Meena Chaudhary noticed the smell first.
It wasn’t the antiseptic, the minty polish, or even the faint chemical sweetness that lingered in most dental offices. This smelled older, almost ancient: damp plaster and something like burnt sugar. She swallowed as it coated the back of her throat. Then, bending over the clipboard, she signed her name without looking. Twenty years of contracts had made it automatic: read, assess, commit. She rarely second-guessed herself once she’d decided.
“Ms Chaudhary?”
She looked up. The receptionist, a small, grey-haired woman, smiled. But it wasn’t her voice she heard. The door to the surgery stood open. The receptionist bobbed her eyebrows towards the door, slightly wrinkling the pancake makeup on her forehead. Again, the smile, but her eyes looked sad.
“Through here,” the dentist said.
He was younger than she’d expected: mid-thirties, maybe. His hands were clean, his fingers bare of any rings. His voice had that calm, even cadence professionals use when they’ve decided to hide the reality of what’s coming. Chaudhary felt a slight tremble run through her. She quashed it with a calming internal mantra, one that had seen her through many courtroom conflicts.
She followed him in.
“I’ll be honest,” she said, sitting down before he asked. “I hate this. I always have.”
“I gathered,” he said, snapping on gloves. “It’s been what? Seven years?”
“Eight,” she said. “Seven would have been preferable. I kept meaning to come. But the cases keep piling up. There was always something getting in the way.”
He smiled. “There usually is.”
He adjusted the light. It hummed to life, too bright.
“What’s the issue?” he asked.
“Pain,” she said. “Lower right. Comes and goes. It gets worse when I drink something cold.”
He nodded.
“Before we begin,” he said, “I should ask, do you have any allergies? Medical conditions?”
“No.”
“And no tolerance for needles?” he observed, a slight flicker of a smile, as if he were sympathising.
She gave a short laugh. “None. I pass out. Every time.”
“That’s inconvenient.”
“That’s why I’m here now. It finally got bad enough to force me to do something.”
He paused. It wasn’t for long, but just enough that she noticed.
“There is another option,” he said. He tapped a pen on the screen of his computer.
She didn’t like the way he said it. It was too casual. Like it wasn’t the first time.
“I’m listening,” she said.
“Pain-free dentistry,” he said. “No needles. No discomfort. Not even pressure.”
“That’s not possible.”
“It is,” he said, and met her eyes. “In my practice.”
She held his gaze. Years of courtrooms had trained her for this: the small reveals, the shifts in tone, the moment when someone believed their own lie.
He didn’t flinch. He just looked at her with his watery eyes and waited.
She’d seen guilty men hold her gaze. They always had a quality she couldn’t quite name, a kind of internal bracing. He had none of it. Either he was telling the truth, or he was someone — something — she hadn’t encountered before.
“What’s the catch?” she asked.
“On top of your standard fees,” he said, turning away to arrange his instruments, placing each in a neat line on the shining steel surface of his table, “you’ll need to sign a supplementary agreement.”
“Which is?”
“A transfer,” he said. “One percentage point of your soul per visit.”
She waited for the punchline, but it didn’t come.
“Very funny,” she said.
“I’m not joking, Ms Chaudhary.”
His eyes crinkled slightly, as if there were a joke, one that only he was privy to, but his face remained rigid.
She leaned back in the chair. The light buzzed above her. The smell, that strange, burnt sweetness, seemed stronger now.
“Let me be clear,” she said. “You’re telling me that in exchange for painless dental work, I sign over one per cent of my soul. To whom, exactly?”
“One per cent per visit. To the devil,” he said, as if naming an insurance provider.
“And you expect me to take that seriously.”
“I don’t expect anything,” he said. “You asked for an option. That’s the option.”
She watched him. There was no smile on his face.
“Define ‘soul,’” she said.
He smiled faintly. “Intangible. Non-fungible. Not divisible in any practical sense, except by agreement.”
“And one per cent is… what? A metaphor? A gesture?”
“A proportion,” he said. “Enforceable.”
She felt it then. It wasn’t dread, not even a fear of the consequences. It was just a change in the air. Like a case that suddenly wasn’t as simple as it looked.
“Show me the contract,” she said.
He handed it to her.
It wasn’t long. A single page. Dense, but precise. She scanned it, then read it once again, more slowly this time, examining each clause with a lawyer’s eye. Looking for the hole. There wasn’t one.
Parties identified. Consideration stated. Terms clear. No hidden clauses, no vague language. It was, she had to admit, elegant.
“You drafted this?” she asked. She’d seen time-served lawyers do worse. Much worse.
“I use it,” he said.
“That’s not what I asked.”
He didn’t answer.
She read the key clause again.
The Client agrees to transfer one (1) percentage point of their soul for each and every case of tooth remedial work to the Devil, in consideration for the provision of pain-free dental services by the Practitioner.
