At Camp Cryptid, our instructors bring a wealth of experience from throughout their lives. And sometimes after that.

TW: verbal references to child abuse and CSA

"Antonia! Antonia!"

JP scrambled to his hands and knees and slid across the basement floor. His instrument clanged and squealed where it scraped against the concrete. It sounded like guilt.

He lifted her head to the height of his knees, half-slapped at her face the way Gammaw had the time he'd been sick and she'd thought it was the pellagra. "Antonia!" Her skin didn't feel like skin, stiff and clammy. Her thick blond hair spread across the blue blanket, like a mockery of that day at the lake.

The basement's one bare lightbulb swung from its cord, glinting against something. JP pulled the needle out of her arm and threw it across the room.

That, he'd later realize, was how his fingerprints got on it.

"Poor Johnny," said a voice. It was smooth and even, and it seemed like it was made out of the same fabric as the walls, the light, as Antonia.

"Don't nobody call me that no more," he snapped. Some guy in a fancy suit, hovering by the door, doing nothing to help except call him by the wrong name. He'd left "Johnny" behind when he'd left home. Rock and roll was the devil's music, said the men who used their daughters to make more daughters and their sons to soften the switch, said the women who knew and did nothing.

He'd found work as a roadie and then as a guitar tech. First for nobodies who treated him like shit, then for better. He'd learned from the lighting tech, the tour managers. He thought that if he filled his head with good things, good sounds, good business, there'd be no more room. Maybe one day he'd wake up and find the back door in his skull broke open and all the bad memories run away.

Antonia hadn't had to tell him what she was running from. It didn't only happen in places like Jackson County. She didn't have to tell him she was lying about her name. She was Antonia the way he was JP.

Since he'd left home, he'd seen for himself it had all been a lie—and he'd told Antonia everything he knew. Rock and roll couldn't really hurt you. Making friends with gay boys, black boys couldn't hurt you. Taking the Lord's name in vain, not going to church. None of it could really hurt you.

Drugs couldn't really...

They couldn't...

"Antonia?"

"Come now, Johnny," said the voice. "By the time you took your leave of the holler and this poor girl took leave of the Earth, Janis and Jimi both had their chemically assisted two-steps off the mortal coil. Not Kurt for a while yet, but still."

There was a sound of soft shoes on the concrete floor. JP looked up, and he saw a man more clearly. He had dark hair, a dark suit, and eyes that looked like they had been there for a thousand years. This basement had been here forever, waiting for Antonia to die in it, and this man had been waiting for JP to see it happen. Old Nick himself.

"You know you belong here, Johnny," said the voice.

It felt right. He was in Hell not for cussing or skipping church or the one time he'd hit his dad back. Or for running away. He was in Hell because Antonia was dead and he'd made it happen. It was a good hurt. Like the universe was better for being this shape.

"That ain't—that's not my name," he said again, looking the devil in the eye.

The man, watched him quietly. He crouched down opposite JP, Antonia between them.

"Good answer," he said. His image rippled and suddenly JP could see only the dark-haired man. "I'm Lucifer, and I run things down here, though perhaps not in the way you were led to believe. Before we really get started," he folded his hands. "Tell me, are there any mitigating circumstances?"

"Miti—what?"

Once you were damned, it wasn't supposed to matter. You were trash, done, not worth worrying about. Hell was the last stop. No one would care what happened to you.

"Not anymore," said Lucifer.

This was a trick. The kindness in those eyes had to be a trick. The Devil was there to corrupt him more, somehow make him do more evil. That's what they'd always said. According to...

Lucifer raised an eyebrow.

JP looked up at him, still holding what was left of Antonia. According to the same people who'd told him music was bad and beatings were good. According to the people who'd muddied the waters of morality so badly that he hadn't known which way was up, not until Antonia had fallen out of reach.

"Do you mean ...it's not my fault because other people lied or something?" he asked. But the words were already sour in his mouth, and Lucifer was shaking his head.

"Your mitigating circumstances aren't what other people did before your sin, JP."

JP breathed the stale air and suddenly the man's face was different, red and hairless, scarred skin framing red-white eyes. They were somehow …sad. Like a creature that had suffered at the hand of God and burned with anger, but there had been some kind of wisdom in the flames.

