“Pardons, my dearest. Don’t want to wake your dad, do we? No, not that.”

Esther shook her head, and the man pounded one hoof against the floor reflexively. He stepped closer to her bed, out from the shadows.

He had long, bushy black hair. His face was stretched and narrow, but strong-boned. His mouth protruded, the giant teeth pushing against fat lips. His eyes were smooth black stone that glinted like diamond when they caught a stray sliver of light. His hooves were tapered black pots, scarred by use. His draped woolen robe couldn’t conceal the geometric shapes of his protruding, spherical belly, his massive square chest. His naked arms were thick as trees and roped with taut muscle. His hands were twice the length of a normal man’s, and they curled in on themselves like eagle talons, the dark nails of each finger honed to a point. She knew they weren’t hands but claws, each one big enough to wrap easily around her head, powerful enough to squeeze until the skull snapped.

She could feel the heat of him. Wispy black smoke drifted off his skin.

And yet, she liked him. Liked him immediately, and was not afraid. She studied him, overtly sly. A look she had perfected with her mother, one that always got a laugh.

“What’s your name?”

“Whatever you wish it to be,” he said, his voice rumbling, head dipped in a bow. “I have many, but care for none of them.”

He said this in such a manner as to make Esther giggle and smack her palm to her forehead in the slapstick fashion of television sitcoms. “Oh gosh. You are frustrating!”

He bowed more deeply, and she laughed again. “A name, if you please. For I will soon vanish without one.”

She thought about it, searched her mind for things that made her laugh, or smile, that made her think of the way things used to be. “Hobbes!” she commanded, pointing a finger at his black eyes for emphasis.

He nodded, as if not unexpected, and took a small step back into shadow. “May I stay, princess? I’ll sit on the floor over here, like a good dog, and you and I can speak to one another, speak of things that we could not say to anyone else in the world. Would you like that?”

She nodded, smiling.

“Wonderful,” he said, eyes sparkling, chunky white teeth a slice in the dark. “Where shall we begin?”

She shrugged, said nothing. He pretended to ponder the issue, then gasped and lifted one long, needle-tipped finger, his face brightening as if struck with a most brilliant thought.

“Tell me, princess,” he said, and she heard the murmuring intrada of violins whisper from beneath her bed. “What does thee know of Hell?”

THEY WERE IN the kitchen, argument full steam.

He arrived home late and drunk and there was no food in the house. While he was away, she’d made herself a dinner of shredded wheat without milk, tried to lose herself in whatever was on television so she wouldn’t have to think about how sad she’d become. There was a great, constant weight on her shoulders, a tiredness she was not mature enough to identify as the early stages of deep, clinical depression. It wrapped around her, a cursed hauberk that sucked the joy from her, bogged down her spirit.

When he finally came through the door, Esther was seated at the kitchen table, finishing a family mural assignment that was to be a combination of pictures, drawings and text on a sheet of yellow poster board given to the students by Mrs. Holmes, her sixth-grade teacher. She’d been gluing a picture of her and her mother taken one day in their backyard, Esther sitting in a small red wagon, arms around her kneeling mother’s neck, both smiling. Beneath the photo she’d written a paragraph about how much she missed her mother, and what her favorite things about her were. The funny voices she used when telling me a story at bedtime. How she would comb my hair with her favorite brush, made from silver. When we went shopping on my birthday and I could try on whatever I wanted. Her smile.

“I will call the police, you fucker!” she screamed, pushing his thin-fingered hands away from her. “Don’t touch me!” She swung her fist at him, hit him wildly in the hip. Her father jumped back, his face shocked and slackened by alcohol. She could smell the whisky on his skin.

“How dare you cuss at me!” he roared, then tripped over his own feet and almost fell, grasping the edge of the kitchen counter. He started to cry. “I just wanted to hold you, princess. I love you.”

“If you come near me I’ll kill you!” she screamed.

She fled to her bedroom, slammed the door. Her heart hammered. She was gasping, could feel the sobs in her throat, but refused to cry.

“Push that dresser in front so he can’t get in.”

Esther spun and saw Hobbes laying on her bed, hooves crossed, long fingers interlaced behind his shaggy head. His black eyes were wide and filled with stars. There was a quarter-sized hole in the center of his forehead she had not previously noticed.

“Jeez, thanks,” she said, and tried to push the heavy dresser across the carpeting.

