Eventually, after an hour had gone by, and two pencils had been worn down to almost nothing, Crudford was finished.

“I think I may have the answer,” he said.

“We are waiting,” said the Great Malevolence. It came with the unspoken warning: This had better be good.

Crudford turned the notepad to face the Great Malevolence. This is what it contained:

The Great Malevolence looked at the drawing. It then looked at the Watcher. The Watcher shrugged because, unlike Crudford, it could. The Great Malevolence, having nowhere else left to look, looked at Crudford and thought about the many ways in which it could reduce a gelatinous mass to lots of much smaller pieces of jelly.

“It is,” said the Great Malevolence, “a picture of a lady. It is not even a very good picture of a lady.”

Everyone, thought Crudford, is a critic.

“It’s not just a lady,” said Crudford. “It’s Mrs. Abernathy. But see here—”

Crudford pointed at the question mark beside the heart shape.

“The heart is missing.”

The Great Malevolence considered this.

“Ba’al does not have a heart,” it said. “No creature in Hell has a heart. Hearts are not needed.”

“But Ba’al isn’t Ba’al any longer, not really,” said Crudford. “Ba’al is Mrs. Abernathy, and Mrs. Abernathy is Ba’al, and Mrs. Abernathy has a heart because Mrs. Abernathy is, or was, human. Those jars contain bits of every organ in the human body except the heart. The heart is missing. All of it.”

“But what is the heart pumping?” said the Great Malevolence. “Not blood, for Mrs. Abernathy’s body died the moment that Ba’al took it over.”

“I’m just guessing,” said Crudford, “but I’d say that it’s pumping pure evil. What we’re looking for is a big, black, rotten heart-shaped thingy filled with nastiness.”

“Then where is it?” asked the Great Malevolence.

“That,” said Crudford, “is a very good question.”

• • •

Crudford wandered the halls of the Mountain of Despair, alone with his thoughts. Wandered probably wasn’t the right word, strictly speaking: slimed, oozed, or smeared might be closer to the mark, but if Crudford had said that he was just off to slime around the halls for a while, then he would probably have been advised to take his gelatinous self elsewhere, or someone would have been following him with a mop and a bucket.

His search of the Multiverse for bits of Mrs. Abernathy had not been entirely random. He had been able to narrow it down to specific universes, or corners of them, either because he could smell Mrs. Abernathy, or his keen eyesight had been able to pick out the blue atoms in the darkness. There were only two places he had not explored: the Kingdom of Shadows, and Earth.

He had not entered the Kingdom of Shadows because to do so would have been the end of him: the Shadows had no loyalty to the Great Malevolence, and would have snuffed out Hell itself if they could. He had stayed away from Earth simply because he had detected no sign of Mrs. Abernathy there, but now he began to wonder if he might not have been mistaken. Just because he could pick up no trace of her did not mean that she was not there, and it was only recently that he had begun to detect the telltale beating of her heart. Mrs. Abernathy was cunning and wicked. Her dark heart, he realized, must be filled with hatred. And what or, more correctly, who did she hate more than anything else in the Multiverse?