The Devil's Tale

By Dan Wick

Lucifer, a benevolent devil if ever there was one, wishes to save an increasingly despoiled Earth. But how will he deal with the planet's most rapacious vermin-namely human(un)kind-who are beginning to encroach upon the sacred precincts of Hell?

Lucifer assigns his son Loki, the quintessential trickster, to a top secret mission: to live among the Americans, observe their ways, infiltrate their culture, and get to know them more thoroughly than any devil ever has. Loki immediately incarnates as bon vivant secret MI-5 agent Roger O. Thornhill and is quickly plunged into a series of concentric mysteries and vivid tales.

Thornhill, who is gifted with telekinetic powers, a gargantuan ego to accompany a perfectly sculpted body, and an eccentric vocabulary, makes the fatal mistake of falling in love with a mortal woman, Special Agent Margaret Dribble. As he tries to gain an understanding of human ways, Thornhill makes desperate visits to both the past and the future where he encounters heroes, wizards, demons, and ancient gods-each with his or her own tale to tell.

Puzzles galore and arcane lore ensue as Thornhill tries to reconcile the love of the seductive Margaret with loyalty to his long-suffering father, Lucifer.

"Brilliantly witty!"

Apollonius of Tyana

"I never laughed so hard in my life!"

Asklepios of Epidaurus

"Literally diabolical!"

Fred of Tuscaloosa

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 22, 2006
• ISBN: 9780595825660

Dan Wick

Dan Wick is an international award winning author. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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THE DEVIL’S TALE

Dan Wick

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Lincoln Shanghai

The Devil’s Tale

Copyright © 2006 by Daniel L. Wick

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-5953-8197-5 (sc)

ISBN-13: 978-0-5958-2566-0 (ebook)

Contents

FOREWORD

EDITOR’S NOTE

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

AFTERWORD

EDITOR’S POSTSCRIPT TO THE SECOND EDITION

An apology for the Devil—it must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

—Samuel Butler

Immortality:

A toy which people cry for

And on their knees apply for

And, if allowed,

Would be right proud

Eternally

To die for

—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

This book is affectionately dedicated to me, without whom it would never have been written.

Foreword 

My late and much loved husband, Roger Thornhill, asked a friend to give me the manuscript you have before you. I received it shortly after Roger’s untimely demise in the nuclear explosion that leveled Schenectady last year.

I confess not to know what to make of it. It is difficult to reconcile the outré events Roger describes with the fine man I knew, a man who saved my life more than once, enormously brave, movie star handsome, and the untiring source of the best sex any woman has ever had.

I can only conclude that Roger’s mind simply went bye-bye on him at some unspecified time before he was blown to smithereens.

Still, enough of what Roger depicts in this narrative reflects recent world events and, though providing implausible explanations for them, may contain some cryptic key to our past and future that I am too stupid or naïve to decipher. So I now pass Roger’s tale to a wider public, at least one of whom, I hope and pray, will be able to tell me what is going on.

Margaret Thornhill Mill Valley, California

Editor’s Note 

I was given the thankless task of editing the following manuscript whilst totally preoccupied with more important academic matters.

I am a professor of Penultimate Studies

I am also a strict deconstructionist.

So obviously, the text speaks for itself.

I will offer just a couple of observations based on the exceptionally limited research I undertook. (Did I mention that I have more important things to do?)

Thornhill (a pseudonym, by his own admission) is indeed listed as the author of the best-selling book referred to in the narrative.

When I contacted his publishers, they could tell me nothing, having only corresponded with the author via a now-defunct email address. Thornhill, by the way, describes the publishers as demons, but this, I daresay, is somewhat unfair. I mean, I dislike publishers as much as any other writer, but demons? That is going a bit too far. Bastards would be more appropriate.

This may turn out to be a classic in psychiatric literature…or it may not.

John Ray III, Ph.D. Hemline, Mass.

