And they hadn’t had a fight since, what, Gomorrah? Egypt?
The events that were in orbit around this unwitting child had an intoxicating whiff of intricacy to them, complex as a clockwork anthill, complex as the mathematics of a hurricane. The possibilities for convoluted entertainment that this clueless little soul presented to the fiend were such an unexpected gift that he took an involuntary step backwards. All the dragon frills that edged the image he was wearing rippled in anticipation, flaring up in a display of his heraldic colours, red and green, bloodshed and jealousy.
“You’re Michael Warren? You’re the one to blame for all this trouble?”
Oh, the way his little jaw dropped, so that you could tell it was the first he’d heard about his sudden notoriety. This whole thing was becoming more delicious by the moment, and the devil laughed until he thought he?
??d burst a testicle. Wiping the hydrochloric tears of mirth from his peculiar eyes, he focussed them once more upon the boy.
“Wait till I tell the lads. They’ll be in fits. Oh, this is good. This is extremely good.”
That set him off again, the thought of how his fellow devils would respond when he informed them of his latest stroke of undeserved good fortune. Belial, the toad in diamond, would just blink his ring of seven eyes and try to make out that he hadn’t heard. Beelzebub, that glaring wall of porcine hatred, would most likely cook in his own rage. And as for Astaroth, he’d simply purse the lipstick-plastered mouth upon his human head into a vicious pout and would be looking daggers for the next three hundred years. The devil really had the giggles now. He laughed so hard his broad-brimmed hat fell back around his neck, at which point the already nervous child abandoned all the manners that his mother had instilled in him and screamed like an electrocuted aviary. The infant’s eyes began to well with frightened tears.
Ah, yes. The horns. The devil had forgotten he had horns in this particular ensemble. Horns, for some unfathomable reason, always made them jump when actually they should consider themselves lucky. Horns were nothing. Horns were just his work-clothes. They should see him when he was in fancy dress, for state occasions and the like, wearing one of his more finely-tailored robes of imagery. The coruscating spider/lizard combination, for example, or the gem of infinite regress. By Jingo, then they’d have something to cry about.
Blubbing profusely now the lad looked up with that expression of mixed accusation and outraged betrayal with which people generally seemed to greet him. He had seen it on the faces of Renaissance alchemists and Nazi dabblers alike. The message it conveyed, in essence, was ‘This isn’t fair. You’re not meant to be real.’ That was the main thrust of what the aggrieved and weeping cherub was now saying to him.
“You’re the devil.”
Children. They’re so wonderfully perceptive, aren’t they? Probably the horns were what had given him away. He felt a flicker of mild irritation at the fact that while people continually identified him as a devil, nobody was ever sure which one he was. It would be like somebody greeting Charlie Chaplin in the street by shouting “You’re that bloke out of that film”. It was insulting, but he didn’t let it get him down. He was in much too fine a mood for that. He’d broken off his laughing-jag and glanced down at the tot, good-humouredly.
“Well … yes. Yes, I suppose I am.”
Poor mite. He looked like he was getting a stiff neck from craning up to keep his brimming gaze upon the demon regent. Out of pure consideration and concern, the devil squatted down upon his haunches and leaned forward so that he and the small boy were eye to eye, the child’s blue puddles staring earnestly into the devil’s traffic-lights. He thought he’d tease the kid, just for a bit of mischief. What could be the harm in that? He spoke in puzzled tones of the most innocent enquiry.
“Why? Where did you think you were?”
That, thinking back, would seem to have been the remark that finally undid the little scamp. He’d shrieked something that sounded like “But they were only ants” and then had taken off along the endless landing, going nineteen to the dozen, holding his pyjama bottoms up with one hand as he ran to stop them falling down around his ankles.
