Read The Worm of the Ages and Other Tails: Six Short Fantasies for Free Online

as  this world is concerned.
    ‘Of course he was in Hell in a moment, and in all my centuries I never saw a customer so glad to arrive. I met him at the landing; I started in to give him the standard briefing (for I was not in Management then), but he paid me no mind. He only cared about the one thing, you see. “Where is Salazar?” he asked me. “Tell me where I may find him, so that I can kill him again!”
    ‘Well,  I didn’t know where his playmate was, so I put him off with flapdoodle. I made up some silly riddle, you know, the kind that  sounds profound, but doesn’t mean anything – or means whatever you want it to mean, when you finally pretend to yourself that you have it answered. He actually shook my hand – almost pulled it clean off’ (here the Middle Management Devil wrung his flabby wrist as if it still gave him pain) ‘and then took himself off on his mission.
    ‘I kept an eye on him myself from time to time, but mostly I delegated. That is, I sold tickets. Half the devils in Hell wanted to see this marvel – a man who  wanted to be in Hell; who was glad of every torment, because he was so unshakable in his faith that Salazar was there. He was convinced, you see, that his own petty grievance was the worst injury any mortal man ever suffered, and the very worst punishments in the hottest part of the Netherworld must have been rigged up just for Salazar’s especial benefit. We didn’t trouble to disabuse him. No, sir, we egged him on! He shovelled cubic miles of filth with his bare hands; he searched through endless dungheaps for clues that weren’t there; he palled up with torturers and cheerfully submitted to red-hot pincers, just in the hopes of cadging information about his enemy’s whereabouts. He even swam the Lake of Fire at one point, all the way across – and then back again, for he had forgotten one of our riddling clues, and across a third time, before he kept on going. Friend, he was  ecstatic because of the pains we loaded on him, so long as he thought Salazar must be having it worse. So I sold tickets, as I said, and hundreds of us took turns watching over him, and fixing up tortures for him, and feeding him false leads that sent him chasing all over Sheol and half of Gehenna. You never saw such mirth among so many devils; and as for me, that ticket-selling stunt was what got me my first break in management.’
    He looked so pleased with himself that I had some trouble keeping my ham and eggs down. I saw that I had only a moment to deflect him before he started bragging about  himself; so I gritted my teeth and said: ‘What happened to your customer? Did he ever find Salazar?’
    ‘Oh, yes. After about forty years, when – aha – when ticket sales had dried up, and I had got everything I could get out of him. You never saw such a disappointed shade. Terrified, despairing, angry, bitter, eaten up with remorse – we get all those kinds in Hell; but mere  disappointment is a thing we hardly ever see. “Blessed is he who expects nothing,” you know. Finally I let him see Salazar; and he was in the dullest and most pedestrian part of Hell, suffering things that would hardly make your granny weep.
    ‘Well, my customer was ready to chuck out every devil for miles around, and take over the work himself. He was acrimonious. “What is this!” he bellowed. “Where are the whips and pitchforks? Where are the red-hot chains? Where the fire and the ice, the filth and the lice, and all the torments of flesh and soul that I myself have had to endure? Why is this worm not  punished!” And nothing would do him but to kill him again. He had got hold of a scimitar somewhere, from one of our guard devils who swapped it for a ticket; and I made sure he wasn’t deprived of it – this would be too good to miss. He stood just so, just as he had done outside that tavern long ago, and sliced Salazar right down the middle again.
    ‘But it was no good, you see. If one death was not