Preface 

Margarita, sparkler of my loins, your very name makes my heart hum. Margaret, yes, but so many permutations: Margie, Maggie, Peg, Greta, Marguerite. To me, you will always be my Margarita, the woman I have loved best in my long and languorous life. Hundreds preceded you, of course, all of them aeons dead, along with thousands of my children.

My multifarious limbs tremble at the merest thought of you. Everything, it seems, summons up some particularity of yours—your lovely scent, your azure eyes, your tawny hair.

And I know that you adore me as well, no matter how shocking or incomprehensible my behavior has been.

A caveat. I am bound by solemn oath to my Father not to reveal our plans for your kind, so you will see some of our schemes unfold, but never know the ultimate outcome. This is as it must be.

You may show these pages to whomever you wish. They will not believe you, and nothing I say here will affect the fate we have concocted for your species.

Your Devoted and Loving Husband,

Roger O. Thornhill

CHAPTER 1 

Loki’s Tale

I awake. Lucifer waves an aspergillum in my face. Say what? I exclaim. His furry wings wave in what may be a response. I need you, Loki, Lucifer replies. Loki is the name my Father gave me long

ago when I was a subversive god of the Norse. I blink, confused. I am sleepy and generally pissed off. What do you mean, Father? I require your special talents, Lucifer says, raising himself to His full height,

three times mine. That is why we call Him Father. Still groggy, I ask, And those are? Duplicity and an ability to get along with humans. "If you don’t mind my asking, Father, what is going on? What happened to

me?" Lucifer smiles, if a rictal grin can be called a smile.

I had to put you in suspension, my boy, after you scared the blazes out of poor old Martin Luther.

I made him throw an inkwell at me. So what? He was integral to our plans, so it didn’t help that you frightened him. I had to do a lot of backup work. Sacrifice a few thousand peasants.

I try to absorb this as calmly as I can under the circumstances, the putrid scent

of the aspergillum still wafting in my nostrils. Father can do whatever He likes, of course. Well, maybe He can. None of us really knows.

You’ve been in suspension for over five hundred years, Lucifer continues.

Humans are now a threat to us. The last I remember, the year, as the Christians calculated it, was 1536. You mean to tell me…?

A whole lot has happened. They’ve invented science for one thing. I don’t understand. Scientia? Knowledge? But they did that a long time ago. Technology, too, says Lucifer. Techne? Also old hat. "You have a lot to catch up on. Flauros will give you an update. The situation is

serious." I take a moment to think about what Lucifer, my Father, had said. Flauros is the Grand General of Hell. He is noted for his prescience. If Flauros

is involved, we must be facing a crisis.

I am beginning to emerge from grogginess, no small feat when you have been suspended for five hundred years. I glance down at my feet and see that I had assumed my usual form, the body of an ape and, I can tell from the way my eyes focus so sharply, the head of an owl. I regard Lucifer warily.

He is undeniably impressive, standing more than fifty feet tall.

No being was ever so perfectly formed.

His handsome head sports an artfully twisted tricorn.

His wings alone weigh at least twenty tons.

His tail is nine times more multicolored than that of a peacock and twelve times sturdier than a giant mastodon’s muzzle.

(We pride ourselves on our tails, which are sufficiently springy to assist leaping and help balance us while flying. When we manifest as other beings, we naturally suck up our tails into our rear ends, a fact which has given rise to our derisory term for servility, which we prefer to ass-kisser: coccyxsucker.)

Lucifer’s twelve testes are universally regarded as august.

He is the only devil who insists on strict retromingency.

He never ages, but He is far older than we.

As one of the youngest of our race, I have lived more than 40,000 years. Flauros, an elder, is around a million years old. But no one knows Lucifer’s age. As far as we are concerned, He has existed since time began, whenever that was.

He created us, of course, directly from His forehead, although none of us understands quite how that worked. We are here to do His bidding, although occasionally that fact slips some of our minds. Mine especially.

Lucifer created me to be a trickster god, initially for the tribes that roamed the great steppes of central Asia, but later also for Native Americans as well as the Greeks and the Norse.