"They're what you did after."

After? After Antonia died the police had gotten involved and he'd gotten out of there.

"The other after," said the devil. He gestured to their surroundings, which somehow weren't only the basement. They were the memories, the ones he'd wished he'd lost.

After…

Everything after deciding to leave home and before Antonia's death had been uphill. Hard, but uphill. He'd thought he could see something beautiful just over that ridge. Or that one. But the other side of his life had been a long, slow decline.

"I tried," he said.

The basement seemed to flicker and move with his thoughts. One minute it was the factory where he'd worked making siding just long enough to qualify for benefits. Another, it was Maureen's place in California, fresh bruises on her face. That was when he'd learned he wasn't better than his old man after all. He'd left her, after that. Hadn't waited to see if he'd hit her twice.

"But was that mercy or cowardice, JP?" asked Lucifer.

In his thirties, he'd thought about doing something else. Maybe something to help kids like him, teenagers like Antonia. If he did it far from Jackson County, far from Christi where Antonia had died, maybe no one would know his fingerprints had been on that syringe. Even if he had to do it through a church. But there were licenses and background checks, and he couldn't risk it.

"You could have had more courage, JP."

After the factory had shut its doors, he'd driven trucks. The hours were horrible but the highway wasn't. The highway reminded him of being on the road with the bands. But he didn't want to be reminded.

"This might be your real sin," said Lucifer, watching a desert blur past. He looked human again, if a little dark and sad. "You were capable of hard work, of focus, empathy. You had a life, and it looks like you wasted it."

Lucifer turned around in the passenger seat, "Did you ever go back to Jackson County? Ever confront your parents?"

JP shook his head, eyes on the white line. Up ahead, he saw a figure, some skinny teenager, thumb out. He drove right past.

His passenger twisted around further, and JP knew he could see Excalibur wedged in the back. "What about your music, Johnny? Manage to find redemption through art?"

JP looked over at him. "Sort of," he said.

"Sort of?"

"There's kids involved. You got children?" JP asked.

The devil gave a sad smile that JP didn't quite understand. "Hell is my child," he said.

In Jackson County, he'd been taught, slapped, beaten into the idea that old people were for Respect, and Respect meant saying that they were smart and you were stupid, that it was always your fault and never their fault, that things had happened the way they wanted them to have happened and your own eyes, ears, and memories were wrong. JP had learned to stay out of the way. Getting old had meant your face would shrivel up like a raisin, your belly would swell up like roadkill. No one had ever told him there was a good part:

Sometimes, being old took the fear away.

After he'd got his pension from the factory, he'd risked it. His old trucking dispatcher Mitchell had bought a summer camp with his savings, and JP had signed a paper saying Mitchell could do a background check if he wanted.

Mitchell never did. And when he'd sold the camp to Dennis, he'd made him promise in writing to keep all the legacy staff. Abbie. Him. Even after years of sharing a brew after a long route and shared bitching about bosses and campers' parents, JP hadn't realized Mitchell thought of him as …worth anything like that. It felt like warm rain. It felt like the way Antonia had looked at him when he'd been a dark-haired roadie who filled in for backup guitar.

He was standing in what looked like his music classroom but grayer and dirtier. JP hung Excalibur on the wall so that Antonia would see him, for all that the instrument hadn't spoken to him since her death. He hadn't had the heart to sell it, even when he'd been hurting bad for cash.

JP turned around and saw Lucifer watching him closely. "How is this redemption, JP?"

"I thought..." he started.

The children filed in, sat silently on the folding chairs with the hands in their laps, looking more like a judge and jury in their camp T-shirts than anything that could ever need his help.

"JP?" the devil prompted.

"I thought it'd be good if the camp had someone who knew what it looked like," he blurted. He'd seen them on his sister Rachel, and then on Antonia, and he'd known without her needing to say.

JP looked at the crop of students. But kids were different now. Life was different now. It probably still happened—human nature had not changed—but there was no way to tell if the shy-back came from the parents or cyberbullying or autism or maybe even just being shy. When he'd recognized Antonia, he'd just been lucky.

