Soul Advocate Season 1 Ep 1 Send Him To Hell: Soul Advocate, #1

By Ted Pepper

It has been a bad day. You died this morning of a routine and entirely preventable illness. This afternoon you found out that you will spend eternity in Hell. An existence of torment and regret.

 

I am your last hope. I am the Soul Advocate.

 

As you suffer in Purgatory, you have a 30 day period of appeal. I will use it to search the Earth for the evidence that you need to clear your name. I will be looking for truth or I will be looking for excuses.

 

Depend on me. There will be difficulty, but I shall overcome it. My reputation and your very existence depend on it.

 

This is the first episode of the Soul Advocate series that follows the progress of one of Hell's investigators that represent souls that appeal against ultimate damnation. We will follow Tedward and a rag-tag assembly of lazy and at times foolhardy hellbeings as they clear cases and uncover a plot by rogue humans to change the unnatural order of things forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ted Pepper
• Release date: Oct 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223510147

Book preview

This book is independently published. If you enjoy it, please share a link to it with your friends so they can enjoy it too.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2023 by Guy Shearer writing as Ted Pepper

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

For more information, please contact [e-mail]

Cover Art

Kittens image taken from Wikimedia Commons and used under Creative Commons license ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ ) having had background removed and converted to monochrome.

Image of Hell Last Judgement in an Initial C from Rawpixel used unmodified under CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Scene One

Ialways start with the funeral.

It may not be the most efficient approach; I never expect it to produce the clue that solves the case.

I just want to know who cares enough about this doomed soul that they will wear unflattering clothes to eat dry sandwiches in an unloved hotel. I helps me tune into the closing act of a life now ended.

Rest my forehead to the floor to feel the trembling vibrations. Love, hate, despair, hope. They rumble and hum. My job is to read their stories. Sift them.

On a more practical level it helps me sift the flood of often false information from my interview with the recently deceased, my client. We are asked to call the Forsaken Ones clients now. Apparently it gives higher levels of client satisfaction. You can never accuse the forces of infernal damnation of not looking to improve the experience.

Our clients cannot be trusted. Recently dead and facing Hell with a capital H they can sometimes be irrational, unhelpful and downright liars. They lie under that harsh lighting as they sip dead water from the thinnest of plastic cups. Even at the Gates of Hell they try to bargain and squirm.

The denials still ring out.

Humans, we love them.

A funeral gives me a chance to put on my best suit. Ink black wool. Button on a pressed, starched white shirt, crisp and dazzling. Sport a soft silk tie, knotted just so. It took me two lifetimes to learn to tie that knot as it should be fastened.

I scrub up well.

Some cases require 29 days of intense effort to unlock. Others snap into view before the over-scrubbed priest has completed the homily.

But always the same. 30-days from the soul lodging an appeal, to the day of the Tribunal. The moment in the Infernal Courtroom that ends in Heaven or in eternal suffering and damnation.

This case was the best and the worst of them.

From the first words he said to me, this client had been busily hoisting red flags. I had more reasons to walk away at the end of the mandatory one-hour interview than I had to stay. But there was something in the constipated blend of desperation, expectation and entitlement of Henry Leek Pughley that made my impish tail tingle. Something that drew me in. Willing or otherwise I was curious.

That happens sometimes. It’s the devil in me. Well one of them. Sometimes I just have to take the cases that I know will be a ball-ache when I could just take the simple ones and have an easy life.

It was my allotted day at Hell’s Reception. I have one each month. As the senior Advocate available I have the right of first refusal on the list of condemned souls seeking representation. I could have picked any from the 12 on offer.

There was an obvious case of mistaken identity. Boring, an easy win and 29 days of relaxation.

There was one that I could argue the defence of passion which is a personal favourite. A speciality, if you will.

There was a vicar. I tend to select members of the holy orders more for shits and giggles than out of any expectation of an easy life. There’s never much pressure to get a priest acquitted.

I should have gone for the easier options.