I have been Coyote, who created the horse and stole the sun. I have been Rabbit, who created fire and Raven, who stole the moon, and Chitimacha, who invented medicine and lovemaking, and bewildered the humans by wandering the Earth draped in buzzard dung.

I have also been Hermes, the winged messenger, god of eloquence and thieves, music and gambling.

But my favorite apotheosis was as Loki, the great betrayer, the supposed slayer of Baldur and the inventor of magic.

My nature is crafty and double-dealing, although only with humans, not with my fellow devils.

Devil is what we call ourselves. Sometimes we are called demons, but that is a misnomer because demons are devils’ offspring, the sterile results of mating with humans.

Only slightly groggy now, I look up at Lucifer.

May I have a little ambrosia before meeting with Flauros?

Certainly, but don’t be long. He vanishes. I look around, slowly taking in my surroundings. Fortunately, Father has revived me in the forecourt of my palace where, I am pleased to see, the central fountain still flows. I leap into the shallow pool and stick my beak into life-giving liquid.

Vigorously shaking ambrosia from my feathers, I consider my homeland.

Over the ages, devils have called it by many names—Valhalla, Hades, Myr, Gehenna, Standido, Universitas—but we prefer Hell because it is one syllable and easy to pronounce.

Hell is a state of mind.

A blessed state, because it contains no conflicts, fears, phobias, anxieties, neuroses, psychoses, or other oddities so common to the human world.

Dante was wrong in denoting nine circles of Hell. There are only six. And dead humans don’t exist in any of them. We wouldn’t allow them in. It would ruin the neighborhood. The notion of humans having immortal souls is meretricious persiflage.

Hell is buried deep under Yellowstone Park. (I soon learn that’s what they call it these days, aeons after Lucifer switched the poles, though how he did that is anybody’s guess.)

Hell is a beautiful place, about two hundred thousand square miles, capaciously accommodating 9999 devils. With its own interior illumination, it does not require sunlight, or any other source of outside energy, to function. Concentrically configured, Hell contains 666 caverns, all leading through illumined tunnels to the Great Chamber. Our 9998 palaces lie beneath the Chamber, followed, below that, by Lucifer’s palace, which we may visit only by Father’s explicit invitation.

Six molten rivers, gleaming in vermilion and gold, thread through our land, forming, at crucial junctures, nine resplendent lakes that provide our palaces with dozens of delightful prospects. For our delight, Father created hundreds of islands, rising from misty depths and replete with the residue of ruined cities that He rescued ages ago from the grave robber’s greed and the archaeologist’s axe, allowing His children to contemplate the spires of Atlantis, the towers of Babylon, and the faded glories of Cibola, Sardis, and Samarkand.

Finally feeling pretty much revived, I fly off to the Great Chamber to meet with Flauros.

The Chamber is as I remember it: a giant cavern with iridescent stalactites.

Flauros awaits me impatiently, his tiger eyes filled with contempt, his saber teeth flashing with disdain.

Grand General, I bow respectfully.

No titles. We are a democracy now.

I am offended. What is this nonsense, Grand General?

No titles! he roars. And no former names of gods. Lucifer is not to be referred to as Zeus or Wotan, for example.

But Father just called me Loki, I object.

He is Lucifer. That is His privilege. In His infinite wisdom, He has decided to exempt you from the rules. Now, can we move along? We are a democracy because that’s what the most regressive human societies have become. You know how our Father loves a good joke.

I nod. It makes little difference what we call our polity. Under any rubric, Lucifer is in charge.

I have much to show you. Look. Flauros points towards the far wall of the Great Chamber where images are beginning to form. The last five hundred years, he intones somberly. You will now spend several minutes in Indoctrination, mastering the details.

Indoctrination? I say, surprised. So soon after awakening?

Watch and listen, says Flauros in a tone of voice that suggests he is having difficulty controlling his anger, and which I find more unsettling than his roar.

I gaze at the wall in fascination as the human history of the last half millennium unfolds before my eyes.

Nothing here of the dry texts that humans call history. This is the collective memory of 9,997 devils (excluding me, of course, since I’d been asleep for five hundred years and Lucifer, who rarely shares His thoughts with anyone.)

