think they’ll like it if I tell them that the deal is off? Why, there’s only one card left, Will. When those others blew it, their cards went away — poof! I bet that Emilia would fight you for it.”

“Mayhap she would,” Will said. He crossed his arms. “But I would not. Do you not want to see what plays some of these others have written?”

Beelzebub snorted, knocking dozens of unfortunates to the floor of the cave. “Satan’s quadratic balls! I told you before, I’m no editor.”

Will shook his head. “‘Twas my good fortune there were few enough of those in my time.”

“You must observe the time,” Beelzebub said.

“And what time would that be?” Will asked. “It seems to me that this is nothingness. Think you that you can play me sir? I ever did play myself. I was like these others — Poe, and Wilde. I did invent myself, sir, from a glover’s man to a — ”

“Pride, Will,” Beelzebub muttered. “I like it like that.”

“I played you,” Emilia said, stepping from the crowd. “I had you in the palm of my hand.”

“And a dusky, rough hand it was!” Will cried, shrinking back toward the wall.

Then, at once, Will was gone from the cave, in a room he knew well: Emilia’s bedchamber. And she was on the bed where he’d loved her, in the arms of the beautiful young man, the Earl of Southampton.

“Nay,” Will said, backing away. A fly was buzzing at his neck. He thought to swat it, but it flew away.

Emilia seemed unaware of Will’s presence. She grabbed hold of Southampton’s long blond locks and held his face close to hers.

“You’re ever so much more a man than he is,” she said. “Oh, you’re so much more.”

“Nay!” Will cried, and started forward.

In a moment, Southampton was gone, and Emilia was alone in the bed, her hands crossed behind her head.

“Black wires be on my head,” she said. “And here, too.” She lifted her plain white shift to reveal the dark triangle of hair between her legs. Will’s heart leapt at the sight. He had loved her more fiercely than any man had loved. She was poison to him, sweet, coursing poison in his veins. He went to her and took her in his arms.

“Emilia,” he whispered. “You are my love, more truly than ever if we were married.”

“Will,” she said, stroking his hair back from his wide forehead. “Oh, Will.”

His hand strayed between her legs, where it was soft, yes, nothing of wire there. That had been a bitter mockery, once she had betrayed him with Southampton. “I would have died for you,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “But you did not. You let him take me.” And she drew each word out with venomous pauses between.

“I had no saying of it,” Shakespeare whispered.

Emilia lay still a long while. At last, she spoke, still stroking Shakespeare’s head, but now, with a cruelty in her movements. “No saying?” she said. “Why, the man who doomed Macbeth by the witches have no saying? The man who would not allow Hamlet to make up his mind? Who fed the poison to Othello, that no man would have heeded had it not been for your word? Why, no saying of it, Will?

You — ”

“He was the Earl,” Shakespeare said. “I must do his bidding.”

“And give your great love even unto his bed. Yes. That was his bidding, Will. Or — ”

Her hand tangled in Will’s hair, and pulled. He cried out. Looking up, he saw the flames rising in the walls. He turned, and there was the fly buzzing in his face.

“Just try,” the fly said. “Use all your heart and soul, like you said. You can!”

“I know not who you are,” Will said to the fly.

“It doesn’t matter,” the fly said. “And I mean that.”

“Yes,” Will said, heavily, as the words choked in his throat. “You’re right, Emilia. It was my idea. It was a thousand pounds, for the theatre, Emilia. You’ve got to understand. He would give me a thousand pounds to remake the Globe if I did but... give you to him.”

Then, Emilia pushed him away, sitting up on the bed. “You stinking burgher. Panderer! Pimp!”

Will hung his head. “It was a thousand pounds, love.”

“More money than you’d ever seen,” she said.

“Aye,” he said.

“So you sold your great love for the damn theatre.”

“And a fine house in Stratford and a hundred yards of good wool cloth,” Will said, feeling his face burning.

“Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” Emilia snapped. “Unless there’s a matter of a thousand pounds between!”

