Peripheral Visions: The Vanilla-Scented Candles of the Damned!

Peripheral Visions: They live in in terror's dark corners and move through the spaces between nightmares. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late.

The Vanilla-Scented Candles of the Damned

Lord Daemon Beelzetrout, Comandante General of Hell, was depressed.

That was an irony hotter than the metal poured from Forge of Hades because he was Master of All He Surveyed, from the ruined city that stretched a sea of smouldering rubble to the far horizon, to the miserable human souls that wailed on the chain gangs and in the torture chambers.

After Millennia of struggle and stratagem – and more setbacks, defeats, and near-obliterations than he could count – the World of Men had been vanquished, and the World of Daemons had taken its place on the Earth, with Lord Beelzetrout enthroned as the Supreme Authority in a Kingdom of Treachery.

Now that he had triumphed, though, it was just no damn fun. The great final battle had been no great triumph, ether. Oh, Beelzetrout would take the credit; he deserved it. He'd spent years and decades and centuries hammering at humanity's most effective defense – their reason – with big lies and small resentments, a potent mix that had finally erupted in a chain of civil wars that circled the globe and brought down the world's great powers in epic street clashes. These had been no armies of angels wearing golden armor... they were more like scruffy waifs armed with assault rifles and bear spray... but they had done the trick. All Beelzetrout and his minions had needed to do was stroll in and take over.

And that, he thought, was the first red flag... the first sign that this great victory might not even be worth having.

Beelzetrout rested his horned chin on one scaly, taloned hand, staring listlessly at the grey and lifeless landscape before him. His Imperial Hall had been hastily jury-rigged from some monument or other in Washington, D.C. – some huge marble structure dedicated to democracy, maybe, or some other outmoded notion that had perished long before the last of the foolish humans who had resisted him. The throne looked out from an open space, standing against a wall that was mostly intact, under a portion of ceiling that had not fallen during the Final Battle. It was enough to keep the acid rain off, but the stinking breeze played freely in the great space.

Beelzetrout eyed the grey, oppressive sky, choked with dark vapors and chemical fog. The humans had not needed his diabolical influence to trash the place; in fact, Beelzetrout reflected, if he had been more attentive, he would have exercised his special methods of mind control and manipulation to convince the human leaders to take steps to preserve the planet, not poison it.

Beelzetrout sighed. It was one thing to enjoy sulfur and steam – the fragrances of Hell – but quite another to be sitting here, in the open air of a world where dioxins and methane (among God knew what other effluvia) filled the atmosphere.

Thank entropy and all dark forces for the one and only truly useful invention the humans had come up with six thousand years of civilization: Vanilla-scented candles. It was only by raiding the city's cathedrals and bringing all the candle racks here, then stocking them with thousands of vanilla-scented candles, that Beelzetrout had managed to create something of a tolerable space from which to rule this ruin of a planet and the wretches who had once thought themselves masters of their own fates.

Beelzetrout looked around the room, then noticed with alarm that half the candles had burned out.

"Sixtus!" he roared.

His right-claw daemon, Sixtus, scuttled from the shadows and stood before the throne, trembling. "Yes, my lord?"

"Half the scented candles are depleted," Lord Beelzetrout said.

"Yes, my lord," Sixtus said, his voice shaky.

"So replace them!" Lord Beelzetrout roared. "I cannot bear the stench of this rotting world, with its pungent burning plastic and its... its... what do they call that infernal preservative they use on their dead?"

"Formaldehyde, my lord," Sixtus supplied, his voice a little brighter. He was always better at supplying facts than at discharging orders, which made him less than ideal as an aide-de-camp, but he was the best Hell had to offer.

Well, Beelzetrout thought to himself, they didn't call it Hell for nothing. Hell set the pattern for all dysfunctional, bureaucratically top-heavy social systems.

"You can plainly see, and smell, why it is imperative for my throne room to remain well-suffused with the scent of the vanilla candles?" Lord Beelzetrout asked, his voice arch and demanding.