First, I absorb modern language, literature, art, and music. I reacquaint myself with English after a one-minute scan of the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary.

I watch as centuries pass, war succeeding revolution, followed by more war, genocide, terror: all of the things that pundits like to call inhuman, but which devils know to be all too human. Throughout this sorry tale of slaughter and woe: the inexorable progress of new and more deadly forms of technology, means of communication, transport, and destruction accelerating until they reach absurd proportions.

Most disturbing to me is that, despite mankind’s best efforts at self-extermination, the number of humans has multiplied exponentially.

In my day, there were perhaps five hundred million humans. Now there are more than seven billion, spread all over the place, polluting the great mountain peaks, swarming over the rainforests, crowding the sea-lanes, burrowing into the earth.

This proliferation has radically reduced the traditional freedoms of us poor devils. Previously able to soar over vast distances of ocean, tundra, forest and mountain, undisturbed by humanity’s noxious gaze, we can now hardly venture from our underground palaces without fear of being spotted by some ingenious surveillance technique. Of course, we can be invisible if necessary, but you can imagine what an inconvenience that is.

Humans are the criminals of creation.

Ever since Lucifer noticed hominids evolving, He has tried to guide their actions, make them less violent, less careless, less cruel, but all to little avail. Consistently do they evade or ignore their own rules. Ruthlessly do they continue carnage and glorify murder in legend and song.

Humans could never have invented religion on their own. They would just have continued raiding one another until everyone ended up dead.

So Lucifer decided to give mankind a reason for living, hinting of afterlives, metempsychoses, reincarnations, the whole ball of waxworks.

We got humans to bury their dead, dress up important occasions like marriage and birth with a bit of ceremony, and act more decently towards one another. Much of this had good effects and certainly we devils enjoyed a splendid time roaming the earth, appearing as apparitions to all and sundry, laying down laws of all kinds. (The Ten Commandments was ours, for example, although it was originally Nine Commandments, because we like things in multiples of three, but that pesky Moses added one of his own, I forget which one.)

Of all the religions, Hinduism was our chef d’oeuvre. It was even more fun for us than the Greek stuff. Talk about your Vedas and your Upanishads.

The really wonderful thing about Hinduism is that it has more gods than you can shake a stipoo stick at. Last time I counted, there were more than thirty million.

Lucifer literally went mad with mirth as He successively impersonated Lord Krishna, later an elephant, Ganeesha, I think his name was, and so on.

Not only did it keep Lucifer busy, but the rest of us were going all out, too.

I remember a coadunate decade in which I incarnated myself as two thousand six hundred and seventy-seven gods.

Boy, did I feel gormless after that.

I regret to say that the greatest religious disaster in which devils were involved was Christianity. And that wasn’t really our fault.

The way it all started, Lucifer decided that what the Roman world needed was a gentle religion. So he scoured all over the Empire and came upon Jesus, an itinerant Jewish preacher in Galilee.

Jesus was a wonderful man, humorous, devout and above all, loving. And, that’s what he preached. Love of God. Love of your fellow man (and woman.) Speaking of women, his most loyal disciple was Mary Magdalene. They were not lovers, but friends, who always looked out for one another. Their correspondence, which I have carefully preserved, is both poignant and charming.

Jesus was charismatic. I spent months following the crowds that flocked to hear him preach and I never saw him out of sorts. He treated everyone with great kindness, from the poorest beggar to the proudest centurion.

The canard later circulated by medieval Christians that Jesus never laughed has always angered me. Jesus laughed all the time. Notwithstanding the sincerity of his message, he was never solemn. Witty, profound, downright funny. The so-called gospels have captured only a fraction of this.

And, Jesus never claimed to be God or a Son of God or anything along those lines. He never thought of himself as a Messiah. In short, Jesus never pretended to be Christ.

After his tragic death, what happened? Beginning with Paul, Jesus was transformed into a savior god, who died for man’s sins. The ethic to which he had devoted his life, an ethic of love, gentleness, charity, and peace was utterly eclipsed by a focus on his death and imaginary resurrection.