"Maybe," said the devil. "Or maybe the two of you just had a special connection. It does happen." He looked at the row of kids in their silly haircuts. The twenty-teens had been bad for fashion, and JP remembered the eighties and nineties. "So you never saved anyone?"

"Not like that," said JP. "I was just ...there."

"So you did nothing."

"No!" JP looked up, pushing his dark brown hair out of his face. "No, I was there do you understand? I saw some of these kids every summer for years."

The devil seemed confused.

Abbie, the art teacher, sometimes played showtunes in her cabin. She'd made a move, but he hadn't been sure he wouldn't do to her what he'd done to Maureen, and he couldn't risk his place here. But the songs weren't that bad. She liked Chicago. She liked A Chorus Line.

Up a steep and very narrow stairway. To the voice like a metronome.

"I taught them music. I said 'good' when they did good. I said 'try again' when they did bad. When they broke the rules, I punished them by the book. I never hit them. They knew they could trust me to never make things up, never play mind games, never hit them." Even that one brat in 2012, the kid who'd been daring him to.

One of the children was already out of his seat, ugly half-formed face snarling.

"You think you're tough, old man? You think you're tough?!"

JP pointed, "He wants me to beat him. Because he wants to decide when he'll get it. Because adults not beating him doesn't make sense." He turned back to the boy. "It'll take years before he sees that most families' not like what he knows."

"I'm never going to hit you, Michael. This is the world. It's back home that's wrong."

"You gave them ...stability?" he asked. "An adult who isn't a total wanker? That's a low bar, even for the current environs."

"At least some of them needed it," JP said. The young faces were inscrutable. Which came from a happy home life? Which eyes had the memories behind them? Who was better off with their parents only because foster care was worse?

"I never knew," said JP. "I just did my part of it. And kept going."

"His name is Michael like the prisoner, Lord Morningstar," said a creaky voice. It wasn't loud, but it was so alien, so hollow, that JP nearly jumped out of his khakis.

"What are you doing here, Borovis?" Lucifer squinted. "And is that you, Crevos? I thought you were both on Nixon duty tonight."

JP jumped at the sight. A demon, a real demon with a thick, twisted body and small tusks in its lopsided mouth. Next to him was a figure dressed in blood-spattered surgical scrubs. JP blinked and a third arm slipped out from under the apron and scratched at the tied cap.

"I was supposed to tell you that the prisoner ripped off Hlokk's leg and beat him over the head with it," said Crevos.

"And I came too!" said the shorter demon.

"Well you've both wasted a hall pass because I already knew," the devil said, sounding exhausted. "I'd only just finished locking Michael up in the sulfur caves before popping over here." And his twin brother had been running his mouth nonstop the whole time. Suddenly there was a clipboard in Lucifer's hand, and he slapped it into the demon's hands—one of which had rotted flesh stuck to what looked like pig trotters. "But while you're here, make yourself useful."

"Give it to me," said Crevos.

"Why?" said Borovis, holding the clipboard up and away like a schoolyard bully.

"Because you can't read," said Crevos.

"Neither can you!"

"I'm learning! The big letter eye looks the same as the little letter elliot."

The devil exhaled. "Unfortunately, JP, I opted out of the job with the omniscience—and the competent minions—and the angel who did take top job doesn't visit much. Can't confirm or deny whether your choices helped anyone, ever. I can only say that it looks like you have even less real training in recognizing child abuse as a one-time volunteer at a Catholic parish, and they're still obsessed with covering their asses."

"Wait, there's training for that?" JP asked.

Lucifer rolled his eyes as if this were a disfavorite subject with him. "Yes, they sit the volunteers down in front of a video, cover a few basics, and then tell them to sign a paper saying they don't ever watch porn or use birth control. So they only get liars, basically. Don't get me started."

So JP could have …gone to a church, lied about his name, learned, and left? It would have been that easy, that safe?

JP sat down, picked up a cheap and graceless acoustic guitar, all peeling varnish and splinters and strings that wouldn't stay tuned. He plucked out a tasteless first-timer's chord, as far from rock and roll as the abyss was from the stars, as empty of wildness as the worst hymns from back home. It gave him no joy. But maybe it could take the edge off someone else's misery.