"Yes, my lord... only, my lord, I wonder if I might offer you other scents instead. Violet, or sandalwood. Patchouli maybe – "

"Patchouli?!" Lord Beelzetrout screamed, his voice a lance that skewered every slave in a direct line of sound from his throne for a full seven leagues. Thousands of the filthy beasts slumped dead, their hearts exploded from the force of his fury.

Lord Beelzetrout glanced with one eye at the carnage. He estimated the loss to be around twenty thousand.

"You made me lose my cool," Lord Beelzetrout told Sixtus accusingly.

Sixtus bowed and scraped... literally scraped. Lord Beelzetrout could hear the enamel of his teeth on the marble floor. It was like fingernails on a chalkboard, only far less pleasing.

"Fool! Enough!" Lord Beelzetrout snapped. "I'll not countenance any candles here of violet, nor sandalwood, nor sage, nor lemon, nor blue raspberry. Do you think I'm déclassé? Besides which, I'm chemically sensitive. You know this. Do I really have to explain it to you?"

"Yes, my lord. I mean, no, my lord," Sixtus stammered. "Only, it's only that... only that..."

"Wretch!" Lord Beelzetrout screamed. "Out with it! What? What could the goddamned holdup be? Why can you not stop yammering and get me a new load of vanilla-scented candles?"

"Well, my lord, it's only that we need thousands of candles every hour to fill this space with their fragrance..."

"Yes? So? Do you need more labor to place and light the candles? To find and fetch them?"

"No, my lord..."

"Because if you do, simply take a few human wretches from the various chain gangs that continue to demolish this insane parody of a city."

"My lord, it isn't that... but, you see, we simply don't have enough."

"Enough? Enough what?"

"Candles, my lord. Vanilla-scented candles, I mean. We've used them all up."

"What! In only a week?"

"My lord, it's been twelve days since we defeated the humans..."

"Yes, a nice round week according to the Infernal Calendar. You're not using that seven-day atrocity of timekeeping are you? Seven days. The span of time he took to create this half-assed universe, before hightailing it to some other dimension. Six days for the work, which is pretty shoddy actually, plus a seventh 'day of rest,' the slacker, as if he hadn't planned all along to slip away to some parallel universe filled with hot babes and white sand beaches..."

Sixtus stood quietly, hands folded, his expression caught between his usual angst and his growing boredom.

Lord Beelzetrout forced himself to stop. He knew he was simply rehashing his usual complaints. After thirteen billion years, even he was starting to find them tiresome. He raised a long-fingered, immaculately manicured talon and waved it in a gesture of dismissal. "Never mind all that. What I want to know is, how could we have used up all the vanilla scented candles in the world in a mere twelve-day week?"

"Well, your morbidity, as I say, it takes thousands of candles each hour to fill this space with the scent of the candles and keep the stench of the Earth's noxious atmosphere away. That ghastly vapor ozone is all too present at ground level, along with carbon monoxide, methane..."

"Yes, yes, but that isn't my question," Lord Beelzetrout snapped.

"But, my lord, you see how your throne room follows an open floor plan. The wind itself carries the vanilla fragrance away."

"So simply burn more candles!" Lord Beelzetrout cried.

"Yes, but my lord, that's what I am trying to say. There are no more. At least, not on this continent... and, my lord, since we set up your throne room I have had squads of daemons flying to every gift shop, mall, and airport concourse in North and Central America. The supply chain is flawless. It's simply that... well, we've used them all up. More may be coming from Europe, or from Australia... maybe even from the South Shetland Islands... but it will take my daemons time to fly all the way there and back..."

Lord Beelzetrout rolled his eyes. "The South Shetland Islands? Things cannot possibly be that dire."

"Oh, but they are, my lord, they are. Which is why I wonder if I cannot interest you in some other, still-plentiful fragrance... cinnamon, lavender, narcissus..."