Oh dear. Him and his big mouth. Despite the wholly innocent intent behind the devil’s harmless query, it appeared that Michael Warren had inferred from it that he’d been sent to Hell, possibly for a crime involving ants. Wherever did these jumped-up monkeys get all their ideas from? Not that he was saying that this wasn’t Hell, mind you. More that the actual situation was far less simplistic than that word implied, and where this devil was concerned one over-simplified at one’s own risk.
So there he was, watching the famous Michael Warren running full tilt down the walkway, trying to hold his pants up, squeaking like a fresh-hatched banshee. Was it any wonder that the devil couldn’t call to mind the last time that he’d had such fun?
He straightened up out of his crouch and flexed his two-tone rags to straighten them. The fleeing boy was some way off along the monstrously extended balcony, slippers flapping comically against the floorboards underfoot. The devil wondered where the child thought he was going.
Leisurely, he knocked his screaming, man-faced pipe against the balustrade to empty it, and then put it away into a pocket of himself. His smoke-break was now evidently over, and he couldn’t stand round here all day. He eyed the by-now tiny figure of the child as it continued its disorganised retreat into the distance of the elevated boardwalk. It was time to get on with some work.
The devil took a short unhurried step, putting his boot down on the boards, heel first and then the ball of his foot in a soft, percussive double thump a little like the beating of a heart: bump-bump. He took another step, this time a longer one that swallowed up more ground, so that it seemed like a protracted pause before the double footfall came again: bump-bump. He took a further pace. This time the pause went on and on. The twin thud that would signify the step’s end never came.
The devil floated a few feet above the floor, still carried slowly forward by the slight momentum of the step or two he’d taken when he launched himself. He narrowed his mismatched eyes, like malefic 3D spectacles, fixed on the dwindling form of the escaping child along the balcony’s far end. He grinned and let his scarlet and viridian pinions snap like stormy flags behind as he began to gather speed. He crackled and he burned. He did his trademark chuckle.
Comet-arsed and showering coloured embers like a Roman candle in his wake, the devil sizzled down the walkway, screeching after the small fugitive, closing the gap between them effortlessly. In a way, the boy’s intuitive attempt to treat the fiend as an uncomfortably big dog had not been so far off the mark. Certainly, you should never run from devils. Your retreating back will simply lend you the appearance of absconding prey, which, when it comes to dogs and demons, only tends to get them going.
Hearing from behind him the approaching firework rush, mixed as the sound was with that of the devil’s escalating cackle, the boy glanced back once across his shoulder and then looked as if he wished he hadn’t.
Whoosh. The devil reached down with both scorched and blistered hands to grab the squealing escapee beneath his armpits from the rear, snatching him fast into the whistling air, across the balustrade and up into the glass and ironwork altitudes above the Attics of the Breath. The child’s scream rose as they did, spiralling aloft with them to ring amongst the giant painted girders, startling the pigeons nested there into a brief ash-flurry of activity. With his slipper-clad feet pedalling frantically, the kid first pleaded for the fiend to let him go, then realised how high up he was and begged instead not to be dropped.
“Well, make your mind up,” said the devil, and considered dropping Michael Warren a few times then catching him before he hit the floor, though on reflection he thought better of it. It would over-egg the lily. It would gild the pudding.
They were hovering there, treading air, a thousand feet or more between them and the vast checked tablecloth of square holes spread below. Having considered all the aspects and the angles of this novel circumstance, the devil opted for a gentler approach in his communications with the boy. You caught more flies with honey than you did with vinegar, and you caught more with bullshit than you did with either. Tipping forward his horned head he whispered in the lad’s ear to be heard above the flap and flutter of his banners, red and green, hot coals and absinthe.
“Something tells me that we’ve got off to a bad start, haven’t we? I’m sensing, from the screaming and the running off, that I’ve said something to upset you without meaning to. What do you say we put it all behind us and begin afresh?”
With frightened, pin-prick eyes still fixed upon the hideous drop beneath his kicking slippers, Michael Warren answered in a wavering falsetto, managing to sound scared witless and indignant at the same time.
“You said this wiz Hell! You said you wiz
the devil!”