#hell to pay

Crowley found his safe house next to a church, on the outskirts of a quiet little village slap bang in the middle of Anathema Device’s coordinates. It had jasmine growing up the outside wall, and a sign outside the green-painted front gate that said HOLIDAY LET. “Exactly the kind of cottaging we should be doing at our time of life,” he said, stepping out of the car with something like his usual swagger. “That’ll do nicely.”

He plucked the sign board out of the ground and sent it flying over a nearby box hedge. The front door opened as though it had no choice in the matter, which it didn’t.

“Oh, it’s nice,” Aziraphale was about to say as he stepped inside, but the words died on his lips.

Something terrible had happened.

He was either having some form of celestial stroke that had irretrievably damaged his ability to see colour, or everything inside the cottage really was grey.   

The carpet was grey. The walls were grey. The fireplace was grey, as was the sofa, the end tables, the easy chairs, and the mantlepiece sculpted artfully out of a large lump of (grey) driftwood. The only things that weren’t grey were the furry decorative pillows on the couch. They appeared to be white, but Aziraphale had a feeling that if he really stopped to analyse the colour he would discover that they were actually a very pale grey.

There was a sign above the driftwood mantlepiece. In curly grey letters it said LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE. It was the only written thing in the room. There were no books.

“Um…” said Crowley. “Why is everything grey?”

“I’m glad you said that,” said Aziraphale, fixated on the sign (eat, sleep, pee). “I was beginning to worry it was just me.”

“Nope. Interesting décor. I had no idea ‘purgatory’ was a popular theme for a holiday cottage.” He glanced into what was presumably the kitchen. “Ugh…vinyl flooring? Well, that’s got to go. One kitchen blowjob and that shit’ll be melting into a puddle of plastic stink.”

“Bold of you to assume I’ll be giving you a blowjob in any room of this alleged house,” said Aziraphale, still staring at the sign. It felt like a taunt, or an underscore to his present feeling of rising madness. “Where are the books?”

Crowley slithered up behind Aziraphale and wound his arms around his waist. “Listen, it’s a fixer-upper, I’ll grant you, but it’s safe. You’re safe, and you’re going to stay here.”

“Am I buggery. With that apparent zen koan blinking down at me from the wall? And nothing to read? I’ll go peculiar.”

“You’ll be fine. You might even learn to be boring.”

Aziraphale prickled. “You said I didn’t have the range.”

“Oh, I have faith in you, angel. Right here, in a room with no books and LIVE LAUGH LOVE on the wall? You’ve got everything you need to learn to be really and truly banal.”

“Are you sure? I was under the impression that the inappropriate use of hashtags were a good way to go about becoming properly dull. Along with selfies, whatever they may be. And inspirational quotes.”

Crowley squeezed his belly and huffed in his ear. “Right in front of you, dope. That’s an inspirational quote.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. LIVE LAUGH LOVE? It’s the inspirational quote. That right there is the Philosopher’s Stone of becoming the kind of dreary bastard who says things like ‘warm enough for you?’ when it’s thirty nine degrees and the road surfaces are beginning to melt. Now, get the cats, get your things, and get cosy.”

Aziraphale sensed there was an argument to be had, but he was currently too tired and too desperately in need of a nice cup of tea to have it. He did as he was told and took the cat carriers indoors. At least he’d brought some books with him, even if they did fall into Crowley’s classification of ‘weird tomes written by drunk alchemists’. Some light reading would have been welcome, though, or some needlepoint. Crowley, meanwhile, showed no signs of getting cosy. He’d disappeared into the cottage garden and started hammering away on his phone.

To add insult to injury there wasn’t any tea, at least not that Aziraphale could find. He had filled up his Thermos flask at the service station, but there was nothing in there but stewed and cooling dregs. He was rinsing out the flask just as Crowley swept back into the kitchen, placed a kiss slightly west of his left ear, and said “Right. I’ll see you later.”

“And where are you going?”

“Back to London.”

For the second time in too few hours Aziraphale threw himself bodily in front of Crowley’s path, blocking the kitchen door. “Not without me, you aren’t.”

Crowley, who had obviously also been anticipating an argument, sighed. “Okay,” he said, in the slow patient voice he reserved for idiots. “You are staying here. Where you are safe. That was the whole point of getting you to a safe house. Please, Aziraphale. Please just do as I ask. You can’t deal with demons the way I can deal with demons.”

“I’ve dealt with demons before.”

“Yes, but now they know you’re flammable,” said Crowley. “And that you’re my…thingy.”

“Husband?”

“Yes. No. You’re my…foot thingy. You know. The vulnerable foot thing.”

“Achilles heel?”

“That’s the one. That. Yes. You’re that. If Hastur wants to hurt me he’ll come after you, so you’re going to sit tight and…live laugh love or whatever, okay?”

Aziraphale folded his arms. “And what are you going to do?”

“Find out more about the whole downstairs situation. I’m meeting Sandra at the British Museum.”

“We used to meet at the British Museum.”

Crowley winced. “Please don’t be jealous. Not now.”

“I’m not jealous, you ninny,” said Aziraphale, although he was. Slightly. “I’m just saying. It’s a known rendezvous point. You should at least be incognito.”

“Fine,” said Crowley, and snapped into her scarlet woman disguise. “Better?”

Aziraphale, suddenly finding himself at eye-level with her lace-covered nipples, glared up at her. She was almost seven feet tall in spiked snakeskin heels. “No. That’s the opposite of incognito. People are definitely going to remember a woman whose skirt is shorter than her labia.” He snapped his fingers and Crowley shrunk back to normal height in a pair of orthopaedic sandals. She wore a long embroidered skirt, and an army-surplus style jacket festooned with badges for worthy causes. Her hair fell to her shoulders in the sensible bob of a woman of a certain age. “Better,” said Aziraphale. “Now you look like the kind of woman who hangs around Bloomsbury.”

“I look like a geography teacher.”

“That’s the point, darling.”