"Do they have rooms all to themselves?" he asked her. "Have all of them gone back to their bedrooms?"

"Bill, just concede. You won. Fucking shake my hand and get it over with."

"I can't remember their names anymore," he said, and looked straight into his wife's face. Eyes of black and purple, as if she had spilled stage makeup into them, staining the retinas permanently.

"That's great," she said. "Now come on. Seal the deal."

Bill looked down to the hand again. She had flicked him in the ear with that hand once, back when they were still dating. It had stung like a bee sting, and Bill had flicked her back. When she started making noise he'd picked her up and thrown her onto her bed, nearly breaking the box spring and causing a great squealing of springs that brought her mother up into the room. They'd sat there looking innocent while her mother lectured them, telling them to get their young asses down to the living room if they were going to behave like idiots. Her mother had the same white-blonde hair as Constance, so Bill had difficulty getting pissed off at being lectured. It was like looking at a picture of his wife taken twenty years in the future.

"Bill," said the same body. "Bill, come on. The night isn't getting any younger."

He met her eyes again.

She wasn't there.

Not even in a shadow, not even in a reflection.

"You're not her," he said. "I hate you forever. You're going to fucking die when I'm the Devil."

Bill reached out his hand.

The contact between their palms was electric.

Bill winced as the red and gold awoke in his guts, uncurling itself like a snake disturbed from its slumber. It slammed into his arm, curling through his fingers, coming out to meet the white demon that was inside of his wife.

"Was that hard?" he heard her mouth say.

He looked down, expecting to see their fingers locked together as tight as any braid.

But then she released his hand.

The red and gold retreated back into his body. It curled back around his intestines, nestling itself comfortably within his body.

"And that's it," his wife's body said. "That's it. Never let it be said that I'm not a good sport."

Bill wriggled stiff fingers. His joints ached.

"He's going to come here himself," said Terris. "And I'm leaving this body."

Bill stared off into the night, with eyes that felt like they'd been scoured in sand. He thought about his wife in the room, staring out into the window that was only a pane of white light. Waitinga*

"Wait," he said. "Wait, did you say that you were leaving that body?"

"I'm done," said Terris. "I'm gone. I'm getting out of here. My punishment is that I have to go back to my room." He wiped his wife's mouth with the back of his hand. "I have a desk made out of this cheap fiberboard. I had this nervous habit when I was alive of scraping pencil erasers across the deska"scrape scrape scrapea"and there's a big pile of the shreds of the eraser to prove it. There's a poster of Boston on my walla*the band, not the city. I hope that my time there's...well spent. I've learned a lot. Goodbye."

And there in front of him, his wife died again.

Forty-Three.

The light about her, which had been tamed to a flickering of candlelight, extinguished completely.

Her expression, once twisted into a smile that she never would've worn in life, fell into neutrality and then a frown. Even in the dark he saw that her eyes lightened, going from the darkest purple-black into the soft grey that he remembered.

A great sigh escaped her, like air going out of a bellows.

Her muscles relaxed. Her knees bent and she collapsed onto the ground, making a noise that reminded him of all the bodies he'd shot out of the sky as they slammed into the other dead. Her head hit the ground last, bouncing off of a pile of twigs and pine needles.

As this happened, Bill felt the red and gold leaving.

He wasn't surprised or upset. Somewhere in his subconscious he knew it was inevitable: the demon had done its job, and would retreat back to the halls of Hell, whichever part of them it had come from. Back to the river of blood. Somewhere.

The words that had been its vehicle, the same ones that bored into his brain, poured out of him. He didn't feel them physically, but imagined them trickling down the close ladder of his spine, through all the vertebrae and then down to the coccyx, where he shit them out into the forest floor and they were harmlessly absorbed. It was the most painless exorcism imaginable, with the demon all too willing to leave its host.

Then it was gone.

Completely.

Bill stared at his wife's body. The hood of the pink sweatshirt had balled up like a deflated balloon, and covered her mouth like a scarf. Her hands lay out in front of her, her long fingers like a skeleton's.

He looked behind her, to the field of the dead. In the darkness, all he could see were the shadows of fallen trees and lumps of body parts were the dead lay.

All those people.

All those names.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. The night, which had fallen quiet, took away his words like they had melted out of him like chocolate in the desert. "I'm sorry for what has happened to you. I didn't want any of this."

"No, you didn't," said Mr. Logic. "But that's the way life is, right?"

