Lightning sprayed the sky with fireshock filigree like gravity cracks across a charred marble dome. It started with a storm: it always did. It started with light cascading along the perfect honey of raindrops, with thunder pacing out its ripples in patient, steady hoofbeats, with banshees wailing in the willows as winds pushed their way through the airy alleyways carved by whip-thin branches. It started with a new body built for me out of the stuff of tempests, like a film of a Viking god's death run backwards: heart of lightning, skull of sky, thud of blunder. I wasn't reborn so much as I was shoved from the Harrow into a full-grown body as it was knit for me, even as shoes wrapped themselves around my birth-wet feet and a trenchcoat draped itself over skin newly stretched across muscle and bone.
 
It hurt like being flayed with thorn-covered branches, like being peeled apart with a knife as thin as virtue and as sharp as the horizon. The world tasted like a cigarette smoked halfway down the filter, and the shimmery haze of the sky froze as I was made from its castoffs, with nested arcs of lightning bending together like coathangers, raindrops disappearing from the air as they became me. Sparks glittered on my sharkbelly-white teeth like cavities and my pulse rumbled with the trembling of birth pangs.
 
The body was never the same — today I was ruddy, wiry, with thick hair standing up in moss-like clumps — but it was always one that would pass as human, and always male. The first time, I wasn't sure I was naturally male, originally male: I'd had to take down my first target to reclaim that knowledge. With soul comes certainty.
 
The clothes were utilitarian, alien in their crudeness: leather shoes with neither laces nor tongue, fitted too neatly to my soles to remove them without cutting them apart; a trenchcoat without buttons or collar, a simple shield from the rain which left my chest bare above flyless jeans; sunglasses with frames which pierced through skin into the bubbles of skull behind my ears. The shoes were to keep me walking; the clothes were to keep me dry and decent; the sunglasses covered up the one flaw of my rebirth, the one thing the devil denied me. I had no eyes. I could see, but had in past incarnations reached under the opaque blue lenses and cool steel frames to feel nothing but smooth bony socket with a thin covering of flesh like boiled chicken-skin.
 
I landed without a splat in a rain puddle in the middle of the highway, as the world resumed with long-haul truckers and night travelers swerving around me, blaring horns. That's how it always went, I was always reborn in the middle of something — it was up to me to stay alive for those first few moments. I still didn't know if it was test or taunt.
 
My palms were tattooed, still itchy with thick scratchings. The right was a constant, like the sunglasses and clothes: an eleven-pointed star, as much a brand or serial number as anything else. The left changed with each rebirth, counting down my progress: 32 now, simple numerals in plain black ink. Thirty-two more, and I'd be done. I'd earned back exactly one ninth of my soul.
  
I watched the traffic, waiting to pick up the rhythm of seemingly chaotic motion, and cartwheel-danced erratically across the lanes, dodging cars by inches until I came to the muddy slope leading to cheap housing and warehouses. This is what the world was to me now. Movement, constant movement. Jerky motion and stuttering blur, air in my lungs and against my borrowed skin. I moved strangely: the rebirths did not last long enough for me to become accustomed to any one body. I skittered down the slope like a spiderlegged puppet on a nickelodeon, arms jerking unsteadily.
 
The air felt good, warm and wet from the storm, from the water splashing up as raindrops drenched the earth with bomb-bursts. The world felt real, tangible, something that could be bitten and bled and savored and relished. Meaty. Moist. The last part of my soul I'd earned back let me appreciate the smell of the mud, the tang of ozone, the green grass I was trampling beneath my shoes. It was good to be alive, if only in temporary flesh.
 
The world tempted me, sang to me, clung to me. Remain, the soil said, remain, linger, elide. Roll in the muddy thunder and return to your mother earth as an adopted son. I didn't think it was possible. The body would start to rot, or the devil would call me back and I'd forfeit the rest of my soul. He had never said so, and maybe that was the trap. Maybe I could remain whenever I chose, content with a partial soul. But it was a risk I wouldn't take.
 