She couldn’t see any qualifiers. And there were no definitions beyond what was strictly necessary. She read it a third time. Not because she’d missed anything. Because she wanted to be certain she hadn’t.
“What happens if I refuse?” she asked.
“Then we proceed conventionally,” he said. “Local anaesthetic. Some discomfort.”
She pictured the needle. The slow, creeping numbness. The pressure. The sound of drilling.
Her jaw ached, as if on cue. She ground her teeth.
“And if I sign?” she said.
“You won’t feel a thing.”
“And the transfer?”
“Handled elsewhere,” he said. “In due course.”
She tapped the paper with her finger.
“No time limit. No jurisdiction specified.”
“Those aren’t oversights,” he said.
She believed him.
It was absurd. Completely. And yet—
She’d read the contract. There was no mechanism she could see for any meaningful enforcement. Whatever a soul was, she doubted it could be quantified, transferred, or held. The whole thing was probably a very elaborate placebo, and the dentistry was presumably some technique she hadn’t heard of. One per cent of nothing was still nothing.
“How many people have signed this?” she asked.
“Enough,” he said.
“And you’ve never been challenged?”
He looked at her then, his gaze penetrating. “Not successfully.”
That settled it, in a way she didn’t like to admit.
She picked up the pen.
“One per cent, per tooth,” she said. “No more.”
“No more,” he agreed.
She signed.
It was, as promised, painless.
It wasn’t like numbed pain. It just wasn’t there. The sensations she had braced for simply never came. The dentist worked, and she lay there, aware of his movements but untouched by them.
At one point, she laughed.
“Still with me?” he asked.
“Barely,” she said. “This is strange.”
“Strange is better than painful,” he said.
“Debatable,” she said. “I just wonder—”
She let the thought go. Some decisions, once made, weren’t worth examining.
The thing she’d almost said was: I wonder if that was real. She didn’t finish the thought. It was the kind of wondering that had no useful answer, and she had a full caseload waiting.
When it was over, he sat her up.
“All done,” he said.
“That’s it?” she asked.
“That’s it.”
She probed her jaw with her tongue. Smooth. Whole.
“No pain,” she said.
“No pain,” he said, and as he pulled off his mask, she could see him smiling.
She paid. The normal fee. No surcharge, no hidden cost.
As she left, she paused at the door.
“You believe in all this,” she said.
He didn’t look up from his notes.
“I don’t need to,” he said. “It works either way.”
She didn’t think about it much after that. Not at first.
Life filled the space. Cases. Deadlines. The slow accumulation of minor victories and soundless losses. If there had been a missing piece, one per cent diminished, she couldn’t feel it.
Years passed. There were more visits to the dentist. Nine more. The receptionist was called Angela. Meena knew this because, by the fourth visit, she’d started to feel something she didn’t examine too closely whenever Angela offered her sad smile from behind the desk.
By the fifth visit, she no longer read the contract before signing. By the sixth, she’d stopped thinking of it as a contract at all. And each time, she signed away a single percentage point of her soul.
Then she died.
A brief, sharp pain in her chest as she climbed the stairs to her office. Then nothing.
And then—
A room.
It wasn’t the Hollywood version. Just a clean, normal room. Like a hospital waiting area without the anxiety.
A man sat behind a desk. He looked like a regular guy, dressed in a twentieth-century business suit, a thin, grey goatee on his chin, and a silver earring in his right ear. He was ordinary in a way that felt like it was designed into his appearance.
“Ms. Chaudhary,” he said. “Let me introduce myself. I’m Pete.”
She looked down at herself. No pain. No weight.
“Am I dead?” she demanded.
“Yes,” he said. “You are.”
She nodded.
“And this is?” she asked.
“Heaven,” he said.
“Right,” she said. “Of course it is. And you, no doubt, are Saint Peter.”
She stepped forward.
“Only to the Catholics,” he answered. “Though fewer of them than you’d think, these days. Even then I rarely stand on ceremony. You can call me Pete.”
“There must be some mistake,” she said. “I’m not—”
“There’s no mistake,” he said. “You’re in the correct place.”
She frowned.
“That doesn’t seem likely.”
“It’s not about likelihood,” he said. “It’s about accounting.”
That word caught her.
“Accounting,” she repeated.
He turned a page on the desk.
“There is, however, a condition,” he said. “Let me see, hmmm.”
He ran his finger down the list. “You’d be surprised how varied these are.”
He snapped his fingers. The sound of a filing cabinet opening and closing echoed through the room, and a manila file appeared in his hand.
“I thought there might be,” she said, trying to peer at the file as he opened it.
“Ah, here we are. One day in every ten,” he said, “you will be required to spend in Hell.”
She stared at him. “I’m sorry?”
“One day in ten,” he repeated. “Non-consecutive, distributed evenly.”
“That’s absurd,” she said. “On what basis?”
He looked at her, patience in his eyes.
“Contractual obligation,” he said.
The smell came back to her then. Burnt sugar and damp plaster.
