Down through
the clouds, down through the radio and TV signals—an overwhelming noise that
mortals cannot hear, a mash of misled meaning.
Down past the windows of the tower blocks, the Angel of Lies lands
gently on the concrete street. He draws
his flame into himself, his wings in.
The horns on his head retract, his blazing eyes turn a cornflower blue,
his appearance mutates into a man in a dark suit. The smoke dissipates from his shoulders and lapels. Touch down, London, British Babylon,
somewhere in the twenty-first century.
“Off-target again,” the Devil says, realizing he’s not in the City. He sniffs the air, and catching the scent of
money, starts to make his way to an international banking head-quarters in the
Square Mile, its fortune founded on Nazi gold from the mouths of dead
men. The Devil is on an inspired
mission: to test global civilization for its ripeness for destruction, and
encourage it on its way. He maintains
an inscrutable vigilance as he walks towards the nexus of human destiny.
Signs
of chaos continually deface the wannabe order of the housing-estate paradise
around him. Even the Devil recognises
its ugliness, and laughs. The stupidity
of humanity always makes him laugh. He
thinks, ‘It’s a very Western disease to believe Nature can be stamped down
with bureaucracy. But suppression
only puts stress on the system. And
they call this repression responsibility!’
and he smiles to himself at the folly and arrogance of mankind. These humans certainly make his job easy for
him.
He
rounds a corner to a back-street on the estate, where three track-suited
gangstas are waiting for the opportunity to earn their way to a rock of crack
each. These are his people—living in
desperation and darkness, and calling it enlightenment. They bristle with hatred and need as they
approach.
“Just
give us your wallet, you bastard!” the gang-leader says, in an
annoyed-to-be-at-work sort of way. The
Devil smiles charmingly. ”Certainly, and may it make you very happy,” he lies,
as he hands the wallet over to the leader.
It visibly bulges with a huge slab of pristine fifty pound notes.
The
Devil walks on. Behind him, the two
white thugs pounce on the asian gang-leader, stabbing and killing him. After mutual minor dismemberment they split
the spoils. Both long and painfully OD
that night on the substance of their choice.
Brushing
past the fallen angel, a woman picks up a lottery ticket from the gutter. She immediately recognises the numbers on it
as the midweek draw winners: 1, 6, 16, 26, 36, 46. She’s just found the winning ticket for a sixty-six million pound
jackpot! The lady immediately dies of a
heart-attack, from an orgasmic mixture of ecstasy, avarice and paranoia.
Walking
on, the Devil stares a young man in the eye, and a poor but kind dreamer gains
the chutzpah, the cahones, to finally
proposition and seduce the woman he’s silently desperately yearned for for
years. They make passionate, frenzied
love. He contracts AIDS, and dies in
great weakness.
The
Devil is heading for the heart of the British financial web. His business is to persuade a CEO to help
human society evolve, and to click on an option on the company database to
achieve this. Before he hangs himself,
the CEO will come to think he shouldn’t have clicked, in retrospect.
The
Devil is ten minutes early for his appointment. He has time to kill. Bad
luck for the secretary, as that afternoon she has the clarity of emotion to
reveal her feelings and her desperate emptiness to the personnel manager. They have a wonderful if short-lived
affair. Both their families fall apart.
The
Devil is ushered in to see the CEO, who stands to shake his hand. It’s always bad luck to shake hands with the
Devil. The CEO says, “David
Smythe-Williams. You say you have a
proposition for me?”
The
Devil stares him in the eye. He asks,
“What do you want most of all out of life, Mr Smythe-Williams?”
S-W
is surprised into saying, “Er... to
do the right thing, I guess.”
“And
what is the right thing?” the Devil
asks before Smythe-Williams has the chance to object to the course the
conversation has taken.
Smythe-Williams
ponders for a moment. “To add value to
life for as many people as you can would be the right answer, I think,” he says.
He has a tender conscience, so he’d often thought once before about how
he justified his riches. Now he is
before the Great Prosecutor, the Slanderer of Souls.
