Page 91 of Interior Design for Demons
My stomach lurches. “Who judges that?”
“There’s a metric for it, agreed upon by Heaven and Hell.” Slate bumps my shoulder with hers impatiently. “Go ahead and read up on the assignment so we can get started. We’ll leave you with your new music.”
Draping an arm across Rusala’s shoulders, she swaggers out with him. They giggle and whisper to each other as they go—probably because the playlist they made me is full of creepy, deathly songs—not my usual choice for inspiration.
It’s a dreadful combination—the dark music, my assigned Horseman “Death,” and the cruel reality of the fates that will be decided in this room. I’m supposed to include chairs for the souls to wait in. They could just float around, right? Because they’resouls. But I guess they will already be in their artificial Hell-bodies. All fleshly and torture-ready.
At the head of the room there’s supposed to be a platform or dais where the demons in charge can call the souls up and hand down their assigned judgment.
And all of it has to be themed around “Death.”
Seems cruel to remind the souls what just happened to them. I can’t bear the thought of terrifying them even more, when they’re already going to be paralyzed or frantic with terror.
But I’ve made it this far. I can’t give up now, not when I’m almost in the top three. Somehow I have to design this room, and I have to do it well so I cansurvive. I can’t think about anyone else’s well-being.
How very demonic of me.
The best I can do for these souls is to make their moments in this room more interesting and distracting. Once again I have a nearly unlimited budget and resources, so I start browsing interior-décor websites, sketching, laying out the room in SketchUp Pro, saving images to Pinterest moodboards.
Over the next three days, the room takes shape. First a deep smooth gray on the walls. Narrow tables along sides of the room, furnished with cast-iron lamps shaped like anglerfish, with their dramatic spiky jaws and dangling light-lures. Rows of ebony armchairs whose creamy upholstery is lightly printed with sketches of animal skeletons. On a few of the chair backs I position stuffed ravens, some with wings outspread, others with beaks wide open.
Slate and Rusala hang distressed gray frames along the walls in the spaces I’ve marked, and centered in each empty frame is the skull of a bird or animal. The tiniest frame encases a kingfisher skull, while the largest, centered behind the dais, features a hippo skull flanked by wolverine skulls. It's harder than I thought to mount the skulls securely without breaking and cracking them, but with some trial and error we manage it.
My favorite piece in the room is a black antique etagere with carved herons supporting its sides. I place artificial plants on it—probably the last glimpse of green the poor souls in this room will ever see. Behind the glossy antique desk on the dais I place a stunning Baroque highback chair with a swirling backrest. It looks beautiful, but it’s horribly uncomfortable. I hope every demon who sits in that chair will hate it.
The chair and the greenery are my tiny acts of rebellion. I hope they’re enough to be interesting, but not so bold that they’ll get me eliminated.
Rusala and Slate have the same fears about the fake plants. They’re also nervous about the deep purple hue of the ceiling and the curlicue design of the ebony crown molding.
“It’s too fancy for an intake room,” Slate says dourly.
“Dead plants,” Rusala says. “That’s what should be on the etagere. Not green ones. This room is about Death, niblet.” He tweaks the stud in my eyebrow, and I flinch at the pain.
Maybe they’re right. “Okay, fine. We can replace two of the plants with dead ones. Do we have time?”
“Thirty minutes,” says Slate. “I can put in a request, but there’s no guarantee the plants will get here in time.”
“Do it,” I tell her. “I want to check that place in the corner where the floor tiles were going all wonky. Rusala, finish wiring the overhead fixture.”
They obey me, but they grumble more than usual. Maybe they have the same fluttery, twisty, panicked feeling I have—the feeling that despite all I’ve done, it won’t be enough.
After checking the floor tiles I scan the room again, taking in more details—the horseman mosaic on the floor in front of the dais, the delicate twisty legs of the side tables that hold my anglerfish lamps, the skeletal designs on the upholstery, the slim leatherbound novels stacked in artful swirls in the corners of the room, so the souls can have something to read while they wait—
Like they’re going to feel like reading.
Crap.
What was I thinking?
What evenisthis room?
My breath stutters in my lungs, coming in short, sharp gasps.
This room is a mess. Anglerfish and animal skeletons? Stuffed ravens? A purple ceiling?
What was I thinking?
What the Hell was I thinking?
