. . .
“Hey,” the Devil says. The Devil tries to pick young Peter up.
Peter kicks the Devil below the belt.
The Devil winces, but he’s a one-off, a singular oddity, a non-sexually-reproducing species, so it’s not as bad for him as it might otherwise have been. He puts young Peter down.
“It’s just,” he says, sitting down on Peter’s bed, “that I was looking for an antichrist.”
Peter pulls himself away to the far end of the bed. He looks at the Devil with deep suspicion.
“Seriously!” says the Devil.
“No,” says Peter.
“No?”
“Don’t want antichrist,” says Peter.
“But —”
The Devil stares at him in bafflement.
“It’s a good job! There’s health insurance! There’s a dog!”
“Nuh-unh,” says Peter.
“Oh,” the Devil says.
. . .
Peter sulks. Then, after a while, he climbs off the bed, goes to his books, and gets a book. He hands it to the Devil.
The Devil looks at Peter.
Peter rolls his eyes. He shrugs. He gives the Devil a ‘get on with it’ expression.
So the Devil reads Dr. Seuss to Peter. He does not do so very well. Peter is always turning the pages faster than the Devil can read through them and shaking his head at the things the Devil says. This drives the Devil to distraction; he finally begins making up new verses to reassert his dignity, but this only starts Peter wailing until his mother comes.
“Blast,” mutters the Devil, who isn’t allowed to be seen by people’s mothers, and he vanishes in a puff of brimstone, sodium bicarbonate, and flame.
. . .
Over the years he keeps trying.
He isn’t sure why he’d fixated on Peter in the first place, of course, but the idea of someone turning him down — well, that’s just not done.
So the Devil takes Peter out to explore the forgotten cities of the moon; and the Garden that was Lost; and to swing from a swing in the highest mountains of Tibet.
“I’ll make you into a beast,” says the Devil, “and teach you to write brooding, Gothic poetry, and one day I will consume you from within, and in your skin and with your name I will rule a great empire of evil.”
Peter swings out. He swings back in. He swings out. He swings back in.
He stops.
“I want to be an astronaut,” he says.
“That’s not completely incompatible,” says the Devil.
Peter gives him a hard look.
“Well,” says the Devil, “I mean, you could do one, and then the other — why do you want to be an astronaut, anyway? I took you to the moon!”
Peter snorts.
“That’s where astronauts go!” the Devil protests.
“I want to be a ninja,” Peter says.
The Devil sighs.
He sits down. He blows smoke into the sky. After a while Peter comes over and pats him on the head.
. . .
The Devil tells Peter stories about Hans. Once, as part of a dramatic reenactment, Peter actually traps the Devil up an orange tree. He wanders off.
“Seriously,” says the Devil. “Hey! Hey!”
He has to bribe Peter by promising to stop bugging him about becoming an antichrist before Peter will let him down.
. . .
The Devil takes Peter out into space. He shows him the endless night.
“I wanna see scissors,” says Peter.
“Scissors?” asks the Devil, lightly.
“I wanna smash ’em,” Peter says.
The Devil can’t tell if that’s a sin or not. He can’t tell if it’s corruption or not. On the one hand, it’s brutal and violent. On the other hand, it’s scissors. So he takes Peter out and they stare at the scissors-swarm — the surviving third of it, the third that went past the world and is curving back.
The space princess assassin Maria flashes by.
. . .
“Who’s that?” Peter asks.
She’s a space princess, who’s also an assassin. She’s dressed in a poofy dress with a bustier. She’s carrying an umbrella even though it hardly ever rains in space. She’s jumping from scissors to scissors, transferring momentum from herself to them, or vice versa, in order to speed up as she heads to Earth.
“Some sort of fairy godmother,” the Devil guesses, vaguely.
“Really?”
“A lot of people are coming to Earth now,” says the Devil. “I mean, in the absence of Hans.”
“He sounds like he was a pretty good guy,” says Peter.
“No,” says the Devil.
“No?”
“If he were a human,” says the Devil, “he’d be in Hell; but the rules for the svart-elves differ.”
“Oh,” says Peter.
Maria is practically superluminal now. She’s just a great long streak with an umbrella; but even so Peter sees her wink at him as she goes past.
“It’s a big world,” says the Devil, and Peter cracks a smile.
. . .
Peter’s almost eleven when the Devil gives up on him.
“I can’t keep doing this, Peter,” says the Devil.
Peter gives him a look.
“I can’t spend my whole life tempting somebody that won’t be tempted,” says the Devil. “I’ve got business on other planets! I was supposed to be on my millennium jaunt to Andromeda by now!”
“Are there angels there?” asks Peter.
The Devil shrugs.
He gets down on one knee. He takes Peter’s hand in both of his. He looks at him sincerely.
“I’ve come to love you,” he says, “you know. I’d treat you well.”
But Peter punches him in the nose,
and the Devil’s gone.
– 3 –
The Devil sulks for a while. Then he bandages his nose. He flutters back down into the world. He tastes the air with his tongue, since his nose is too hurt to sniff it, and he homes in on the house of Linus Evans, who will be Mr. Enemy: age nine.
Linus stares at the Devil with eyes that see no light.
. . .
Linus stares.
The Devil makes faces at him.
Finally Linus acknowledges him. He licks his lips. He shifts his gaze.
“You’re the Devil,” Linus says. Then he laughs. He laughs harder. “You poor creature. Ha haha! You’re going to die.”
“That’s not what we’re discussing,” the Devil says.
. . .
“You’re the heart of it, aren’t you?” says Linus. “You’re the reason. You’re why there’s nothing left that is good in the world? But haha. The joke’s on you, Mr. Devil. Oh, yes. Swoosh! The bad man will clean you away.”
“Please,” says the Devil dismissively. “I invented creepy children.”
His tail twitches, twice, behind his back.
Linus just giggles more. Then the humor fades from him. He begins to cry.
. . .
“Will you be my antichrist?” asks the Devil, a little uneasily. “Will you be born to take people from their quest for God, to tangle their spirits, to bind them to the material, and eventually to be my flesh and rule an empire of evil things?”
Linus shrugs.
“Whatever,” Linus says.
“You will flourish into damnation,” says the Devil, temptingly. “And drag the world down into unholy revelry. You will become an awful flame.”
“Is that so?” says Linus, like he’s getting something precious and secret.
“That’s so,” says the Devil.
Linus looks at him.
Then Linus shrugs. He snorts out half a laugh. “I guess that’s fine.”
. . .
The Devil weighs his options. He makes a tactical decision. “Done, then,” he says, since he’s got business in other galaxies.
He licks two fingers. He presses them into Linus’ forehead. He leaves his mark.
Then he goes away.
. . .
He can’t spend all his time dooming the Earth!
It’s practically a lost cause for salvation, anyhow.
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