"Fool! One more word and I surely will decapitate you!"

Sixtus nervously fingered the stitches that formed a band around his neck, a relic from the last time. He'd hoped to heal completely before having his head separated from his shoulder yet again.

Lord Beelzetrout slumped in his throne. This terrible news was simply par for the course on this miserable world. It had once been a place of great natural beauty – in fact, Beelzetrout would go as far as to agree with his Ultimate Nemesis and say it had been a garden. Now it was one big Superfund site, with no Superfund in evidence to clean it all up.

"Fine," Lord Beelzetrout muttered, waving a talon. "Whatever. Dismissed. Get out."

"Yes, my lord," Sixtus said, backing out of the throne room, bowing and simpering as he went. It was truly irritating. Lord Beelzetrout gave further consideration to beheading him just for being so goddamn annoying, then set the notion aside. What he really needed was something more satisfying, like driving a stake through Sixtus' chest, leaving him pinned to some arid desert floor, and appointing a vulture to show up once or even twice each day to peck his organs out and devour them. It had been done already, so it lacked novelty and shock value, but, Beelzetrout told himself, there was a certain satisfying quality to all such reiterations of Traditional Values.

Later, though, he thought. Right now, he needed some cheering up. Lord Beelzetrout hove himself from his throne, crossed the debris-littered floor... which was littered with chunks of the fallen ceiling, as well as a few dozen human corpses, the aroma of which, while pleasant, wasn't nearly enough to fend off the overpowering stench of the Earth's grotesquely polluted atmosphere... and picked his way down the stairs to the monument. Crossing a space to a nearby building (well, ruin of a building), Lord Beelzetrout made his way into the darkness of a sinister passageway that led to a subterranean Hall of Torture.

This had been the second space his minions set up after the Throne Room. They had appointed it well: Various well-known torture devices were scattered throughout the space. Some were quotidian, such as the rack that stood near the entrance; others were quaint, like the dozen stocks that stood in a neat row, each of them entrapping a weary human. A few were there for sheer novelty value, like the gallows that had been set up outside the Capitol Building on a winter's day five... no, was it six?... years earlier, at the start of a brief interregnum in a long age of advancements of Lord Beelzetrout's ambitions. The gallows had been meant for some official or other – Lord Beelzetrout couldn't remember which one; they all tended to blur together, so generic and witless was human corruption – but it hadn't actually been used.

Not yet, Lord Beelzetrout thought, pausing by the gallows, a tiny smile playing on his beak. Maybe he would change that in the next little while.

The thought cheered him briefly. Humming, Lord Beelzetrout continued to survey the selection of wretches arrayed before him. There were onetime friends and longtime foes alike in the chamber; one staunch ally who had made a career out of sabotaging democracy screamed from between two boards, the upper of which was weighted down with massive stone blocks. Despite the heavy wood and the even heavier stones, the upper board canted to the side, put out of balance by the man's considerable obesity. Beelzetrout paused again to watch him shriek anew as more stone blocks were added. This was a man who had made a mantra of the claim that lust was a deadly sin; Beelzetrout was moved by the plain hypocrisy of his life, seeing as how gluttony had also been ranked among the deadly sins. Didn't someone that blatantly duplicitous and self-serving deserve at least a modicum of mercy?

That sickening impulse faded quickly as Lord Beelzetrout got hold of himself. He moved on, questioning his own moral fiber. What was wrong with him?

Ah well, he thought, approaching a woman who has hanging upside down, her wrists bound by strips of leather. It had been a long aeon; he'd had little rest or true happiness in his life for centuries. He was tired and emotional.

But the sight of the upside-down woman cheered him up, as did a chorus of keening cries that seemed to rise from all around him as the daemons charged with torment did their work. The woman's wrists were tied with leather cords that led to a wheel. A torment daemon had been cranking the wheel bit by bit, slowly increasing the pull on her wrists. Eventually her shoulders would be dislocated, and her spine pulled apart – but not before hours of ceaseless pain and horror had befallen her.