As Oscar Wilde said, The first and last Christian was Christ.

Early on, the Church devalued Jesus’ moral teaching, claiming that it was meant only for his apostles—Give away all that you have and follow me. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Resist not evil.—since ordinary humans could not possibly abide by such radical principles. In fact, one of my chief problems with Martin Luther, and why I kept scaring his wits out, causing him to throw inkwells at me, was because of an essay he wrote on why those in authority, princes and the like, could not possibly be expected to follow Christ’s rules of conduct, since it was their Christian duty to keep order and kill unruly peasants and rebellious artisans whenever they got uppity.

So humans have subverted all religion, and none more than Christianity.

I am brought back from my reveries by a low growl from Flauros.

Got the picture?

Yes. It’s depressing.

That it is. Melchom will now conclude your Indoctrination. He’s waiting for you.

I fly off, glad to be gone from Flauros, although Melchom is no picnic either.

As Hell’s paymaster, he supervises all special missions to the realm of the mortals. He’s a beardless little bald guy with the arms of an octopus and a voice as deep as death.

Melchom inhabits a small alcove seventeen caverns down from the Great Hall. He smiles as I swoop in. I envy you, Loki.

And why is that?

Yours is a really plum assignment. You are to investigate the most dangerous nation on Earth.

Flashes of my recent history lesson run through my mind. Nazi Germany? No, that was already dust. The Soviet Union? Dissolved.

Communist China?

Melchom smiles widely at this display of naïveté. No, my friend. The United States of America.

Startled, I ask, But aren’t they supposed to be the good guys?

From the overview that Flauros provided me, I have implanted memories of doughboys, and then GIs, liberating Europe, Woodrow Wilson and the Fourteen Points, FDR and the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, Ronald Reagan overcoming the Evil Empire, and George W. Bush putting a kibosh on the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Americans certainly think so. But there are brumal worms tunneling through the bowels of American society. It is time that you receive a more thorough briefing on the good old U.S. of A.

Displayed on the small far wall of the cave is another series of moving tableaux, again the collective observations of 9,997 devils, but this time focusing on the history of the United States. All four hundred years of it, from colonial times to contemporary superduperpowerdom.

When the melancholy briefing concludes, Melchom growls at me.

As you see, not since the Romans has a nation been more self-righteous and self-centered. Or as complacent and cruel.

Still, I find myself reluctant to condemn all things American and tell Melchom so.

That’s why our Father chose you, dear boy. You’ve been blissfully asleep during the entire history of America, and are therefore in a better position to be objective than any of us. Father is seriously considering destroying all of humanity, beginning with America, but He hasn’t yet up His mind. Your mission will shift the balance one way or the other. As you know, Father created you to be our shrewdest investigator.

So what exactly is my mission?

To go among the Americans, observe their ways, read their minds, talk to their leaders, infiltrate their culture, get to know them more thoroughly than any devil ever has, and then come up with a plan of action.

Or inaction, I say.

Or inaction, Melchom agrees.

What special powers will I be allowed? Interacting with humans is a tricky business. It is therefore customary to provide an agent with a variety of powers designed to elude detection.

The whole gamut, I am happy to say, Melchom grins. Teleportation, telepathy along the Null scale, incarnation, possession, and transformation.

Impressed, I say, As far as I know, Lucifer has granted all of these powers only once. To Apollo…

A frown flashes across Melchom’s face. You mean Melchizedek. No gods’ names, remember.

Right, I say hastily. Sorry. The classification of Nulls is straightforward. Null Ones are inaccessible to our telepathy. We can read the surface thoughts of Null Twos and Threes, and can

access and control most of the thoughts and actions of Null Fours and Fives. Null Sixes, we can control body and soul in a New York minute. We can possess Nulls Four through Six. Devils have tried, at various times, to

possess important humans lower on the Null scale, like Alexander and Caesar, but succeeded only in giving them fits, which, fortunately, were mistaken for epilepsy.