They
sit down.
The
Devil loves any sort of wish that doesn’t involve truth. It’s something he can really use. He replies, “Mr Smythe-Williams, in this
dark world, surely the most efficient thing
to do to benefit humanity would be to free us from the terror of our run-away materialism, right? You could do so much good in your position.
Have you ever realized how powerful you really are? You can alter the course of history. Let me show you how.”
Smythe-Williams,
overcoming the Devil’s charisma and suspicious, asks, “I’m sorry, what exactly
have you come here to sell me, Mr Kronos?”
The
Devil crosses his legs in what he hopes is a subtly dominant way, resting his
chin on his fingers and his elbow on the chair. He says warmly, “Dave. Can I call you Dave? I’ve come here with the power given to me by
the Almighty, to make your dreams come true.
Let me grant you a wish.” Satan
then gives the man’s imagination a fading glimpse of the glory of his
realm—albeit with the pain and the destruction cunningly edited out. Glory is the ultimate rush to Satan. It’s so satirical an idea to him. But he’s sure one glimpse of worldly light
and power will hook this man.
Smythe-Williams
is not impressed. He’s seen it all
before. He says, slightly
sarcastically, “I’m sure you know what my wish is, if you are what you claim to
be. Why don’t you tell me what my one wish is, Mr Kronos?”
“Certainly,”
replies the Devil, who has been given many powers. “As you intimated, your ultimate wish is to benefit the
world. Your position as the head of a
finance house sometimes causes you much anxiety of conscience, doesn’t
it? I bet I’m right about that.” The Father of Lies smiles. He doesn’t have to lie when he doesn’t want
to. He continues, “Well, I have the
solution to your anxiety for you. It’s
not perfect, but it’s close. If it was
the perfect solution, I’d be
God.” For a moment his eyes role
upwards in a gesture of eternally defiant sarcasm, and deep personal
disappointment.
“Please
tell me more,” says the CEO, who is intrigued at the insight of this mad
stranger. He has his finger ready on a
buzzer under the desk.
Satan
replies, “I can give you a password that will give you access to the programme
that controls the international flow of financial information. Even its designers don’t know its
potential. I—it can give you great riches; but that’s so common. Alternatively, I could show you how to destabilise
the global finance system by poisoning it with a virus—or better still, how to create global Babel just by deleting
a few files. But what would you like to do?”
Smythe-Williams
is wary. He furrows his brow and says,
“That sounds like it could create a lot of problems for a lot of people.”
The
Devil says, “Nonsense. By choosing this
option you will merely cause a slight collapse in international trade,
thereby temporarily freeing the world from accelerating globalization—giving us
some much-needed thinking time. That’s
got to be a good idea, right?”
“Hmm.
I don’t know. Hmm.
No more global trade for a while.”
“Except
for the necessities, perhaps,” the Devil contributes.
“A
lot of people would be very unhappy about it, Mr Kronos.”
“Better
sooner rather than later, right, Dave?” the Devil asks.
“I
don’t know, I’ll have to think about it,” Smythe-Williams replies.
But
the Devil’s impatient, so he passes a vision of the fear of millions dying as a
result of indecision through Smythe-William’s mind like a shudder, and he asks
again, “Look at it this way Dave. Isn’t
it better to topple the tower now before
we get any higher off the ground, rather than God, er, or Fate, or Destiny—bringing destruction on us later? We’re surely bringing destruction upon
ourselves eventually. I’d press that
button, if I were you.”
Miraculously,
Smythe-Williams’ desk screen already shows an option to click. The dialogue box asks, “Are you sure you
want to delete all files?
The
CEO says, “Perhaps it really is better to start the process of pro-ecological
economic stabilisation sooner rather
than later... If you’re sure this’ll work—” and he clicks
‘Yes’ with great relief and satisfaction.
The Devil laughs, and disappears from his tortured mind in a puff of
smoke.
Copyright Grant Bartley