The crew of kids from his first year filed out. The next ones came in, different faces but the same blank expression. Impossible to tell apart from each other in any way that mattered.

"The real question then, JP, is whether this decision of yours was charity or cowardice," said Lucifer. "Did you work here because you wanted to help your fellow humans or because you were hiding from the world and or yourself?"

JP shrugged. "Can't it be both?"

The second year kids filed out. The third years came in, plunked their butts down on the chairs and stared at his lesson, unresponsive.

Lucifer raised an eyebrow, "It looks like you don't think you had any effect, or at least you're afraid you didn't." He rubbed his hands together. "Time to crack out the big guns."

JP looked up, and wondered for the next thousand years if that was his mistake. He fell into the dark eyes, suddenly certain he could tell this man anything. The man's words licked his brain like Antonia had licked water off his hands that day in the desert.

"...desire?"

Rock and roll swirled like a desert whirlwind against a marrow-deep wish for just safety, to have his own kids and be better than his dad, to never have kids because that was the only way to make that wheel stop turning, to save someone, to never need to save someone, to have the wave of the world pass him by overhead without knowing he had ever lived, to ride it like he'd ridden the highway, to become a great performer, to teach someone else to become a great performer...

"Oh? A complicated man? I'm not too good to go deep on a first date."

"I..." JP breathed out into the stale air.

"I want to be who she thought I was," said JP. He swallowed.

Lucifer's mouth moved in something halfway to a smile. "It's a bit late for that now, JP," he said. "You really are quite finished, in the artistic sense. I can help you work through your guilt, but becoming what you are is a matter for Earth."

Work through the guilt? That wasn't in anything he'd heard about the devil.

As they spoke, the second year kids left and the third year kids filed in.

The problem was, now that he was dead, he could see it so clearly. Maybe he had been a coward. Maybe he could have learned how to be better. They were defunding the police, he'd seen on TV. They wanted to split the department up, hire people who knew how to help victims, help kids. There was some woman captain in the news all the time.

The world was changing and, even at his age, maybe he could be part of that. He was old, he'd thought, not dead.

Then he'd touched the air conditioner the wrong way, and…

"Does no one go back?" Abbie had read him a news story about some rich rocket man who'd woken up from a coma. Hadn't he said the angel Lucifer had helped him find forgiveness?

"Well," Lucifer sat back into a spare folding chair, idly picking up one of the junk-heap guitars. "In Earthly terms, you've only been dead a few minutes. If someone finds your body and gets you to a hospital in time and it does any good?"

The summer camp wasn't near any hospitals, JP thought.

"Rough luck, then, JP," said Lucifer. "That being the case, I'm afraid it's demons and my occasional attention. I do have other patients. Until then, Hell can offer you the chance to do things differently, but it won't be easy. You'll be fighting against your own fears, your own weakness." He put the guitar down. "But what I can tell you, is that when your door appears, and you walk through it, you will be truly ready." A little smile. "You won't ever have to feel unworthy ever again."

The students from his fourth or fifth year at the camp got up, and the ones from the next year walked in, different clothes, different faces, same no-difference.

What was this door? To a deeper level of Hell? Or would he turn into a demon himself?

"So!" Lucifer slapped his hands onto his thighs and stood up. "Give you the basic run-down, shall I? Most humans experience Hell as a loop of the same events over and over. Hours, weeks, dealer's choice, really. Figure out what's truly frightening you, what's truly holding you back from being a proper citizen of the universe. I'll be back to check on you eventually, but I do have other duties." He snapped his fingers.

JP jumped as the scabby-looking creature with three arms showed up again, still with the clipboard. The porcine one waved.

"Hi! My name's Borovis and I'll be torturing you this millennium."

Lucifer whacked him on the back of the head.

"I mean I'll be... Doing that... It's like twisting but not..." the brows over his pinpick-red eyes knit together as he thought hard.

"'Helping,'" said Crevos.

"Helping? Are you sure?"

"That's better." Lucifer lowered his voice. "Believe it or not, they're two of my brighter ones." Behind him, Borovis poked at a guitar string and jumped back when it twanged and broke.

This had to be a trick. Old Nick wasn't kind. He wasn't nice. He was the Prince of Lies and always up to something.