Forty-Four.

Bill said nothing as the tall man sat beside him. He brought better odors with him than the forest: cooking pastries, cream cheese, and cinnamon. It smelled like he'd just spent the night in a bakery.

Bill stared at his wife's body. He missed the feeling of the red and gold inside of him. It had been with him for such a short time. Using it he could have made his wife stand up, smile, take a bow. Could have made her recite her lines from the awful plays she'd been in. Or sing a song. Or laugh. Or flick his ear again.

"Congratulations," said Mr. Logic. His voice was close, as if he had his lips up to Bill's ear.

Bill didn't turn to him. The pink hood had fallen farther onto her face, covering everything but the eyes like some kind of veil.

He tried to feel something more than fatigue. Anything. Pain, anger, fear, dread, loathinga*any of them would be preferable to the exhaustion that was claiming his limbs.

"Hell of a couple of days, wasn't it?" asked Mr. Logic. Bill felt the Devil's long fingers on his shoulder. He allowed his muscles to be massaged, even though every part of his psyche wanted him to bolt away, go and hide somewhere in the forest. The deep enveloping woods.

"Yes," Bill said, his voice still no more than a whisper. The words were crunchy in his throat like gravel. Part of him wanted the red and gold to come back and levitate him away from this place or some shit.

"You can get her back," said Mr. Logic. "Because you've won. Taking my place."

"Oh," said Bill. "Yeah. Forgot all about that. Sorry."

"It's the rules. We all live by the rules."

"Rules. Right." All Bill wanted to do was take a nap. Collapse face-first in the pine needles, next to Constance's body if need be. Shut his eyes and dream about nothing for the next couple of thousand years. Go back to his own room that they'd set up for him in Hell, lie on his bed there.

"I think I'm going to get away from this for awhile," said Mr. Logic. "You know what my real name is?"

"Satan."

Mr. Logic laughed. The sound was alarmingly friendly, open, affable. There in the terrible woods, in full sight of a holocaust, it came out as a profanity.

"No, no. Those are just dumb superstitious handles. My name is Clark Donaghy. I'm from Connecticut. I spent five years in the Navy before I became a contractor. Roofing contractor."

Bill rubbed his face. He got an image of the Devil standing on a rooftop, driving nails with his forked tail.

"And you got to be the Devil...how?"

"Never mind," said Mr. Logic.

"Why the hell do they call you Mr. Logic?"

"Never mind."

"Are you going to tell me anything of substance?"

"No."

Bill sighed. His eyes were fluttering closed. The stars were out, he saw, sprayed out against the night sky like random strands of Christmas lights.

He turned finally to Mr. Logic. Or Clark, or whoever the fuck he was.

"I'm tired," said Bill. "Can't I just take a nap before...whatever it is we have to do?"

"We don't have to do anything," said Mr. Logic. "In fact, it can happen right now. Right here and now."

"What?" Bill jerked his eyes open, wishing again that he had the red and gold there with him, to help keep him awake. "But I'm not going to stay awake for much longer," said Mr. Logic. "And it already happened. When I touched your shoulder. I passed it on to you."

"So why are you still sitting here talking to me?"

"Residual. I..."

Mr. Logic trailed off in the middle of his sentence.

Bill stared into the night, barely noticing that Mr. Logic had finally shut up. When he heard the last breath of the awful body, the rattle of death that he'd read about sometimes in books during the times he felt like reading, it barely registered in his consciousness.

He stared off into the bright night sky.

"Constance," he told his wife's body. "First thing I'll do is come for you. I promise."

Bill closed his eyes.

Forty-Five.

He stood at the edge of her room.

Bill stared at the back of her head.

She was framed by the window. Outside there were trees, bare birches with their black-and-white bark. They tapped their black branches against the window in rhythm with the rain. Constance had opened the window a crack, and there was a hint of ionized air in the room.

The window.

No longer a massive pane of white. No longer featureless on the outside.

"Dreaming," said Bill. "I am dreaming."

Bill looked down on himself. He wore the same clothes that he'd worn in the forest, but now they were immaculate, as if he'd just gotten them off the rack. He could even smell the leather from his boots, the tanning agents wafting up into his nose.

He turned around.

No door.

A hallway.

The ground covered in flowing blood.

"Not dreaming," said Bill. "In Hell."

A thousand questions formed in his brain as he turned around again to face his wife.

Why?

What was he supposed to do?