Thirty.

They sat at a red table.

"First," said Mr. Logic, looking from Bill to Constance, "you must understand."

"I understand," said Constance.

Bill stared at his wife. She had set the blue knife in front of her, its point toward him like a compass needle facing magnetic north.

Mr. Logic spread the black book in front of him.

Bill kept looking back to the walls. They were like slabs of warped glass, stained blood-red. Networks of blue and purple cracks traced through them. The room reeked of cinnamon.

The table was circular, with hard edges and fat legs, and a furry red upholstery clung to the wooden chairs. Bill's seat had oozed around his buttocks and legs when he sat down, bringing him into a position that he had to admit was comfortable. Silence reigned, except for the sound of their speaking and breathing and incidental movements.

"Tedious," said Constance, fiddling with her knife. "Get this over with as soon as possible, please."

Mr. Logic, then looked to Bill and smiled.

"You're going to become one of the preferred beings."

Bill crossed his arms.

"Really," he said.

"Yes."

"And what does that mean?"

"It means," said Mr. Logic, "that you will get knowledge that most people would kill for. Kill many, many people for. Kill everyone they loved for."

"Don't want it," said Bill.

"Again, Bill," said the demon. "No choice."

"Why? Why?"

"Sound like a baby," snapped Constance. "Boo hoo hoo."

"I believe you received some sound advice from Septimus before his...setback," said the demon. "You will be ignorant of most things in the universe. Do not try to understand them."

Bill rubbed his face, looked to Mr. Logic. The demon flipped through pages of the black book open before him. Bill saw pages packed with dense scribbling, letters stuffed into every square millimeter.

"Can you give me just a couple of answers, though?" he said. "Throw me a bone, before I take that big step into godhood? Like, at least tell me where we are?"

Mr. Logic looked up from the book. "It's well-removed from where you are. There is much knowledge which flows through here. Some come on their own accord, and some are summoned. Some are put here for punishment. Some may rise through the ranks."

"Punishment, huh?" Bill scratched his temple. "So, you mean, this place is Hell?"

"That's a very shallowa*"

"I'm going to call it Hell," he said, slapping his hand on the table. "Makes things easy."

Mr. Logic cleared his throat before he continued. "And Terris gave your wife more...of himself...than she needed, yes."

Constance raised an eyebrow.

"But you're the one responsible for doling it out," said Bill, pointing at the demon. "You're the one who did it. You're the onea*"

Mr. Logic slapped the air. Though there was no physical connection, Bill felt the blow on the side of his face. It rocked him in his chair, and he had to grasp its furry arms to keep from falling to the floor.

A stinging burn heated his skin as he settled back into position, rubbing his face.

"Responsibility is a vague issue," said Mr. Logic. "Are you going to allow me to finish?"

Bill took his hand away from his face, flexed his jaw. One of his back teeth wriggled slightly in the gums, and he tasted blood. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Constance smiling, covering her mouth with the hand that held her blue blade.

"Some may rise through the ranks," said Mr. Logic. "That is what Septimus and Terris wanted to do. They must fight each other. They chose to fight each other there, in those woods. You were, unfortunately or fortunately, in their path."

"But they seemed like they got along," said Bill.

"They did like each other. It was nothing personal. A ritual combat. The winner would be judged, and would rise to greater power here." Mr. Logic waved his hands, indicating the red and purple walls. "They would have a chance at my position."

"Oh, wow!" Bill waved his arms in mock amazement. "So, they'd have a chance to lurk around in dark cathedrals and carry huge books and torment the hell out of everyone they met? That sounds like a big giant fucking awesome prize! Wow!"

"It's more than that," said Constance. "You can sense it."

"Yes," said Mr. Logic. "Much more than that."

"Oh, yeah," said Bill. "So you're the head asshole in charge around here, aren't you?"

"Something like that, yes," said Mr. Logic. "They draw my portrait to keep things out. Some matter shuns me, will not come near. You have experience with this."

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

"Don't be an asshole, Bill," said Constance. "You know."

"In the forest they drew my portrait," said Mr. Logic. "And you shunned me."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Bill demanded.

But then he knew.

The devil faces in the forest. The crude eyes and jagged teeth and broad wild smiles plastered over rocks and trees and highway signs. The sigils painted by Septimus; the ones that spoke and turned him around in the middle of the path. The devil face his wife had addressed so boldly as they tried to escape the woods, to flee back to their young lives that Hell had snatched away.

Mr. Logic regarded him impassively. His wife scraped her fingernails across the blue knife.

"Oh, shit," said Bill. "Devil. Not a devil, but the...."

"If that concept fits your view of the world, William." Mr. Logic smiled, turned another page in the book. One of his eyes looked at Bill, and the other read the text, his eyes moving as independently as a chameleon's.

Bill rubbed his face, took a deep breath.

"So you're the Devil," said Bill. "Sitting here in Hell." Giddiness bubbled in his brain, and he stifled a laugh. Wouldn't be the most appropriate time to start cracking up. "Letting people...no, wait...demons fight it out to take away your position. Oh, this is good." He felt his wife's eyes stabbing him but didn't care. "Wait for the recap, wait for it. And those demons, when they adopted me and Constance and gave us power, they gave Constance too much. Or you gave Constance too much, and now she's one of the *preferred beings' or whatever the fuck you said, and I now I have to be one of them to and fight her so one of us can become the Devil?"

