Moral Depreciation

Chapter One: The Reconciliation Meeting

The universe runs on double-entry bookkeeping.

This is not a metaphor. Every soul that has ever drawn breath, and several that only got as far as thinking about it, is recorded in the Grand Celestial Ledger — a vast, self-updating supernatural document maintained jointly by Heaven's Bureau of Ethical Accounting and Hell's Department of Moral Depreciation. For roughly fourteen billion years the arrangement has worked passably well, in the same way a washing machine held together with duct tape works passably well. Nobody looks too closely. The strange noises are ignored. Occasionally something leaks onto the floor and everyone agrees it was probably always like that.

Once every hundred years, the two departments meet to reconcile the books.

The venue for the Reconciliation Meeting is a neutral pocket dimension that has, for reasons no one has ever satisfactorily explained, taken the permanent form of a conference room in a budget hotel outside Swindon. There is a whiteboard with the ghost of last century's flow chart still faintly visible on it. There is a jug of water with no glasses. There is a radiator that produces heat in the manner of a witness giving evidence under duress, and a window that looks out onto a car park containing three cars, none of which have moved since 1804.

Norman Peakes arrived forty minutes early, as he had for the last four centuries.

He set out his materials in the order prescribed by the Bureau's Handbook of Interdepartmental Etiquette: pencils, sharpened, in a row; the Ledger's primary access spindle, laid flat; a small brass abacus he did not need but found calming; and a packet of ginger biscuits, which he arranged on a plate in a fan, then unfanned, then refanned, because the first fan had looked provocative.

Norman had died in 1642 of an infected paper cut. He had been filing a petition concerning a disputed hedge. The universe considers irony to be load-bearing, and so, having killed him with paperwork, it had promptly handed him more, in perpetuity. He was Heaven's chief ledger auditor. He was also Heaven's only ledger auditor, a fact that appeared in the Bureau's annual report under the heading Streamlined Team Structure.

He was tall, faintly grey, and permanently braced, like a man who had once been startled and had decided to remain that way in case it happened again.

At 9:59, the far door opened and a smell of warm sulphur and hand sanitiser came in ahead of its owner.

"Norman Peakes!" said Olive Fennell. "After seventy-two years of margin notes, I feel like I know your handwriting better than my own mother's."

She was small and round and wearing an entirely reasonable cardigan. She had a lanyard. Demons were not required to wear lanyards. Olive wore one because she liked the way it swung.

"Miss Fennell," said Norman, standing so quickly his chair fell over. "Yes. Quite. Welcome to. Yes."

"First time face to face," said Olive, shaking his hand with both of hers, which was somehow worse. "My predecessor came in 1925. Snurge. Terrible man. Ate the sandwiches and set fire to the whiteboard."

"I remember Snurge," said Norman, in the tone one uses for war.

Olive Fennell had died in 1953, at her own retirement party, by choking on a celebratory biscuit during a speech about her twenty-eight years of unblemished service at a paint factory in Dudley. She had gone to Hell not for any particular sin, but because a filing error in the Department of Moral Depreciation had assigned her there under a misread surname. By the time anyone noticed, she had reorganised her cubicle, established a rota for the communal kettle, and made herself so useful that Hell had quietly decided to keep her. She was the only being in either bureaucracy who genuinely understood how the Ledger worked, and both bureaucracies found this so alarming that they had promoted her twice to stop her talking about it.

"Right," she said, sitting down and producing an enormous flask. "Shall we do the century?"

They did the century.

This is the part that outsiders imagine as a clash of cosmic titans: the great weighing of virtue and vice, thunder rolling over the scales of judgement. In practice it involves two people reading numbers aloud to each other for eleven hours.

"Souls received, Heaven, 1925 to present, four billion two hundred and six million, one hundred and twelve thousand, nine hundred and four," said Norman.

"Agreed," said Olive, ticking.

"Souls received, Hell."

"Four billion two hundred and six million, one hundred and twelve thousand, nine hundred and eleven. Ooh. Seven over."

"That will be the Poulters."

"The whole family?"

"The whole family," said Norman grimly. "Contested. Appealed. Withdrawn. Reappealed by an aunt."