“Stand back,” he said, and he whistled, or made a face as if to whistle, but a swinging lick of horn came out instead, like a jazz trumpeter tuning up for a midnight performance.

Lithe figures made of smoke slipped from the hole in his forehead, danced across the floor to the dresser. She smelled the sour of sulfur and the dresser jerked free from her fingers and slammed against the door with such force that small chips of wood flew into the air, the peach-colored wall which spread outward from the doorframe dented where the edge had struck. “There,” he said, and the devils slipped back into his head, as if inhaled.

There was an immediate pounding at the door. Her father in the hallway screaming now, screaming that he was going to punish her, punish her for what she said. For disrespecting him. The screams were muffled, as if his face was pressed flat against the other side. The handle rattled, fists slammed into the wood.

“I’m coming in there,” he said, and it did not sound like her father, but like someone else. Like a stranger in their home. “I’m going to come in there and take care of some business. You hear me! I’m gonna take care of business tonight!”

Esther ran across the room to the window, meaning to escape into the dark. She pulled up on the handle, but the window would not budge.

“Help me!” she screamed, crying now, releasing her fear and misery. Hobbes sat up slowly, razor-tipped fingers punching effortlessly through her blankets, into the mattress. The hole on his forehead cycled open wider, the size of a silver dollar.

“You don’t want my help, princess. If I helped you, it would be to take you away from here. From all this. Into Hell.”

She ran to him, threw her arms around his massive frame, her small hands only making it as far as his biceps. The heat of his skin so hot, almost burning, the smoke coming off him covering her like oil. He did not move.

“He’s going to come in here, and he’s going to get me.” She stared into his deep black eyes, wide and round as a mad stallion. “You don’t understand what he’ll do to me.”

Hobbes looked at her, nodded. When he closed his eyes, a tear, black as ink, slid down his roughened cheek. “Listen to the music, princess.”

HELL.

He took me there. I don’t know how, but he did. Shit… it’s hard to describe.

First off, it was way worse than you’d imagine. Very dark and cold and Hobbes wasn’t even Hobbes when we got there. He didn’t look much like a human anymore. His head was that of a huge black horse, or a unicorn, but it was NASTY. The horn was long as I am, it stuck out forever! And it was drippy and twisted, moving up and down like it was covered in little skinny snakes. He’d pretty much doubled in size, and even though he still had his normal body, it was bigger. WAY bigger. All covered in thick hair and he had a tail and when he walked everything shook, like tiny earthquakes.

And—yes, I know how this sounds—that’s when Satan arrived. But he wasn’t like I’d been taught. He was beautiful and radiant. And sweet. All smiles and power. He glowed like a giant angel. He must have been ten feet tall, because he was even bigger than Hobbes.

This is when it got crazy. Satan (or Lucifer, he said, call him Lucifer), wanted me to stay. He didn’t want me to come back. Which, frankly, I wasn’t all that upset about. Come back to what? Father? A shitty house in the woods with no friends and no relatives and nothing but a horrible man who couldn’t keep his hands to himself? Who is supposed to LOVE ME GOD DAMN IT.

Then Hobbes got mad, and they argued. Lucifer said he would let me return if Hobbes performed for him.

And he did. It was unreal.

The most incredible thing I’d ever heard. He unleashed a thousand creatures inside a deep, massive bowl in the ice, and I sat with Lucifer and they performed this insane symphony. It was like what I hear in my dreams, but a million times louder, a million times better. It was beautiful, and scary. Melodic, but violent with bursts of sound and wide swinging melodies. Sometimes I cried, and a few times I laughed, but I loved every second.

Lucifer told me that the world I was from was being destroyed by the music. He said giant waves were destroying cities, hurricanes were flattening towns, and millions of people were dying. I nodded. I didn’t care. Not really. I hoped my house was flattened by a giant tree, or hit by lightning, or blown apart in a tornado, like the one in my dream, and that Father was cut to ribbons and destroyed.

I think Lucifer knew I was thinking this because he laughed, but I didn’t mind, because Hobbes was beautiful, and brilliant, and all those creatures—they looked like humans, and animals, and other things I’d never seen (some were horrible and ugly, and some were so gorgeous you couldn’t even look at them)—were playing for HIM, and I could hardly breathe until it was finished.

At the end Lucifer stood, an audience of one, and clapped. Hobbes bowed his great unicorn head, and then everything was gone, and it was only me and Hobbes left. A lake of fire burned in the distance, but I stood on black ice and shivered.