The Fall of Heaven: I. The Proprietor and the War

A devil came into my store the other day, an angel in tow. He held the child by an invisible but heavy chain, dragging him like a rag doll across the threshold. This devil bought some candles, some sweets, disposable lighters, and a pack of Marlboro Lights. The look on the child’s face as he was led through the store was pathetic in its complacency; I could tell in his eyes that he had given up a long time ago, whatever dreams he may have had of freedom. I saw his pain and his fear through his acceptance, and wished that I could vanquish the devil, gather up the angel, and tell him that everything would be all right and bring him back to the world into which he had been born. But that would throw off a balance that I would never be able to fix, and who was I to kill the devil? After all, a store owner is only a human—I never could have dreamed of being possessed of enough power to defeat him. And so from behind the counter of my quaint corner store, I watched the fall of Heaven.

In this new world that Satan has created—a world without God, a world without rules—there are three kinds of people: the rebels, who are faithful to the God who wasn’t strong enough to stand his ground when our world was at stake; the loyalists, who have sided with Satan and are in his favor for it; and then, there are those who have become a sort of atheistic race amongst the faithful turmoil. The demons have taken the angels as servants—now stripped of their celestial blessings, they are simply humans distinguishable as angels only by the way that light is reflected off their eyes, much like the wings they are depicted so often to have. Every human in this new world order (if you could call it such) is at the mercy of the devil’s servants; the demons have full reign of the world, and come and go and kill as they please, with no angels to stand in their way.

To describe this world as it appears would be deceptive, because it is no different than it was before—men and women go to work, the children attend school—but that is normalcy only on the surface; we all live in fear of the demons that torment our home, who without the slightest provocation might slaughter the whole lot of us. Most people brave this every day, but I suppose you could say that I am of the cowardly type—I live and work in this store, and I venture out only to check the mail, armed with a gun or two, useless as they may prove. The seasons still rotate the same, and day and night still happen every twelve hours… only the light is less wholesome, and the darkness more menacing.

Maybe to say that this Satanic takeover has infected the entire world is misleading inasmuch as describing the everyday goings-on here; it is our town that is so plagued by the devil and his minions—but it has been the world for us who’ve lived here, and those who’ve died to see this place. This town is Godforsaken and forgotten; no one can leave and no one can save us, as if an invisible barrier has been erected between our neighboring towns and us that could shock us dead if we dared defy it. God has gone into hiding, and everywhere but our little town has been left to the discretion of humanity—to the powers that we possess without the help of God or Satan, either one. You can’t find us on any map, or in any phone book; we’re not on any highway sign, and we never will be. I live in what’s called a “ghost town,” although there are plenty of us here, struggling to survive every day.

Welcome to Heaven, New Mexico.

Long before the War began, talk had circulated, like it always did—but I had never heard talk like this before, in my twenty-six years of owning the corner store: there was rumor that a war was indeed brewing, that the balance that had so long cradled humanity and shielded us from anarchy would be challenged by the Devil, and that soon the angels would be called to battle to protect their human charges and defend the honor of their Lord. I had never given these rumors much credence, and when customers came to grab a newspaper and gab about the latest word on the street, I was always quick to denounce the rumors as the hypothetical talk of bored angels. So to say the least I was surprised when a demon waltzed into The Daily Dollar and began to peruse my stock.

He didn’t speak to me as he looked. He walked through the store, his eyes traveling up and down the shelves as if he were looking over a woman, all the while his mouth slightly twisted in what had to have been either contempt or discontent. The contorted expression, even though it was turned from me, I saw melt into an icy grin as the demon set eyes on the array of beers that sat behind the glass of the cold cabinets.

“Have you any hard liquor?” the demon asked, then, turning his head to face me. His eyes, that were vermilion and unusually iridescent, pierced mine, and though he hadn’t the look of a monster, I could almost not bear to look at him. And in that moment I wondered how it could be possible that a demon could come unnoticed to one of our ghost towns. And that begged the question, Where is God?

“Yep,” I replied, my voice betraying as little of my inner dialogue as possible. “I keep it back behind the counter. What is it you want?”

“Whiskey. The strongest you got, in the biggest bottle.”

I turned my back on the demon and began to search through the liquor shelves to find any whiskey I might have in stock. The only thing I order is Jack, and a few bottles remained as it wasn’t too popular here in Heaven. I grabbed the bottle off the shelf, then turned to face the counter once again. The demonic man had stepped noiselessly to the counter while my back was turned, and the sight of him so close startled me for a moment.

The demon snickered. “Do you take debit?” he asked.

I replied with a quick “yes” as he forked his card over for me to scan. Once the transaction was completed, I bagged the bottle and pushed it toward the other side of the counter. “Have a good day,” I said perfunctorily. Hoping he would leave; that this would be just a blip on the radar, and not a harbinger of things to come.

The demon grabbed the plastic bag by its handles and headed toward the door. “Oh,” he said, as if adding to something he had said before, “and your God is too busy with the World to defend his Heavens.” As if he had read my thoughts as he walked through my store.

Then just as unexpectedly as he had come, this psychic stranger left me to my rumination.

And just as unexpectedly as the demon entered my world, so did the War begin. The battle over New Mexico’s Heaven lasted two years; either side made headway, then lost it again within a matter of months. Eventually Satan’s army gained the upper hand, and angels were being slaughtered by the hundreds—angels that had been summoned from all over the planes to help to subdue the devil and regain the balance he was destroying. The angels knew not the pain of death until they were killed in combat, and a panic ensued among them that washed over the army like the aftershocks of a great celestial earthquake—one from which they could not recover.

While the angels and demons clashed, those who died and were bound for our Heaven were rerouted elsewhere, and so our town’s population only shrank by the hour with the killing of more and more angel-soldiers. Eventually one of Satan’s platoons stealthily descended upon the township and set to work that static barrier that took away the blessings of the angels and gave demons free roam. With that barrier he kept the deceased from entering the town, and kept anyone from leaving—and with that barrier, he even obscured us from the eyes of God.

The network of Heaven—“ghost towns,” places that exist only within the realm of Death, on every continent on Earth and in every country, but found on no maps—collapsed slowly under the pressure of a Godless existence; we had never experienced a time without God here, but suddenly He could not be reached through plea or prayer, and the living and less-than-holy were blessed with all of His attention, for he had lost the Heavens but would not lose the World.

Satan sent to the residents of Heaven a message, one that the demons delivered as rain began to fall (and the drops were not water, but blood): that this takeover was not an attack upon the dead, nor the angels, although those who would rebel would be punished—but this war was with God, and God clearly had lost.