They moved through the schedules. Small mercies, unrecorded. Kindnesses performed for tax purposes, disallowed. Charitable donations made to impress a woman at a party, allowed at forty per cent. Around the fifth hour, they reached the section of the Ledger that no one enjoys, entitled Adjustments, Reclassifications and Miscellaneous Grace, and around the seventh hour they reached the sticky notes.

The sticky notes were how Norman and Olive had conducted their entire professional relationship. Heaven's copy and Hell's copy of the Ledger were the same document viewed from opposite sides, which meant that anything written in the margin appeared instantly to both of them. Over seven decades, an etiquette had developed.

Norman read one aloud, stiffly. "'Norman — reclassified 14,000 souls under Impulse Generosity. Hope that's OK!!' Three exclamation marks, Miss Fennell."

"Two," said Olive. "The third one's a smudge."

"And mine," said Norman, holding up a small yellow square in his own tight, upright hand. "'Miss Fennell. Per my previous note. Per my previous previous note.'"

"I found that one very funny," said Olive warmly.

"It was not intended to be funny."

"That's why it was funny."

At the eighth hour, they reached the totals.

Norman ran the totals. Then he ran them again. Then he took off his spectacles, cleaned them on his tie, put them back on, and ran them a third time, at which point a small cold thing began to unfold in his chest like a deckchair.

"Miss Fennell," he said. "What is your closing population figure?"

Olive told him.

Norman told her his.

There was a silence of the type that architects design conference rooms to contain.

"That's a gap," said Olive.

"That is not a gap. A gap is eleven souls in a bad quarter. A gap is the Poulters." Norman's voice had gone up half an octave. "Six million, two hundred and ninety-eight thousand, four hundred and forty-one souls are on neither side of this document."

"Purgatory?"

"Purgatory reports weekly and reconciles to the unit. Purgatory has a spreadsheet culture I frankly envy."

"Limbo?"

"Limbo was decommissioned in 1962 and turned into a training facility."

"The sub-basements?"

"All seventeen," said Norman, "confirmed empty last audit, apart from Basement Nine, which contains a whale."

Olive leaned back, and her chair made a small honk of protest, and something happened to her face that Norman would remember for a long time afterwards. She did not look frightened. She looked interested. It was the expression of a woman who has been doing crosswords for seventy years and has finally been handed one with a mistake in it.

"Six point three million souls," she said, "have walked off the books."

"They cannot walk off the books. There is no off. The books are everything. The books are the—" Norman gestured at the ceiling, the window, the immobile cars. "The books are all of it."

"Then where are they?"

Norman was already flipping backwards, and this was the moment the deckchair in his chest collapsed entirely, because the discrepancy was not new. It went back decades. In 1974 it had been fourteen thousand. By 1998, three hundred thousand. In the last five years it had gone nearly vertical.

"It's accelerating," he whispered.

"Well," said Olive, pouring tea from the flask into the lid and offering it to him, "that's a Tuesday."

"Miss Fennell, do you understand what happens if this is reported?"

"I understand exactly what happens if this is reported," said Olive, "which is why I'd like you to say it out loud, because you're going to feel better afterwards and you're going to say it more calmly than I am."

Norman put down the tea, untasted.

"My superior," he said, "is Gilbert Pugh, Archangel of Compliance. For six thousand years he has stood in front of the Almighty Comptroller at the Quarterly Cosmic Review and said the words 'no material findings.' He has said them so often they have been embroidered on a cushion. If he learns that the Ledger has been haemorrhaging souls since the nineteen-seventies, he will not investigate it. He will find the nearest available person to be at fault, and he will file the paperwork so thoroughly that the nearest available person will cease to have ever existed. I am the nearest available person. I am, in fact, the only available person."

"And mine," said Olive, "is Duchess Varlotta, Archdemon of Infernal Operations, who three months ago launched a rebranding exercise called Total Damnation Quality, complete with mugs. If she finds out that six million damnable souls have been mislaid, she will assume Heaven stole them, and she will express that assumption at volume, for a century, in verse."

Norman looked at the whiteboard. The ghost of the 1925 flow chart looked back.

"The next Quarterly Cosmic Review," he said, "is in seventy-two hours."

"Then we'd better not tell anyone," said Olive Fennell, "and go and find them ourselves."

And that, as the Ledger would later record in a column that did not yet exist, is how it started: two middle-ranking clerks, one plate of ginger biscuits, and a radiator that had never once been fixed.