"Well, hello," Lord Beelzetrout smiled down at the woman. "What have we here?"

The woman looked up at him, not seeming to know who he was. Lord Beelzetrout crouched down so their faces drew near.

The woman winced. With pain? – Lord Beelzetrout wondered, his smile growing wider.

"What's that smell?" the woman asked. She seemed not to be in any pain at all, and whatever horror she felt at her situation seemed to be limited to the immediate moment and a stench of rotting flesh that had erupted into their air. "Are there more dead bodies in here all of a sudden?"

Lord Beelzetrout grinned more widely, then picked a shred of human skin from his teeth. "Just my breath," he purred. "I try to keep it moribundly fresh."

"Yeah, you might to keep working on that," the woman told him.

Lord Beelzetrout marveled at her calm mien, her lack of terror, her evident acceptance of literal Hell on Earth as nothing unusual.

"Are you not distressed to find yourself among the damned?" Lord Beelzetrout asked hr.

The woman looked back at him with a start, as though he had interrupted a daydream. "What's that? Oh... well, no. I mean, Q told us this all about this stuff a long time ago."

"I... what?"

"Q Anon?" The woman squinted up at him. "You followed the reveals, didn't you? About the great Satanic conspiracy?"

Lord Beelzetrout frowned – not out of anger, but distress. It hurt him to the quick to see people deceived by lies that were not only obvious, but downright transparent. A master liar himself, he hated to see his craft so betrayed by hacks and, worse, all-too-willing rubes. A conquest of people like her might have been a triumph for the master of some lesser perdition, but not for him. He should simply have stayed home, opened the gates of Hell, and sent out invitations... they would have come running.

"My dear," Lord Beelzetrout told her "there was never a conspiracy, just a lot of hard work. I never made a secret of my plans, nor of my methods. I simply made people want to destroy their own futures and those of their children."

"Huh," the woman said. "Well, anyhow." Her eyes wandered slowly away.

"Listen," Lord Beelzetrout said, startling her into renewed attention, "how would you like to be released from this instrument of torture? And brought to live in a palace of great Infernal Luxury? Where you can dine on the screams of children and besot yourself with the blood of innocents?"

"What, you mean like at Tony's All You Can Eat Platter-Puss Buffet?" the woman asked.

"I'll even throw in a pair of plush piggy slippers," Lord Beelzetrout said.

The woman brightened at that. "Oh! Really?"

Her excitement ruined his brief happiness and plunged his soul to a whole new level of despair. Sighing heavily, Lord Beelzetrout straightened up and, with a flick of his talon, erased her body from existence. He didn't even bother to claim her soul; he simply watched it wail and weave around, abruptly disoriented and without anchor, until it vanished.

The daemon of torment who had been working the wheel gave him a questioning look.

"What?" Lord Beelzetrout snapped. "Just go find another!"

The daemon of torment scuttled off.

Lord Beelzetrout left the Hall of Torture and made his way to the Garden of Dead Roses. There was no sign of any red buds; the plants here were as dead and dry as most of the Earth had been by the time he had finally prevailed. Lord Beelzetrout dragged a talon across his scaly forehead, wishing he could sweat. The air wasn't just choked with filth, but also hotter than... well, hotter than Hell. The day was a scorcher, and it was only May. How had humans tolerated the increasing heat of successive summers that roasted and battered them? It was too much even for a regal daemon like himself. No wonder his minions had been looking so haggard lately... well, more so than usual. It wasn't a glow of good health, Beelzetrout realized. It was sheer exhaustion. Earth really was a hellhole the likes of which not even the underworld had seen. Sure, Hell had lakes of fire, but they were hardly its only, or even main, attraction; and it had its desolate ice sheets, too, but they were far to the North. By and large, Hell was a pretty temperate place, at least compared to Earth.