“You must admit,” Will said to her, “that it was a good price, even so. There’s not many who could say they went for that.”

She looked at him in fury, her dark eyes blazing, then, in a moment, she changed, bursting into laughter. She sat up on her knees, facing Will. “Nay,” she said. “I suppose that’s true. Not many have gone for such a price.”

In the distance, Will heard ominous rumbling. He thought, looking about the walls of Emilia’s chamber, that the flames had lessened. Perhaps they were fading, as the walls of Wilde’s dining room had before Wilde had made... the wrong choice.

The fly buzzed close once more. “Whatever you do,” it said, “make it quick. He’s coming all the way inside the cave!”

“What manner of — ” Will exclaimed, just as a huge black hand with vicious claws reached into Emilia’s chamber and snatched the fly.

Beelzebub’s voice rumbled through the room.

“Bob, I told you that you could be replaced,” Beelzebub said. “But nobody ever seems to listen around here.”

The hand left the chamber. Will did not see what happened next. Beelzebub rose above the Cave of the Writers, Bob Haldeman clenched in his fist, and he pointed across the Lake of Fire to the legions of the damned on the other side.

“Any one of them will do,” Beelzebub said. “I could close my eyes and point and I’d probably get a better one.”

Bob took as deep a breath as he could into his tiny fly lungs. “Then I guess, Sir, that you’d better just go ahead and do that.”

“What?” Beelzebub said, voice full of disbelief.

“I said, Sir, that you’d damn well better do that!” He closed his eyes, and couldn’t help but flinch. Even as terrified as he was, Bob’s heart felt at peace.

“You damn little bug!” Beelzebub screamed. “You crawling insect! You brainless, spineless lit... le... creep!” And just as he’d flicked Busby Berkeley into the Lake of Fire, Beelzebub held Bob Haldeman in the palm of his hand, drew back his left index finger, and flicked him ten miles into the center of the Lake of Fire.

It was bad in the Lake of Fire. Hitting it felt a little like what Bob thought of as hitting ground zero of an atomic blast. It was damn near as bad as the cancer had gotten. But the pain went away, after a moment, or maybe it just got so great that his body shut down.

Because he was only a small fly with a tiny human-shaped head, Bob didn’t precisely sink into the Lake of Fire. He floated. Where, to his wonder and amazement, a couple danced. There was no music, of course, only the roiling and roaring of the eternal flames. Busby Berkeley danced elegantly, even with his singed fly wings. Gently, he held Isadora Duncan’s neck straight as they danced in the classic ballroom style.

Maybe it was a samba, Bob thought, or perhaps... he had it now. A tango. And once more Isadora had on her red silk dress and trailing scarf. And Busby’s neat cashmere sweater and bow tie were perfect. Bob thought that she smiled at him as they passed. And he put back his fly wings and floated on the flaming brimstone, feeling free for the first time he could remember, in his human life, or in eternal damnation since.

Beelzebub returned to Emilia’s chamber. “I’m going to fry you, Shakespeare,” he said. “If you think what I did to Milton was bad, you’re going to go through something a million times worse!”

“I cannot pen a line,” Shakespeare said. “What could be worse than that?”

Emilia stood. Beelzebub was now close to human size, and he’d positioned himself next to the door. He was gesturing toward her.

“I need someone new,” Beelzebub said. “I just had to get rid of the old fellow.” Then, he shook his head ruefully. “It’s always something,” he said.

“What will you offer me?” Emilia said. “After all, I think I might be able to get out of this place on my own. Where are Poe and Wilde? Answer me that!”

Beelzebub roared, throwing back his hideous head. “They’re in the Lake of Fire! Where else?”

“How do I know?” she asked, her eyes narrowing.

“I could show you,” Beelzebub said, now smiling and holding out his hand.

“Mayhap,” Emilia said. “You could. I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Good girl,” Beelzebub said. “Now, tell me, what was this conversation you had with the scribbler here?” He indicated Shakespeare with his thumb. “Some tenderness there? Human kindness? What in the infernal regions has gotten into you, girl?”

