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Behind the lobby of the Heaven and Hell office building, across from the elevators, is a closet. Officially, it's a janitorial closet, but neither of the tenants, for different reasons, understands why janitors are necessary. Unofficially, it's the back channel.
(There may be no janitors, but the closet does have a self-cleaning mechanism akin to those found in self-cleaning loos on street corners. It smells overwhelmingly of harsh, fake-lemon disinfectant, but this is immensely preferable to the alternative, an unspeakable combination of mingled holy and unholy effluvia.)
The interior entrances from Upstairs and Downstairs require the deposition of a token to enter. These are hot commodities, although the now-defunct Boston T tokens also work, at least on the Hell side[1]. The lobby door doesn't ever open.
One week after the failed apocalypse, Aziraphale and Crowley kiss for the first time in Saint James Park, in full view of the Saturday crowds, several secret agents, a pair of poorly disguised angel and demon spies, and a flock of ducks. Afterward, they head, giddily arm-in-arm, back to the privacy of the bookshop. The door shuts behind them, the sign flips to closed.
But when one door closes, another one opens. Every seven minutes, to be exact, the door to the back-channel closet starts bursting open with a loud, obnoxious egg-timer ding. Someone, it seems, has a sense of humor. Or justice.
(Someone is also far too amused by human party games. Humans have always been the most ingenious of Her creations, but in this particular case they've gotten it wrong: seven minutes in Heaven would be very boring indeed, unless you happened to have an appointment on the one day when a massive pillar of hellfire appeared in the executive conference room.)
This would not be such a big deal, because the general public does not ever enter the building, except for the fact of the security camera pointed directly at the door.
Within one day, it records the following interactions:
- Four – no, five – Erics, plus the cute, floppy-haired angel from Heavenly Reception, enthusiastically taking advantage of back channels. Also, one big avocado.
- A squirming mass of tentacles. And Sandalphon, squirming.
- Hastur, his face suspiciously wet. Michael, awkwardly patting the droopy frog on his head.
- An orange, hairy, googly-eyed thing of great and eldritch power, ethereal-occult-other status undetermined.
- Uriel, wearing nothing except a silk rope tied in a number of elaborate knots. Dagon, who is very good at sailor's knots.
- Several demons furtively brushing their teeth.
- The Archangel fucking Gabriel.
The CCTV feed goes to three places. The surveillance departments of Heaven and Hell have immediately and conveniently lost their connections.
The third place it goes is to a thirty-year-old, box-shaped computer in a bookshop in Soho, which had until then never seen anything more titillating than disturbingly perfect tax forms. The bookshop's occupants are otherwise occupied with slaking six thousand years of thirst, and so the machine takes it upon itself to save these recordings in a folder titled "Insurance Forms."
[1] Although there is always the risk that you might end up like Eric's predecessor Charlie, who, if you believe the stories they tell around the bonfires in the Sixth Circle, used a T token to enter the closet and was never heard from again. return to text