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mean by that?”
    “Exactly what I said. Some are and some are not. It can be difficult to tell. They aren’t ghosts in the conventional sense, you understand, any more than they are corpses, but the person who has left the corpse and the ghost behind.”
    “Would you mind if I warmed up a couple of pieces of this, and toasted some of that bread? We could share it.”
    I shook my head. “Not in the least, but I’m practically finished.”
    She rose, and I wondered whether she realized just how graceful she was. “I’ve got a dead brother, my brother Eric.”
    I said that I was sorry to hear it.
    “It was a long time ago, when I was a kid. He was four, I think, and he fell off the balcony. Mother always said he was an angel now, an angel up in heaven. Do dead people really get to be angels if they’re good?”
    “I don’t know; it’s an interesting question. There’s a suggestion in the book of Tobit that the Archangel Raphael is actually an ancestor of Tobit’s. Angel means ‘messenger’, as you probably know; so if God were to employ one of the blessed as a messenger, he or she could be regarded as an angel, I’d think.”
    “Devils are fallen angels, aren’t they? I mean, if they exist.” She dropped three pieces of chicken into a frying pan, hesitated, and added a fourth. “So if good people really get recycled as angels, shouldn’t the bad ones get to be devils or demons?”
    I admitted that it seemed plausible.
    She lit the stove with a kitchen match, turning the burner higher than I would have. “You sound like you come here pretty often. You must talk to them at breakfast, or whenever. You ought to know.”
    “Since you don’t believe me, wouldn’t it be logical for you to believe my admissions of ignorance?”
    “No way!” She turned to face me, a forefinger upraised. “You’ve got to be consistent, and coming here and talking to lots of demons, you’d know.”
    I protested that information provided by demons could not be relied upon.
    “But what do you think? What’s your best guess? See, I want to find out if there’s any hope for us. You said we’re going to Hell, both of us, and that dude – the Italian—”
    “Dante,” I supplied.
    “Dante says the sign over the door says don’t hope. I went to a school like that for a couple years, come to think of it.”
    “Were they merely strict, or actually sadistic?”
    “Mean. But the teachers lived better than we did – a lot better. If there’s a chance of getting to be one yourself, we could always hope for that.”
    At that moment, we heard a knock at the front door, and her shoulders sagged. “There goes my free room. I guess I’ve got to be going. It was fun talking to you, it really was.”
    I suggested she finish her chicken first.
    “Probably I should. I’ll have to find another place to stay, though, and I’d like to get going before they throw me out. It’s pretty late already.” She hesitated. “Would you buy my wedding ring? I’ve got it right here.” Her thumb and forefinger groped the watch pocket of her blue jeans.
    I took a final bite of coleslaw and pushed back my plate. “It doesn’t matter, actually, whether I want to buy your ring or not. I can’t afford to. Someone in town might, perhaps.”
    A booming voice in the hallway drowned out the old man’s; I knew that the new guest was a demon before I saw him or heard a single intelligible word.
    She held up her ring, a white gold band set with two small diamonds. “I had a job, but he never let me keep anything from it and I finally caught on – if I kept waiting till I had some money or someplace to go, I’d never get away. So I split, just walked away with nothing but the clothes I had on.”
    “Today?” I enquired.
    “Yesterday. Last night I slept in a wrecked truck in a ditch. You probably don’t believe that, but it’s the truth. All night I was afraid somebody’d come to tow it away. There were furniture pads in the back, and I lay