In fact, Hell was better in just about every way imaginable, Lord Beelzetrout thought bitterly. His thoughts flashed to the Stronghearts, a family of devil hunters he'd done battle with for more than four hundred years. They had been resourceful and dedicated; they had turned back tides of evil both supernal and mundane on literally hundreds of occasions, and they had even come close to beating the devil at his own game. The Stronghearts had been a powerful line of sorcerers and wizards, exorcists and even... Beelzetrout put a talon to his leathery chest in a flash of fear at the thought... accountants; but every time they nearly managed his extinction, he scraped out an escape, retreating in order to recuperate and then rejoin the fight another day. He thought back fondly to his most clever escape, which he had managed by inhabiting a cursed ring. The move had been pure genius on his part, though what happened next was hardly his finest moment; he'd entered into a dysfunctional relationship with a self-absorbed djinn. That detour had kept him away from Earth for almost three decades. Oh, when he thought back to the quarrels, the icy silences and futile attempts at appeasement, the labors of love that had been answered with backhanded, haughty slights... what a fool he had been!

Then there was the time the Stronghearts had cornered him at a VFW lodge. Things had looked bleak until he had slipped the noose by possessing the stuffed hear of an elk – a residency that came to an abrupt end when he bit an annoying nine-year-old, after which the head was doused with kerosene and torched. Not to be so easily defeated, Lord Beelzetrout simply inhabited the brat who had started the whole mess, and became a powerful U.S. senator, destroying social safety nets and championing legislation that punished women, minorities, gays, and crepe makers.

God, how he hated crepes.

Beelzetrout sat on a scarred, blackened stone bench neat the center of the dead garden. He had to admit it to himself: He'd only prevailed in the end because the Stronghearts had abandoned the battle. They had used a Holy Coin Purse to transit into another dimension, which they optimistically took to be Heaven, but which Beelzetrout was pretty sure was a favela in Porto Mandible, Portugal. In any case, they had all vanished in a heartbeat, which was when Beelzetrout knew that victory finally was at hand.

So now here he sat, victorious... and disillusioned.

It was at that moment that it occurred to Lord Beelzetrout that the coins in the Holy Coin Purse might not have been the magical talisman that had effected the Stronghearts' disappearance. The coins themselves were powerful; there was no doubt about that – they were, after all, the thirty pieces of silver that Judas had raked in as a bounty for selling out that preacher he used to hang out with. It was an act of betrayal so nakedly avaricious that it had charged the coins with a sinister black magic, and Judas' subsequent suicide only made the magic stronger.

But now Lord Beelzetrout contemplated the possibility that it might actually have been the coin purse that had possessed the power to transport his enemies to their mysterious destination. The coin purse was only the latest container for the coins, which had migrated from clay urn to wooden box to straw-stuffed mattress over the centuries; but the coin purse was in a class of its own, having belonged to a baker in the South of France – a hard-bitten, vividly méchant
biddy so vicious that she used to bake her croissants with plaster of Paris. Add to that the paisley pattern of the purse's fabric, and there was no doubting its potency.

Lord Beelzetrout's meditations shifted to on how, even as they fought him tooth and nail, the Stronghearts drew their battle plans while standing around the island in their high-end kitchen, wearing cable-knit sweaters, drinking small-batch coffee from artisanal mugs, and eating crullers. Such times those were, such times! The world hurtling toward incineration, and yet doing it with such élan.

Beelzetrout thought again about the crullers. What he wouldn't give for one now. Humans over the last century had spoiled; they were far from the tasty meat they once had been. The race of man, conquered and hopeless, wasn't even worth eating. They were stringy and toxic after drinking water filled with industrial waste chemicals. Beelzetrout doubted he would ever get the dioxins out of his taste buds.