She shrugged. “We had some good times,” she said.

“Honey, you need a new man,” Beelzebub said, crooking his finger and inviting her to come closer. “Let me show you how a real man treats a full-blooded woman.”

“Emilia! Do not!” Shakespeare cried. He grabbed her arm, but she tore away from him.

“Oh, Will, when are you going to get over it?” she asked. “It really was no big deal.”

Staggered, Will stepped back. “But you — ”

“I lied,” she snapped. “I didn’t care. You know what, you fat-headed ox? Southampton gave me ten times what he gave you. You spent your entire life torturing yourself over that stupid boy and his affair with me. I took him for what he was worth,” she said, pausing, then adding after a moment in an utterly vicious tone, “just the same as I took you.”

“Never underestimate the power of a woman,” Beelzebub said, winking.

All around Will, the flames danced. They singed his cap, and his shoes. Putting his hand to the cap, the bells burnt his fingers. He put his fingers in his mouth and sucked on them to cool them, but there came no relief.

“Then it was all for nothing,” Will said. His voice sounded broken; old and weak, even in his own hearing.

“Yes,” Emilia snarled. “Who could have ever really loved a bald-headed prat like you?”

“That’s my girl,” Beelzebub said, looking her admiringly up and down. “Did you ever hear tale of my member? How it’s . . .”

“Yes, I did,” she said, tweaking Beelzebub’s horny cheek. “You’re quite the lover, I hear.”

“I’ll never let you down,” he said, taking her by the waist.

Will stared helplessly as Beelzebub kissed Emilia, and watched as Beelzebub’s forked tongue came out the back of her head, then retracted.

The flames were licking about his feet.

“Think, Will,” he said to himself. “Damn you! Have the saying of it!”

Beelzebub released Emilia, then held her at arm’s length, looking once again admiringly at her. “I think you’ll do well,” he said.

Shakespeare looked up at her, wonderingly. “How could I have loved you so?” he asked. “How could I have seen you as so different than what you are? I always saw true — always. No man had the best of — ”

“I was never man,” Emilia said. “I was a woman.”

“I should have gone back to my wife Anne in Stratford,” Will said. “The lights of the city should not have held me.”

“You did,” she said. “You gave her the second-best bed, too.”

“Ah, my Christ, so I did,” Will said, putting his head in his hands. He held it there even as the flames ate away at his legs, and began to flicker about his belly. Then, he looked up once more.

“But I have said it!” he exclaimed. “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”

She smirked at him.

“If hairs be wires, then black wires grow upon her head,” Will said. The flames were at his throat, but still he spoke.

And as he spoke, her eyes grew small, and mean, and too close together. Her hair coarsened, and threaded with gray. Her white face darkened, her complexion grew pocked. Her lips changed from red to dun.

Beelzebub regarded Emilia with a rolling yellow eye. “My dear, something seems to be wrong,” he said. “I’m afraid you — ”

Emilia’s hand flew to her head, then she patted her bosom, which was no longer full and firm, but flaccid in her gown.

“You!” she screamed at Will. “You stop that!”

“It is as it was,” Will said. “This is how you looked to the world, not to my loving eyes.”

“Who’d pay a dime for this hag, much less a thousand pounds!” Beelzebub exclaimed. “Shakespeare — what are you doing? This is my place.”

“Fiend!” Emilia cried, leaping at the Devil and clawing at his evil yellow eyes.

“Emilia, do not!” Will cried, as he felt his heart change. “Think better... stand back!”

Still, she went at Beelzebub, flailing at him in fury.

“Emilia, I forgive you,” Shakespeare cried. “What was between us was between us. I loved you once more than life, more than the world itself, beyond all time. It is all right. Please, just — ”

Beelzebub threw Emilia aside, raging. She hit the flaming wall of her bedchamber, and lay there, crumpled, her neck at a horrible angle.

“I’ll stop your mouth,” Beelzebub cried.