But no. I picked Henry Leek Pughley. Like a fucking chump.

I generally give the English upper-class a wide berth.

Most of them deserve their place in Hell. Working to save them from damnation is both thankless and pointless. They lie like experts. They are the best gaslighters that ever walked the earth. They bristle with self-importance. The people they leave behind, the ones I must investigate, are bores.

But they do, as a rule, put on a decent buffet.

Also, the Tribunal rarely errs on the side of kindness, so the percentages of a win with a posh Brit are not good. Nobody likes the British, not even the demons of Hell itself. Well, I do, but I’m twisted even by our standards.

Taking on the hard cases invites future problems. To retain my seniority, I must rarely lose. Nobody wants to be the second most senior Advocate for condemned souls once they have reached the top. It took a long time to climb my way to the top, I have no intention of making my way back down.

So, ‘posh’ and ‘Brit;’ two red flags to start with.

Leek was the next red flag. The third.

He insisted I continue to use his middle name. Held onto it like a man drowning in a cesspit, which I suppose he soon would be. Ashen-faced and disheveled, with teeth that did him no credit, he twisted and coiled. His ribs were showing through paper-thin grey skin. He shivered even under the stifling warmth of the institutional heating system of Purgatory. Through this pain and this shock, at no point would he allow me to utter his name without inserting that four-letter-fucking-appendage.

Each time I spoke his name, he corrected me. Reinserted that superfluous pair of consonants and vowels.

Henry Pughley. Henry, Leek Pughley seemed to have died an entirely predictable death. He had a year to set his affairs in order. Yet still, he seemed shocked to have had a life of privilege revoked. He was not quite enraged, but he was certainly irate. That was my fourth red flag. Any case where the defendant has had a long time to cover their tracks can push even my resources to the limit.

Sudden, unexpected deaths leave so many more lines of investigation open. I prefer to investigate a violent death, or better still a spectacular accident. It is simply easier. Easily simpler.

We both agonised over what he must have done to merit damnation. Well I pretended to. I sympathised and nodded at his grievances and he reeled off a score of benevolent works and donations to good causes that seemed to have not afforded him a golden ticket to the Pearly Gates.

He felt that an eternity in Hell was a touch unfair as consequence for some less than ethical investments and a series of infidelities. He admitted to both readily enough. People admit things to me with abandon. I have trustworthy eyes. Big, brown eyes. I like to accentuate them with a subtle touch of eyeliner. On Earth at least. Here in Purgatory my eyes are black in black and probably a little more horrific than they are charming. Anyway, I digress.

Charisma. I create a sense of client-advocate bond. I create a circle of intimacy, a channel of confession. They always seem to think that somehow putting their foul deeds into words and putting sorry at the end will cancel sins out. That is especially so with Catholics. It is a delightful and charming notion, but a false one.

Sorry scores no points in Hell.

People tell me things I really wish they wouldn’t. Sloth, perversity, unkindness, misadventure. They tell me it all. It grows tiresome.

After a few prompts and some thought, he suggested bribery might be his mortal sin. With hindsight, I would say he offered this a little too eagerly, but at the time there was a lot on the table and I was still in that first sift.  Corruption can indeed be the kind of sin a Judge latches onto like a furious crab. The kind of wonderful sin that leads others to commit further sins. Judges love those cascades of fault. For that reason, we get a lot of marketing executives pass through our books, and a therapist or two. But for it to be bribery, it would need to be something big and nasty. Something that had truly stinking consequences.

Hell is busy, we don’t just send anybody there anymore. We used to. Back in the Middle Ages you could be condemned for something mildly unpleasant. Not anymore. Nowadays we have so many potential customers, you need to be a proper arse to qualify for the eternal brimstone vacation.

Judges rarely bother with the small stuff, unless they have a particular reason to want that soul to drop onto the damnation and shredding pile. Or if it is very funny. Few humans interest them enough to bother.

Except politicians, we love to fuck them