I didn't have long before the message would come, and didn't want to waste whatever time was left. No time to reach the houses and raid them for food or liquor or flesh. I'd make do with what the world provided. I sunk myself into the soft dirt of the grassy slope, grinding against it, furrowing the soil with the erection trapped in my jeans, clawing at the grass as it rubbed against my chest. I grunted like an animal, aroused by nothing but the ability to be aroused, by the freedom to be feral and uncaring, by the rain trickling down the back of my neck and under my trenchcoat, by the dirt collecting beneath my fingernails. When I came, there was no sense of culmination or contentment, only relief. Relief is the closest thing I know to Heaven: in the Harrow, there is no such thing, only madness and murmur and the occasional syncopation of the mission.
 
I rolled over, watching raindrops slink off the lenses of the sunglasses, and spread my legs out, feeling the slackness of my muscles, the sweat of my thighs against denim. Lightning cracked again, and the voice came from the deep within the thunder, the ineffable murmur of the devil:
 
"Reclaim."
 
The devil never addressed me, never had. If I had a name, I hadn't yet re-learned it — I thought of myself as Eleven, for the star on my palm. The first time I was sent out of the Harrow, the only thing I had was certainty of my purpose: certainty of the mission and its reward. The damned must be reclaimed, and my soul would be returned to me as payment. One soul for thirty-six: the devil always won. How many more like me were out there?
 
The lightning lifted me to my feet, stumbled me down the rest of the slope, as the waning storm washed the mud from my chest. Where I'd lain, the grass had turned brown and chalky, and fat greasy maggots crawled from the furrows I'd dug. The devil never needed to tell me who the target was: when he spoke, the knowledge was awakened in me. Face, name, location. Tonight it was Karen Arbelovsky, tonight she was blonde and dirty, tonight she was in one of the dingy houses lining the service road. Tonight she'd die again.
 
The storm faded into drumbeats propelling me forward, and I took a glance at the houses between me and Karen. There weren't many, but I would need power. Who knew what Karen had dragged out of the Harrow with her? Whatever neighborhood this was, whatever city this was, its children would be telling campfire stories about this night for years to come.
 
I called the last remnants of the storm to me, sucking the wind into my lungs and the lightning into my fingertips, lips splitting apart in a rictus as I swam in the delight. Once, I suspected, this is what I had given it all up for: this is how I had lost my soul, for a rush like this. It was not something I could remember: very little of my life had been given back to me. I had lived in a city, and lived alone; I had at one point had a pet of some kind; I had liked Italian food. I remembered little else. But I learned from my prey, as well as my rewards. Souls were traded for power. At the time, it must seem such a simple thing.
 
Like a frog, with knees bent and arms outstretched, I leapt through the window of the first house I came to, glass shards bouncing off the trenchcoat as it flapped behind me like wings. Bedroom. Two inhabitants, male and female, awoken by my entrance. I sniffed the air, taking their scents. The male. The male had more to offer me, richer meat. I grabbed his woman by the neck, leveraging my grip with fingers sunk into her mouth as I twisted her head and snapped her spine and trachea.
 
The male lunged at me, and I danced out of reach, jittery like a salamander dangling from a string. "Fade away, little boy," I whispered, in the voice the devil had lent me, a voice like paper wasps' nests crushed together. I hadn't yet earned enough of my soul to have a voice of my own. Like a cuckoo, like a hermit crab, I dwelled in the stuff of others. "Fade away, fade away."
 
It was a phrase I'd drawn from his nightmares, nightmares old and vivid that he hadn't had since childhood but still remembered. His gut, his girth, his fat sausage fingers, they were ways for him to establish his solidity and realness in the world. He was meat stuffed with fear. His eyes widened, and his lunge stuttered.
 
"Fade away, little boy." I smeared the blood of his woman across my lips, I stood in the moonlight to cast paleness on my face, and let it play against the tuft of my thick hair. "Fade away, fade away."
 
"No," he murmured, "No, no." He wasn't even looking at the woman anymore.
 
"You're going to fade away." My voice was like the slither of worms making love. "You're going to fade away in the magician's closet and the clowns will find you in the fog. Fade away, little boy. Better eat, better eat before you fade away. Better eat before the clowns find you."
 