One year's students got up, completely unchanged, and moved away as the next year's came in.

Be the man Antonia thought he was? Make a difference? Save anyone? He couldn't even turn a boy who didn't know his G-chord into a boy who did.

"If you'll forgive me, JP, this ends your orientation visit. I'll just need to—" Lucifer stopped talking. The smarm, the irony all fled his face like wet paint running down the side of a van.

He pointed. "Who's that?"

JP turned. It was one of the guitar students. One of the younger girls.

"Her?" he asked.

The dark eyes flared red-white. "Yes, her! How do you know her?"

Not "who is she?" but "how do you know her?"

JP stepped back, "She's one of the campers! That's it!" he said, afraid of the devil for the first time. "She transferred in from the stage acting program?"

Lucifer walked toward the girl, crouched down until they were at eye level. He spent what might have been an eternity looking into her face, his own a mask. JP actually looked at Crevos, but the demon didn't seem to think anything strange was happening. Maybe the devil was like this all the time.

Children were innocent, JP remembered. Did the devil crave children?

Was this the real test? he wondered.

Lucifer stood up, "How badly damaged was your body when you died?" he asked.

"What?" asked JP. "I don't know. Didn't I have a heart attack?"

"Any limbs missing? Still got all the bits?"

"I… I guess so?"

Lucifer nodded. "Mum was able to heal a screwdriver to the spine…" he said, as if to himself. He clapped his hands. "All of you, out!" The children looked at him, and for the first time, JP realized they weren't really children. Extra eyes, spidery mandibles instead of fingers, exposed bone poking out of their camp shorts where their knees should be. Demons.

When Lucifer turned back to him, he was smiling, a smile that a million used car salesmen would have sold their souls to perfect. "John Peter Blanchard," he said. "How would you like to make a deal with the devil?"

"I—what?"

"You give me permission to climb up into your bones and it's possible, not certain, that my presence and eventual willing departure may heal your injuries and pull your spirit back to Earth." He smiled. "You could give it all another try. You could take the right chances, get a social worker's license, maybe save someone who truly needs to be saved. Redeem yourself."

It was tempting, so tempting. But that was what the devil did, wasn't it?

JP swallowed his fear. "What—what do you want with that girl?" he asked.

The smile faltered, just at the edges. "She's my daughter," he said.

And that meant jack shit.

"No," Lucifer pointed. "I want to check on her. I want to see her."

"So go see her. What do you need me for?"

Something in the fabric of Hell seemed to move, like the largest, subtlest earthquake.

"It's not that simple!" Lucifer protested. "I made a prom—wait a second. I'm the lord of Hell. I'm afraid I don't have to tell you why I want what I want."

"Then I guess you don't want it."

Lucifer narrowed his eyes. "So it's candor you need? Fine. I'm surrounded by the worst that humanity can do it itself, and even though I know Earth is the best place for her, I'm terrified of what could happen. Because I know something bad is going to happen, even if it's only that not enough good happens."

This was it, he was sure. An evil father. The devil himself. He'd never protected any of them when he'd been alive, but whatever Lucifer wanted from him, he had better not give it.

Again, Old Nick seemed to know what he was thinking. "Oh no, JP. You've got the wrong idea entirely. I'm not like those men from your childhood. I've never harmed one of these creatures in my life," he said. Because that is what the devil would say. "I'm not a bad father. I am merely afraid of being a bad father."

"This isn't some cosmic test," said Lucifer, charm frazzling out into exasperation. "You're not here to stop me from discreetly getting a good look at Aurora. You're here to confront the way you wasted your life after your one albeit colossal failure." He frowned. "Actually, it was probably two. I think you're glossing over this whole Maureen business. And I don't believe we covered what happened to your sister."

"Oooooh! He's doing that thing Lord Morningstar!" the demon Crevos scribbled something on the clipboard. He turned it around and JP saw the sloppiest frowny face ever.

"Why are you still here, Crevos?"

"I was trying that free will thing you told us about. But he's doing that thing they do! He's pretending that his sin is something else so he doesn't have to face it."

"You—" Lucifer opened his mouth and then shut it. "He's right."

"I'm sorry, Lord Morningstar. I will try to—Hang on, did you say I was right?"

