Friday night at nineteen hundred and thirty hours EDT on Hell's big clock, the imp on the soul radar yelped like an air raid siren and began bouncing around its station. It grabbed the mike and howled, "Holy Tarheels, Your Bat-Winged Arch-Fiendishness! Bogie on the big board! Bogie on the big board! And it's a whopper!"
Lucifer rose slowly from his work and stalked through the lined rows of desks, glowering, scattering secretaries with every step. When he walked, the rest of Hell went face down and shivered until the ground beneath it ceased to tremble with the passing of its lord. Flames curled up where Lucifer had stepped, and the stench of brimstone hung in his wake.
He reached the imp, and from his great and terrifying height, he looked down. Into the vast silence in the office, silence that came not of deference, but of dry-mouthed, unthinking fear, the Lord of Darkness growled, "What do you mean, doomed imp?"
The imp pointed to a swirling dot of white spinning against the deep red background of the soul-board. "Right there, O Foul Putrescence." The imp switched from doing Robin the Boy Wonder to doing Chuck Yeager. "Right smack in the heart of Charlotte, North Carolina—we got us a four-point-seven-nine plus-soul crosscurrent intersecting on the material plane with a triple-A hardcase bearing zero-zero-ninety and carrying an unidentified soul-cargo anomaly aimed straight at us, Roger Wilco, over and out."
"Little imp," Lucifer snarled, picking the imp up by the scruff of the neck, "tell me what you are called, that I may remember to curse you more fully after I have ground your very soulstuff into paste, ingested it, and shat it into the Bottomless Pit."
The imp squirmed and shook. "Er . . . Earwax, Your Hellishness."
"Earwax. You have only the time between one heartbeat and the next to tell me, Earwax, what exactly it was that you just said, or I will see that you spend an eon simply finding all your scattered atoms and pulling them back together before you can reform yourself into so much as a slime mold."
"Good-guy-upstairs-stirring-things-up-with-the-Big-Guy-and-looking-at-us," Earwax whimpered in one terrified breath, while he dangled thirty feet in the air from the Evil One's needle-tipped talons. "In Charlotte, North Carolina," it added.
"Charlotte, North Carolina, eh?" The Archfiend stared off into infinite space, thinking. "It seems to me we do a better than average business there . . . Oh, yes. That Charlotte. Automotive damnation cases—Hell's draftsmen designed the roads."
Lucifer realized he was still holding the imp; with a snort of disgust, he pitched it over his shoulder and it bounced four times, then scurried away. The Archfiend bent over the soul-radar and watched the bright swirls of energy that indicated the building fronts of good and evil—the pattern, a spiraling storm center that spun slowly around a central eye, would have looked at home on a hurricane tracking chart. It indicated building tension, the coming of a big event . . .
. . . And the Angel of Darkness knew that big events always left plenty of wandering souls in their wake—souls that with minimal effort could be corralled into his domain.
He needed to get a team ready. He didn't know what was about to break—only God could tap directly into the lines of future events, but he could track their shadows and be ready.
And Agonostis—whatever was going to happen, this would be the perfect punishment for him. Agonostis didn't know it yet, but he was about to get a demotion.
Lucifer smiled slowly, and called up his list of servants who were furthest out of favor, and nearest to being downgraded to the unrank of damnedsouls and thrown into the Pit. These little special assignments always did much to stir up the enthusiasm of his deadweight employees. Sheer terror was a marvelous motivator.