“No,” she said. “No, that was…”
“You signed,” he said. “Voluntarily.”
“For one per cent,” she said. “One.”
“And one per cent of eternity,” he said, “is a great deal of time. And you made a total of ten visits. It’s cumulative.”
Meena made a quick calculation. He was right. She had made ten visits. And every time she had signed the contract. She felt her world revolve giddily: that same strange sensation she’d had in the dentist’s chair, that precise instant when everything she’d thought was true turned out to be otherwise.
“I want to see the contract,” she said.
“You will,” he said, clapping the file shut. “In due course.”
“And until then?”
“Until then,” he said, “you’ll begin your term.”
Hell was not fire. Not entirely: it was heat and pressure. And a constant, grinding presence that pressed against her from all sides. The air, if it was air, felt thick, resistant, as if it didn’t want to be breathed.
And there were others. They weren’t screaming. Not all the time, just enough to make her stomach turn. Most of them, though, were just enduring.
She lasted an hour before she started counting. Three more and her thoughts started whirling. By the fourth hour, she steadied her thoughts. By the time the day ended, if it could be called a day, she had a strategy. What she needed was a cause of action. There was always a cause of action. You just had to find the right frame.
The next time she descended, she asked for him.
“The Devil,” she said. “I want to speak to him.”
The thing that escorted her, tall, indistinct, tilted its head.
“Why?” it asked.
“Because I have a complaint,” she said.
That seemed to amuse it. But it beckoned her to follow it through winding corridors, where the atmosphere fought back, slowing her steps with each turn. She struggled to keep up, but kept going anyway.
The Devil’s office was smaller than she expected. It wasn’t a grand, theatrical space designed to intimidate. Instead, it was just a room with a desk, a chair, and shelves lined with files.
He looked up as she entered.
“Ah,” he said. “The lawyer.”
She didn’t sit.
“I want to discuss the terms of my contract,” she said.
“Of course you do,” he said, smiling toothily. He waved his hand at a chair. “What else would a lawyer want to discuss? Please.”
She remained standing.
“The agreement I signed,” she said, “was for pain-free dentistry. In exchange for one per cent of my soul.”
“Per visit. That’s correct.”
“The services were provided,” she said. “I experienced no pain during the procedure.”
“As promised.”
“Let me be precise,” she said. “The current arrangement, this,” she gestured at the room, at the heat, at the pressure beyond it, “constitutes a clear breach of the implied terms of that agreement.”
He leaned back in his chair.
“Go on,” he said.
“Pain-free dentistry,” she said, “cannot reasonably be interpreted to include subsequent exposure to extreme, sustained suffering as a direct consequence of the contract. The consideration is disproportionate. The duty of care has been…”
“Abrogated?” he suggested. He stroked his chin.
She paused and looked cross.
“Yes,” she said. “Abrogated.”
He nodded slowly and shifted in his chair, raising a finger, which he closed immediately.
“I see,” he said.
“Therefore,” she said, “I contend that the contract is void, or at the very least subject to renegotiation.”
He studied her for a moment. Then he smiled. It wasn’t a cruel smile. Not exactly. More like a familiar, forgiving, sad grin.
“And you wonder,” he said, “why so many lawyers are down here.”
She held his gaze.
“I’m not wondering,” she said. “I’m arguing.”
He laughed, softly.
“Of course you are,” he said.
He reached for a file. Opened it.
“Here’s the difficulty,” he said. “The contract was fulfilled. The dentistry was, in fact, pain-free.”
“I don’t dispute that.”
“And the transfer,” he said, “was clearly stipulated. One per cent of your soul per visit. You made ten visits.”
“Yes.”
“And what is a soul,” he said, “if not the totality of your experience? Your time. Your sensation. Your, how did you put it, endurance?”
She said nothing.
“One per cent for each visit,” he said, tapping the page, “is precisely what you’re receiving. One day in ten. An exact proportion. Elegant, really.”
“It’s punitive,” she said.
“It’s accurate,” he replied.
She stepped closer to the desk.
“You knew,” she said. “When you drafted it. You knew this would be the outcome.”
“Of course,” he said.
“And you allowed it to be presented without disclosure.”
He tilted his head.
“It was disclosed,” he said. “Just not understood. Not by you anyway.”
She felt the weight of heat press in again.
“This is bad faith,” she said.
“Bad faith?” he said. “Is it bad faith to write clearly and rely on the other party to read carefully? I’d call that optimism.”
She closed her eyes, briefly. Thinking. Then opened them.
“This isn’t over,” she said.
He smiled wider. “It never is.”
The air thickened.
“Your time is nearly up,” he said. “Back to Heaven, I believe.”
She turned to go.
“One day in ten,” he called after her. “For eternity.”
She paused at the door.
“I’ll find a way out,” she said. “There’s always a way out. You just have to find the right frame.”
“I know,” he said.
And he sounded almost pleased.
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