At the end of his spiel, Bill could not resist the tide of hilarity, and he broke up into hoarse laughter. It felt hysterical, not humorous, and he wondered honestly if he was going insane.

"You're all just figments of my imagination," said Bill. "All. You're no more real than a movie on the wall, or a comic book from some bad writer and artist team. Bad art! That's all you are!"

"Please," said Mr. Logic, who Bill could only now think of as Satan. "Stop. You are going to receive a tremendous gift."

"Tremendous," sputtered Bill, and giggled even more.

"Doesn't hurt, darling," said Constance. "At least not if you don't want it to."

"And it's going to let me do...pretty much whatever I want?" asked Bill.

"Yes," said Mr. Logic.

"But what if I don't want to fight my wife? What if I say no to this entire fucking deal?"

"You have to," said Mr. Logic. "This is what you might call a precondition of acceptance for this great, great gift. William."

"It is a gift," said Constance.

Mr. Logic held a single page of the huge black book between his thumb and forefinger. Red light shone through the paper, which was as thin as the sheets of an onionskin bible.

"Everything in this book," said Mr. Logic.

"It's wonderful, darling." Constance smiled to him. "Everything is wonderful."

"Fuck yes," said Bill. "Everything is a-ok. You know what the first thing I am going to do will be, Constance? The first thing I'm going to do when I can do whatever I want?"

"You'll do what you must," said his wife.

"No. I'm going to dress you up in that stupid white dress that you were wearing that one day after your stupid drama club practice. I liked that dress. And then I'm going to take you out of this Hell or wherever we are and go back to that time. And you'll be trapped there. And I'll marry you and keep you away from these guys. From the Devil himself here, too."

Constance stared at him as he said this. Flat lines and shadows defined the planes of her face, and the soulless purple darkness filled in her eyes. But the corners of her mouth turned down for a fleeting second, and Bill got a glimpse of the girl in the white dress standing next to the cafeteria. And of a girl in the white dress walking down the aisles of the crappy church, with her fat-ass dad leading her up to Bill, who now let himself smile.

"Come on," said Bill. "I'll get you out."

"It is time," said Mr. Logic, who closed the book. "The process is waiting, William."

Bill looked to the demon. Sitting there, his white hair pulled over one shoulder, the thing didn't look like the devil. Looked like a pompous old college professor in somebody's basement, poring over dust-ridden manuscripts and drinking wine from a jug. Not very imposing, or very devil-like.

"All right," said Bill, looking again to his wife, who was staring into the blade of the blue knife. "Let's get this silly bullshit over with."

Thirty-One.

"You're kidding," said Bill.

"It is the place where you are the most comfortable," said Mr. Logic. "It will do."

"I can't even fit on this bed anymore." Bill kicked the blue and white comforter spread out across the twin mattress. "In case you didn't notice, I outgrew it when I was about thirteen years old."

"It will do. But you do not need to lie on your bed; you may also sit on your desk."

In front of them, underneath a blank window, was his desk. It was just as he'd remembered it: stainless-steel tubing and glass, modern but cheap. His old indigo iMac's screen-saver swirled with cheesy geometric patterns, which he had thought were awesome when he was eleven. A portrait of his mother and his father and himself peered out from on top of a copy of the Martian Chronicles, one of the few hardcover books his mother had ever bought him.

The wall opposite his bed was black; it was the one concession his mother had given to his moody adolescent taste. Wallpaper printed with cartoon baseballs covered the rest of the walls. Whenever he stepped the wine-colored carpet crunched underneath his feet.

Bill looked back to the doorway. In his old house the hallway would have led to his mother and father's room, the bathroom, and down to the kitchen. But now he saw only the moving darkness and blood on the floor.

"When did you get this here?" Bill asked.

"We know," said Mr. Logic. "Now, please sit either at the desk or lie down on your bed."

"But..." Bill trailed off, and dragged his hand across the comforter. Even the texture of the material was exactly as he remembered it. There was even a stiff spot where he'd spilled a Coke and never bothered to clean it out. Certainly there would be the Playboys he stole from a box in the attic underneath the bed, too, their pages musty and dog-eared from use. The women in them, from the nineteen-eighties, waited with their high-waisted lingerie and their permed and hair-sprayed hair and lime-green eyeshadow.

"Are you comfortable here?" asked Mr. Logic.

"I'll sit at the desk," said Bill.

He shoved his way in front of Mr. Logic, and pulled out the cheap office chair that sat next to his desk in front of Mr. Logic. Its lime-green cushion hissed when he sat, just as Bill remembered it doing a thousand times before. Mr. Logic had extracted every little detail from his brain about this place.

The Devil had made his bedroom. Awesome.

Bill wheeled himself toward his desk. He couldn't fit his knees in the cubbyhole, and they banged against the glass top as he pushed in.

"Okay," he said, giving an exaggerated shrug. The animation of his iMac had flipped off, revealing a dark green screen with all the icons neatly arranged. He'd accessed his first dirty website on that computer, he remembered. And his mother had found out because she had installed some kind of spy software that let her know what sites he was visiting. Bill wondered if this version of the computer was before or after his mother had done that to him.

"So you accept this chore," said Mr. Logic. "Everything that comes with it."

"Yes." Bill bounced his feet like a fidgety kid. He tapped a few random keys on the iMac's keyboard. The *Q' key was sticky, just as he remembered it. Like pressing down on a stale gumdrop.

"That is well," said Mr. Logic. "Now this book is yours."

"Ooh, can't fucking wait."