I left the house as he turned to his dead woman, reaching for the softest parts of her with his teeth and shivering fingers, and his feasting fed me. I denied myself the temptation of helping him, or raiding his refrigerator or liquor cabinet. The power flooded me, stiffening my muscles and my cock, lifting the trenchcoat like a windblown skirt, sizzling the ends of every hair. It tasted like carrots and dark chocolate, like lemons in tin foil. And the power gave me the means to acquire more.
 
I crept into the next house unseen, not invisible but unnoticed, as a single mother hunched over the crib. The baby was crying anyway, she told herself. It was crying anyway. She was only curious. Would it cry more? How much more? Would it matter where she pressed the pin? Would it matter how many pins she stuck it with? She didn't want to hurt it. She was only curious. She didn't know why. Sometimes she just looked at the baby and thought — what would happen? If I stuck it with diaper pins, if I ran a razor blade down its back softly, too softly to pierce, only to scrape, if I pinched its little toes until it howled?
 
She wondered, and she was curious, and she was tempted, and in my presence she gave in. It was crying already anyway. The power came at me like knives dripping with cold oil, like a bassline snaking up my spine and biting my neck.
 
In the third house I was nothing but a whisper, I was a hand on a shoulder, I was gentle. The twins rubbed each other beneath the covers, taunting each other to go on, to go faster, with their retarded father caught between them. With the power coming off me in waves now, it took only a glance to get them started, and they would continue long into the morning, long after I had left. It started so quickly that I saw no harm in stopping in the kitchen, filling my maw with scrawny cold tomatoes which bled like beating hearts, and fistfuls of raw beef on the cusp of its sell-by date.
 
I had enough. The power hummed in my ears like high-tension wires. It crackled along my teeth and tongue. The hairs inside my ears stood at attention.
 
It was time for Karen Arbelovsky to be sent back through the gates of Hell, back to the Harrow where we all belonged, where we were hidden from the eyes of this world.
 
Hell is a verb. It comes from the Anglo-Saxon helan: to hide. Through its Greek and Latin roots, it's related to "occult," "apocalypse," "clandestine," "cellar." The gate to Hell is a cellar door, and Hell isn't what's beyond it: Hell is the verb of its opening, Hell is the verb of hiding what's beyond the sweaty creaky door. Hell hides the Harrow, the dirty smudgy gasping thing beneath everything that is.
 
And sometimes that door swings open, just a crack. Sometimes, usually on a Halloween when the things of other worlds bulge below the surface of this one like varicose veins, things come back through to the earth from the Harrow. They needed to be sent back.
 
Karen was in the fifth house. I skipped the fourth, sparing it as if lamb's blood marked the door. I could feel her, so close, and could imagine my reward, the sensation of another piece of my soul returned to me, another piece of myself, of my me. Soon I would be finished, and could leave the Harrow a whole man, for whatever realms existed for the undamned. Soon I would remember who I was.
 
There was no place for subtlety now, nor need. The damned would know me for what I was. I let the power crackle in the interstices between my outstretched fingers as I approached the side of the house, and unleashed the wrath of the devil upon the world. The wall split along its seams, shattering into splinters which softened with rot in the night air, the rot giving way to worms and green-bodied flies which buzzed and squirmed in foggy puddles around me. The glass of the windows melted into yellow pus which bubbled and hissed as the lawn steamed into wilt.
 
Karen was sitting in the dark in a corner of the living room. She was hunched in the corner, holding a hammer in one hand as she slurfed up chicken grease from the fingers of the other. The whole house was littered with pizza boxes, Chinese takeout, emptied cans of beer and soda, buckets of well-gnawed chicken bones. It stank of organs and fat, and my stomach churned with hunger. There was no food in the Harrow: not as I'd known it in life.
 
"Karen Arbelovsky," I murmured, with the voice of a thousand rats muffling each other's squeals. "It is time to return to the Harrow."
 
She looked up at me, and as the light struck her I saw that she was naked except for her leather shoes. Her eyes — were skinned-over skull-hollows, exactly as I imagined mine must look. "You don't have to do this," she said quietly, and her voice was fully human.
 
"The damned have to be sent back. You know this."
 