Lord Beelzetrout got to his feet and made his way back to the Throne Room. Bodies were strewn left, right, and center as he made his way up the path. Once, the sight would have gladdened him, because it would have meant that he had won the day, if not the final battle. But now that the final battle was behind him... and hadn't even been a battle... it all felt useless and hollow. What had been the point? Had he really wanted to rule the world... or had he simply been bored and put out, especially when he realized that no one made haute couture in his size? The working definition of haute couture changed with the centuries, as did the words by which it was referred, but it was always the same in effect: Be it animal skins, armor, leather harnesses, or chic white tunics with huge shoulders and matching flying saucer-shaped hats, Beelzetrout had always felt no one was tailoring to his specifications. He'd spend millennia dreaming of his epic revenge.

But now he had the whole enchilada on his plate, he'd lost his appetite.

Lord Beelzetrout sat on his throne once more, looked at the candle holders, and saw that now only a quarter of the candles that had been freshly lit that morning were still burning.

The stench of Earth hung as oppressive in the air as ever, and these were the last of the vanilla-scented candles. In an hour or less the last of them would have guttered out and released a final puff of fragrant smoke.

What would make this shit-hole planet worth ruling over then? His legions of broken, hopeless humans? Hardly... humans were depraved lunatics at the best of times. Now that they were chained and smudged in every sort of filth, worked to the bone and fed scraps that were as likely to be bits of their own offspring as the looted provisions of an office complex's vending machines, they were no fun. It had been so delightful to watch them argue over trivial matters like transgender athletes competing in team sports while they ignored the wanton destruction of their own environment. They'd once been such adorably stupid, venal creatures. Now, under his rule, they were nothing but beasts of burden. They weren't even much good at that; they certainly did not work like fiends, which was understandable since only fiends could work like fiends. Beelzetrout supposed that his human cattle did, to some degree, lighten the load a little and make it easier for the daemonic minions to meet their daily quotas of destruction and wanton cruelty. Lord Beelzetrout knew his daemonic minions appreciated any help they could get.

It was fine work; noble work. But what was any of that work for? In the absence of opposition, and with nothing in the way of the heat of battle left to keep him warm, Beelzetrout felt the icy creep of ennui coming over him.

On a world that was far too hot for his liking, no less.

There was only one thing to do: It was an idea so bold it put confidence back into his body and venom back into his blood.

"Sixtus!" Lord Beelzebub screamed.

The aide-de-camp appeared at once, nearly tripping over his own feet, a nervous wreck. He'd always been jumpy, but over the past twelveday week he'd grown positively deranged with anxiety. Finally, Lord Beelzetrout understood why: He was the canary in the coal mine, the bellwether of mental health for the entire Infernal Horde. He was showing more severe symptoms of the same existential despair Lord Beelzetrout himself was feeling. It was one thing to prevail against Goodness, Light, and Glory, but these humans wouldn't know any of those things if they stepped in them with bare feet. Not only were they not worth it, but the thought that he'd defeated these wretches was such a slight victory that any daemon worth his salt would long for suicide at the thought that this was the best he would ever do.

Obvious as it was, Lord Beelzetrout saw it only now: If they stayed on Earth, every last one of them was headed for a nervous breakdown.

Lord Beelzetrout smiled at his chief minion in a way that was so kindly, it might have been taken as sadistic. "You'll be pleased to know," he said, "that we are going home."

"My... my lord?" Sixtus asked, not believing his elongated, pointy ears.

"We're heading back to the Underworld, my friend!" Lord Daemon Beelzetrout, Comandante General of Hell, threw back his head and laughed. It was a sound of pure joy and relief. "To Earth with the humans! Let them stay here and rot in their own filth, in the doom of their own making. What were we thinking? If we wanted to see them suffer, all we had to do was sit back, popcorn in our laps, and watch!"

With that, Lord Beelzetrout gave the sign; Sixtus repeated it; and all the legions of Hell decamped for home, singing a cheerily devilish song as they marched straight back to the peaceful, fragrant fields of Hell.

Next week we peer into a forest of the future, joining two disconsolate sojourners as they make an unexpected detour through a stand of old growth... and straight into "The World That Was."