“Oh, Emilia, you always wanted everything that you could not have, and yet you never saw what you held in your own hands,” Will said, and then he wept, though his heart was full of everything it had always held for her. In the end, he realized, that he did love her more than he hated her, and he would not have seen her end so. He gazed steadily at the demon.

“I did love her,” he said. “And a love such as we had was its own sacrament. I sold myself into purgatory for that thousand pounds, but I have paid it back. I know now what I did, and I have made my absolution. I am at peace with myself. And,” he added, “Now I have the saying of it.”

Beelzebub roared.

“It is the tale of a man who provided such fancy to those without,” Will said quietly. “Who showed the universe and all of time to men who knew only what was before their faces. And such a man gave a thousand pounds for the love of a lifetime. Though he knew better, he lived in his moments; and thought not for tomorrow.”

“Bard, I will destroy you!” Beelzebub shrieked, clawing at Shakespeare, but something held him back, as though there were one final circle of flame about Will’s body that the Devil could not pass.

“I say this man lost what he had loved; and that he forgot. And at the end, he began to remember, but he only began. He must redeem himself, yet he would not. Instead, he shut himself away and he dreamed. He could not forgive. He could not love. He could find no peace.”

“I’ll set your mouth with brimstone,” Beelzebub said. “I’ll see to it you burn forever in the Lake of Fire with the worst of the sinners. Liar!”

“Nay,” Will said. “Save about Emilia... I lied not. And I made my amends. Before her and before God, I have made them.”

“Cuckold! Greedy, lascivious, lustful man! Adulterer! Cheat!” Beelzebub raged.

“Now, I understand,” Will said. “It is not just what we dream, but what we are, and the closer our dreams to what we are, the better they be. And I was not a bad man, demon. Once, I betrayed,” and he looked toward Emilia’s broken body, “and I too had my pride. But I was a man like any other man. I was at peace until this woman came back from the dead. I went home to my wife, and I lived out my life well. No adventures mine; no shipwrecks, no magic, no battles, no speeches of great men but those that were in my head. A little house in Stratford; my friends, the partners in the theatre and a gentleman’s name bought at my great cost. This I had.”

“You were never anything much, Shakespeare,” Beelzebub said.

“I was,” Shakespeare said, “Exactly as I am.” And he smiled at the devil before him, gently. Then Will shook his head, as a thought suddenly came to him. “Devil, a last word: Tell them all that the most human of the great writers takes his leave.”

“Shakespeare!” Beelzebub screamed. He tried to leap at Will, but his legs held fast to the floor as if he was chained to it.

“I am a little child again. Yet I am tired,” Will replied. “I think I shall sleep.” And he lay down on Emilia’s rumpled bed, put his head on the pillow and closed his eyes. And in a moment, he did sleep.

Beelzebub, mad with rage, found that he could suddenly move his legs. He went to Emilia and lifted her body, shaking her like a doll, as if he could wake her. “Speak!” he cried. “Get him up! We’ve got to get him back before he — ”

Beelzebub held Emilia’s mute form, looking back at the bed, while the sleeping form of Will Shakespeare faded, then shivered a moment in the flames, and at last, disappeared into nothingness.

“No!” Beelzebub cried. But it was already too late.

Will, as he slept, thought that a gentle man with a beard much like his Lord Southampton’s came to him, and rested his hand upon his temple.

And, Will thought, mayhap, that the man leaned forward and said, “soft you now; sleep, good Will, and wake, to paradise.”

oOo

In the lake, the dancers passed by Bob, again and again. They spun, and as they spun, they looked more and more like a top. A red and yellow top.

And Bob remembered the top.

“Do you know when you’re little,” he said, to no one in particular... “when you’re little, you believe in magic. You believe in goodness, and you’re not afraid of anything. If you just wish hard enough, things will come true. You don’t have to be a great man. You don’t have to be much of anything to believe in that.”

And when he closed his eyes, he was home again. The palm trees waved. It was a fresh, exquisite morning and he saw all the way to the mountains.

Bob Haldeman knelt on the sidewalk in front of his house and pressed the red knob on his top. And set it spinning.

— END —