She shook her head, and when her hair moved I could see the fragments of sunglasses frames still sticking into her skull. "It isn't worth it." She held her palms up to the light where I could see them: a five-pointed star on one, but the left was blank. "It isn't what you think."
 
I brought the power to the surface of my skin, letting it ferment and fester, waiting to drive the devil's cock through the world and drill a hole to the Harrow. "I don't blame you for having been tempted. But I need to send you back. If your tattoo means what I think, you understand that."
 
"What's your name?" she asked, and I shook my head. "He hasn't told you yet? Listen to me. It isn't real. Your reward, what he's giving you back, the promise of 'something beyond the Harrow.' It isn't real, none of it."
 
The power sizzled on my skin like frying bacon and I began to open the gates. "In the name of the dark lord who has no name, in the name of the consort of the Harrow—"
 
She sighed and held her palms up again. "If I finished my work, why am I here? If he gave me back my soul, why are you here to bring me to the Harrow?"
 
That stopped me cold. There was no number on her palm, and I could smell the soul on her. If her mission had been the same as mine, why was she my target? She didn't belong either on Earth or in the Harrow; she should be wherever the undamned went. "You — must not have been under the same aegis I am. Or you've become damned again. You tell me."
 
"I had the same deal you did. Thirty-six damned, right? Rope all thirty-six and you get your soul back. All your memories. All your humanity. And then off you go to the great whatever. Right?" She didn't watch for my answer. "It's bullshit. The soul he gives you isn't your own. It's someone else's. I'm not even sure all the pieces are from the same soul — unless mine is from someone raised in both Moscow and Brooklyn. You're never going to be you again. You're never going anywhere but the Harrow. You've been duped."
 
"And I suppose you can prove this."
 
She chuckled, but still didn't move from the floor. "No. You've got my word and my blank palm. Go ahead, then. I can't fight you. I'm human now. He did that much for me. No more dark powers, no more magic. There's nothing I can do to stop you. If you're going to do it, get it over with."
 
"If you were telling the truth, why the hell would he send me to take you? Why would he risk my finding out?"
 
"What can you do about it? Why would he give me 'back' pieces from different souls? Because he doesn't give a shit. He's the devil, Eleven — he moves in mysterious ways. Because he can. Listen — look at you. The power's making you hard." She was right. My erection pressed so feverishly against the jeans that it hurt. "You could fuck me. Not in exchange — take me, don't take me, whatever. But if you fucked me first, at least we'd both have that one last something."
 
This could all be a trick. This could be a test. I'd only reclaimed four of the damned. Maybe the devil was testing me, testing my loyalty and devotion to the mission. I would remain strong. I would resist temptation. "In the name of the dark lord—"
 
"Wait."
 
"—who has no name—"
 
"Wait, you bastard. Look at me. If you're going to do it — at least look at me."
 
I looked at her through the blue lenses of my sunglasses, looking directly at the empty sockets ringed by bruises her hammer had left. "In the name of the dark lord who has no name," I said, in the voice of the rats, "in the name of the consort of the Harrow, in the name of the concords of Hell, I consign thee, thou damned thing, to below, and upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life."
 
The power convulsed from me, my stomach vomiting up the meat and tomato and dirt in a thick mucusy crimson rope, my cock pulsing against denim as it dampened it, and everything I had taken, every pang of guilt and thrill of taboo, every fleshy pleasure and forbidden delight, arced out in a graceful bolt which rose up to the ceiling before crashing down, driving a hole into the dirt and pushing Karen before it. She didn't scream, not like the rest. She didn't level a curse in her wake. She simply grunted and took it, like a bride thinking of England.
 
I was not left behind to watch her fall: no sooner had I reclaimed her than, as before, the hand of the devil grabbed me through the gates and yanked me back, unshackling me from borrowed flesh and pressing a thirty-sixth of soul to me. I swam in it, rolled in it, holding it close to my heart as the sense of me consumed me in that brief moment before I returned to the Harrow.
 
Five down. Thirty-one remaining. And I had my name now, I knew my name, the name of the man I had been in a life I could not yet remember: my name was Julie.
 
The world fell away from me as the gates shuddered closed, and a thousand unimaginable filths pressed moistly against me for a taste of the above, for a stolen kiss of the living world.