This was a trick. This was the devil, the Prince of Lies.

"Even my brothers and sisters don't spread that tosh about me lying all the time any more!"

"Lord Morningstar, you don't need his permission," the demon Borovis said, too loudly. "You can possess his body. He can't stop you using his bones. And we can handle him if he tries." The two meaty trotters clapped together in a crushingmotion.

"Yes, but I want his consent," Lucifer breathed in, composing himself. He looked back at JP. "Can't have myself making new rules for you demons and then not following them myself." He turned back to JP. "I'll make you an offer..."

"I won't let you hurt those kids."

"I have no intention of that. But if it secures me your consent, I promise. No harm will come to them from me—" and he must have seen the suspicion in JP's eyes "—and nor will I knowingly allow another to harm them. When I'm in your body, I'll go full Aismov. In the meantime, I can pay."

Pay? The only thing JP wanted was… No, not even escape from here. When JP opened his eyes, they were back in the basement.

"But Lord Morningstar," Crevos was saying. "You're not a demon. And you're not the Angelmother. How are you going to fit your body in his body?" Behind him, Borovis scratched his nose.

"I've done far more unlikely things at Burning Man. Now shut up." Old Nick turned back to JP. "I will provide you with one piece of information, and if you can say, honestly, that it isn't worth a mile in your shoes, we'll forget the whole thing. I give you this, and if it doesn't make your timid little soul glow with relief, then you refuse," said Lucifer. "Deal?"

JP hardly knew what possessed him, maybe that same spirit that had made him break the lock on the back door and escape to the only good years of his life. "Deal," he said.

"Time flows differently in Hell," said Lucifer. "Every tenant here a meeting with me. And I have a wonderful memory, Johnny. I could tell you of shepherds from the Levant, a Viking smith who's down here for selling shitty steel, Montana housewives who poisoned their husbands, not to mention the exact child-abusing excuses for fathers who drove you out of Jackson in the first place. They're here, JP. I welcomed them all."

He blinked up at Old Nick. How was this payment?

Lucifer pointed at Antonia.

"But I've never seen her before in my life."

JP blinked. Then he looked down at the girl's face. She'd died. But she hadn't come here. She'd gone to the Lord. Who might even be real. He hadn't damned her.

"Well, JP?" there was an edge of impatience in his voice, and something like longing. "Have I paid?"

JP swallowed. "Yeah," he said. "You paid. So do we shake on it, or—"

There was a rush of more than air, a blinding flash of holy white, and then a soul-aching absence.

"Oh wow. He's in a hurry," said the demon with the clipboard. He covered his mouth with his smallest hand and cleared his throat. "So my name is Crevos..."

The demon started muttering something about redemption and doors and loops. JP got the impression that he didn't understand what he was saying, so he let his mind drift. Antonia was …in heaven? He hadn't thought to ask? Or had she survived somehow and outlived him in Earth?

And …the devil had a daughter? JP felt another wave of anxiety. What if this had been a test? He'd failed again, then.

Then there was a sound. It started like a wind and then grew to the roaring of a river. It sounded young, wild, full of hope, like when Excalibur had felt like another part of his hands. JP looked up, out into the walls. Somehow it was both all around him and impossibly far away.

"Oh," Crevos said. "I guess he did it."

"Huh?"

"Your heart's beating again," he said.

"Well that was interesting," said a creaky voice.

JP turned around. The piggy demon was back and he looked …worse. The tiny eyes gleamed with knowledge and evil. For some reason, he seemed less of a buffoon. With a chill, JP realized he'd been playing the fool for Old Nick and was probably damned good at it.

"Now now, Borovis—" Crevos waved the clipboard. He didn't look any smarter.

"Alive again, or at least your carcass is," said the demon. And there was a mica-bright gleam in his eye that hadn't been there before. In front of his boss, he'd been all servility.

A door appeared at the top of the stairs, and the demon pushed toward it. "Where you going?" asked Crevos.

"Don't ask questions," the demon smiled, and JP felt like Little Red Riding Hood, wondering at how many teeth he had. "And don't bother helping him."

Crevos shrugged and turned back to JP. "Want to play table tennis?"