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There were many beliefs in the world around death, what the process was like and what came after. The whole of one’s life was to flash before their eyes, according to some. Others said your loved ones would be waiting, there to greet you on the other side of a bright, white light. Some believed angels, agents of God would greet you and issue judgment.
Perhaps that was true, for the lucky ones.
Alastor didn’t experience such things.
One moment, he was dragging a body through the bayou, looking up at a sound and the next moment he was blinking up at a red sky that looked like nothing he had ever seen before. His mother did not meet him at some white light. There wasn’t a moment of judgment where he was pronounced unworthy.
He didn’t even feel it.
The only reason he knew he was shot was the sound of the rifle echoing in his ears. The sharp sound faded as the world came into view. A soft, static sound replaced it, filling his ears. It sounded almost like a radio with the dial set to an empty channel.
Dead air.
It was the sound of dead air.
“Well, fuck,” Alastor groaned as he stood, brushing the dirt from his pants and started walking.
He didn’t need anyone to tell him he landed in hell. It wasn’t a surprise and he’d prepared for this inevitability. What was important now was that he find her and keep his appointment. It would be rude to be late.
On the ground behind him, a shadow stretched out. The shadow man darted around, looking for someone or something that was missing. A frown stretched it’s face, a grotesque inversion of the smile the man it belonged to wore as it took in the surroundings.
“Well there.” A woman strolled down the sidewalk, an umbrella resting over her shoulder to block what passed as sunlight. She was neatly dressed in a classic, timeless way that Alastor rarely had seen in life. “Do my eyes deceive me or is it Alastor!?”
He knew her by her voice. The smile on his face twitched wider as he strode up to her, bowing at the waist with a flourish.
She held her hand out to him, fingers down as she laughed in delight, “Oh, deer!”
“It is indeed me, my darling benefactor.” Alastor kissed the back of her offered hand, looking up at her over her knuckles. “And to whom does the delightful voice belong to?”
“You can just call me Rosie, deer.”
Alastor felt something atop his head twitch at the words. The sensation was filed away as something to investigate later. “A pleasure to meet you, though I’d rather have waited a while yet. I had more to do.”
“Heaven nor Hell cares if you’re done. When your time is up, your time is up. Now come along, let’s get you settled and then you can begin making your voice known.” With a cock of her head, she lead Alastor down the sidewalk behind her.
And just like that, it began.
Alastor was far from one to wait. He hadn’t gotten where he was in life by hesitating and he wouldn’t change that in death.
Alastor moved through the shadows, marveling at the liquid feeling of his body as he did. Oh, how many times he wished he could be one with the darkness and now? It felt better than he imagined.
The smile on his face spread a little wider as he followed the strange, thimble like man. It had quickly become clear how wildly different the shapes and talents the citizens of Hell came in. Each was a reflection of the lives they lived, the sins the committed and the deaths life dealt them.
Alastor was far from unique in the reminder of when life failed him.
“Go on,” Alastor’s voice came softly through the combination microphone-speaker on his staff.
Around him, the inky shadows rippled and shifted, giving birth to little imps stitched together with the same green threads that held Alastor’s smile annoyingly in place.
The little bodies ran, laughing with the glee Alastor felt when he watched the life snuff out of the eyes of men during his time in the living world. They climbed up the man, a loud mouthed overlord who ran the fashion district and was known for charging sexual ‘favors’ for female clients.
He was well enough regarded within hellish society. He was a good enough starting point.
Joints popped and creaked as Alastor’s body shifted. The thimble man failed to notice the looming darkness behind him, more focused on the small imps grabbing and pulling at him, trying to expose points of weakness.
Static filled the street as Alastor, much bigger now, crawled out of the alleyway. Eyes turned from the man battling the imps to their master, clad in red, as he laughed.
“Who are you?!” The man yelled, words broken with the exertion of fighting off the imps.
“Alastor,” he said, voice coming both from his wide, toothy smile and every speaker within the city. “Quite a pleasure to be meeting you. Quite a pleasure indeed.”
Alastor’s intent didn’t match his words. Red tipped claws reached out, pulling the man up by his thimble head. With a shake, Alastor tossed his minions off, letting the shadows reclaim what once belonged to them. A deep, static filled laugh rolled through speakers as the overlord tried and failed to cut into Alastor’s sharp claws with sewing needles turned into blades.
And then Alastor’s mouth opened, head turned back and all protests ended in a silence that seemed final. Alastor made a show of chewing once or twice and then his Adam’s apple bobbed, swallowing down the body of the once powerful overlord.
As he felt the hard thimble head move down his throat, Alastor’s body shifted, creaking and cracking as he returned to his typical size. The green stitching that held the corners of his mouth and the seams of his clothes together faded.
A static laced him reverberated through his throat as he took a moment to fix his coat. Only once he was satisfied with his appearance did he look up and meet the eyes of the bystanders.
“Let this serve as a warning to you all,” Alastor said simply, though they didn’t understand the gravity of his warning at the time. It was alright, soon they would.
It was assumed the overlord would regenerate, as all sinners not killed by angelic steel did.
Instead, as night fell over Pentagram City, radios all over turned themselves on. “Salutations,” Alastor’s voice greeted them but it wasn’t his voice that they were focused on. Instead, the screams of the once overlord were the backdrop of Alastor’s ramblings.
He was the first, but far from the only voice to join Alastor’s broadcasts in his first few days in hell.
Overlords ordered radios broken. In some areas, only live music was permitted. They thought that could protect them in the early days as overlords fell under Alastor’s judgment. He needed nothing more than a speaker to exert his influence, to hear and speak.
The promised power was everything he had hoped for. It rushed through his veins as overlord after overlord fell, fed to the static that surrounded him. They were neither double dead nor undead, existing trapped in a limbo of Alastor’s on making, screaming out over the airwaves night after night.
And so, in a matter of a week while the woman who had loved the man he was grieved his death, the Radio Demon was born.