Devils can incarnate or transform into anything, including imaginary beings like unicorns. Devils are intuitive. We rarely operate by rules of logic. In general, we do not like and do not understand science. On the other hand, devils are devoted to art, especially music and poetry. We invented language just to confuse humans. That Tower of Babel story. It’s all true, except for the details. We even threw in Basque as a ringer to confuse future anthropologists.

You know about the Puritan work ethic We subscribe to the devils’ play ethic. Why work when you can play? I mean, think about it. What does work do? Produces more things that more beings consume. So what? I mean, give me recess anytime.

Oh, the existence of Evil? Nothing to do with us. Entirely a human invention. But more of that later.

That most pontifical of poets, Milton, described Lucifer as saying that He would rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. Well, Lucifer does reign in Hell, but that is because there is no Heaven in which to serve.

And what did Milton know? He really wasn’t of the devils’ party, despite Blake’s comment. Blake, without knowing it, did belong to our party. He just wasn’t registered.

But I digress.

Bidding me an uncharacteristically cheery farewell, Melchom says that I am to receive my final instructions from Father Himself.

It fully strikes me only at this moment that Lucifer has just appointed me His ambassador. My official title? The American Devil.

CHAPTER 2 

Lucifer’s Tale

Melchom advises me I can choose three assistant devils, and that I will also have at my disposal three thousand demons.

I know immediately whom I want as assistants. First, Asira, about my age, give or take a millennium, very good at observing human behavior, tireless, ingenious and loyal. Second, Canda, one of the older devils, somewhere around eight hundred thousand years, crafty and devious. And finally, Dusana, a couple of hundred thousand years old, brilliant, perceptive, fond of humans.

The four of us have worked together before. Hundreds of occasions, really, but most notably when we constructed a thorough needs assessment for the Broctowany tribe of Southeastern Bengal about twenty-five hundred years ago.

I telemessage the three of them and, within seconds, gain their agreement to join me on the mission. We agree to meet after I have my required interview with Father.

I approach Him in the ancient manner, performing proskynesis, licking the tips of his talons whilst utterly prostrate.

But Lucifer is in a mood that I might describe as gloomy if it were not a sacrilege to think so. In any event, He is out of sorts.

I may have to extinguish all of humanity if their behavior doesn’t improve.

You can do that? I am surprised. Lucifer is the gentlest of devils and has devoted several million years to the betterment of the human race.

Of course. I almost did it once before. You know the story. Big flood. Everybody drowned except for Manu, Ziusudra, Noah, Utnapishtim, Atrahasis and their families.

But there are seven billion humans now or so I’ve been told.

Numbers don’t matter. I can firestorm them all into oblivion in a matter of milliseconds. Oh I might keep the odd Hottentot or Hopi around just so the species continues, but really humans are most annoying. Nothing but parasites. And by far the worst parasites this poor planet has ever endured.

Perhaps I will uncover something redeemable about them that will cause you to change your mind.

Lucifer snorts. Not likely in America. But enough of this idle tergiversation. I am depending on you to be crafty and cruel, not be an apologist for the unspeakable. To that end, I’ve decided to grant you the power to understand science.

I am astonished. But no devil understands science or wants to.

Lucifer gives me an exasperated look. "That’s because I removed that power from you. To understand science is to be both distracted and depressed. Who wants to be around devils like that? But I can give it back whenever I want, and I am doing so for you, but just for the duration of this mission. You won’t understand enough to actually become a scientist. That would be too cruel. But you will be able to absorb all the scientific theory necessary to arrive at a balanced assessment of America and Americans.

I am going to give you two further gifts, Lucifer continues. The first is hatred.

But, O Merciful One, you have eliminated hatred from our hearts. Why give me this now?

In order that you understand humankind, my son. You need to realize how despicable they are. Otherwise you cannot report objectively on them.

And the other gift?

Fear.

Father, devils fear almost nothing. Why should I be so burdened?

"Because, my son, fear is what drives humans. Again, you cannot give me a clear picture of them unless you understand the core of their