The Devil and I

Torrential rain screamed down upon the beach. Lightning flashed, briefly illuminating the black clouds before flickering off again. Sharp blows of wind blasted by, swirling into massive sandstorms above the inky-black water. Crows flew around, which I could barely make out from the dark sky. 

“Are you sure this is the right place?” the frenzied taxi driver asked, trying his best to maneuver the car on the disintegrating mud track. Just half an hour ago, a strong gust of wind had blasted the taxi into a ditch, and it had taken twenty minutes for us to get out of the pit. There were still brown stains on the widows. 

“Of course,” I replied, staring out the windows. In the distance, a skyscraper jutted out of a hill, piercing through the sky.

The driver grunted. “Such arrogance coming from someone so young. Especially since you need me to wait for you to pick you up after your appointment.” He spat the word like he was saying “excrement”. “Why do you even want to meet the Therapist anyway?”

“I need his assistance,” I snapped.

I was still clutching the brochure I had picked up from the train station. Escape to paradise without needing to pay money, it read, along with explicit directions on how to go to the Therapist’s office. Of course, I knew who the Therapist really was. 

The driver pulled the car next to the entrance, adorned with wreaths of violent nightshades. Small fountains splashed and bubbled around the revolving glass door, in front of which two burly security guards patrolled the property. 

Their eyes narrowed at me as I stepped out of the taxi, clutching only the pamphlet and my school bag. 

“State your business,” one of the guards ordered. 

“I’m here on an appointment with the Therapist,” I replied, pointing at the pamphlet for good measures. 

After thoroughly inspecting my belongings–and by that I mean taking a magnifying glass and painstakingly going through my bag–the guards stepped aside to let me through. 

The revolving doors led to a Gothic lobby with a neat spiral staircase rising out of the centre, a large oak desk with a bored receptionist, a quaint café selling afternoon tea and macarons, and a fleet of five glass elevators. 

As soon as I entered the lobby, the receptionist snapped to attention. “How may I assist you?” she asked, looking glad to have something to kill time with.

“I have an appointment with the Therapist,” I replied. “How can I get to his office?”

“Take the third elevator to the top floor. As soon as you get off the elevator, he’ll know you’re there.”

That seemed rather unsettling to me, but then again, traveling across the country to meet up with a stranger was not what I’d call normal. 

The elevator was waiting for me. Soft lofi music hummed in the background as the glass car zoomed upward toward the office, which eased my nerves. After ninety seconds of flying upwards, the doors opened with a pleasant ding. 

As soon as I stepped out of the car, I immediately understood what the receptionist had meant. The aura of something–or someone, more precisely–enveloped the room, tingling my arms. Ideas and thoughts I had never dreamed of began to take shape inside of me: how to best hide from the police, how to lie perfectly, how to cleanly murder someone. It was like a consciousness was wrapping around me, infecting my thoughts…

Suddenly, ebony mist thickened in front of me, morphing into a man in his middle ages. He had striking wine-coloured eyes and wavy caramel hair. Dressed in a black leather jacket and leather pants, he looked like he had stepped out of the cover of a sports magazine. 

“Hello, Samael,” the man purred. “I am the Therapist–”

“You mean the Devil himself,” I corrected. 

His plastic smile only grew. “Indeed I am. Now, as a certified psychologist and counselor, I can help you with your problems in life.”

He conjured up two red sofas and a coffee table with a red mug on it. 

“How?” I gasped, staring at the red mug. 

The red mug was filled with hot chocolate topped with whipped cream spiraling like an ice cream cone. There were even miniature marshmallows sprinkled in the drink. It was exactly what my favourite childhood drink was. 

“I know my clients,” the Devil replied, gesturing at me to sit down and enjoy the drink. “You booked an appointment with me, which means you want something otherwise impossible to get. Tell me your story.”

I stared at the whipped cream slowly disintegrating into the hot chocolate. In many ways it represented my life: stable at first glance but insidiously breaking down once you look a bit closer. 

“I’m having many challenges with my life in general,” I explained, trying hard to look away from the Devil’s piercing eyes. I could still feel the magnetic tug radiating from him; if I didn’t keep my guard up, all of my thoughts might be taken over by the Devil. “Like, I can’t tell you how much.”

“You’re going to need to.” He slowly smoothed the collar of his jacket. “I’ve got nothing but time.”

“No one in school likes me. Not even my teachers. They all think I’m super weird.”

“As I recall, your peers and teachers think you’re psychotic because you broke your best friend’s arm,” the Devil recalled. “After breaking his arm, you proceeded to break his leg and then toss him up a tree like a rag doll.”

An inferno raged on my cheeks. “He provoked me first!”

“Anyhow, go ahead,” the Devil encouraged. “What other problems in life do you have, other than the fact that you’re a complete social reject?”

“All my investments are tanking as well,” I continued. “Not only that, the lemonade stand I set up went bankrupt.”

“That was because everyone that hates you decided to boycott everything you held dear.” The most unsettling and infuriating thing was that the Devil wasn’t asking me; rather, he was bringing me up to speed with my own life. 

“Yes,” I conceded. “I’m also super ugly.”

The Devil looked cosmically bored at that point. In fact, he conjured up a cup of coffee just to stay awake. “Is that all you need my help with?”

“I’ve also descended into heavy dissatisfaction and depression as a result of the several years of bombardment I’ve received,” I added. “I’ve tried everything under the Sun to return my life to normality, but nothing has worked. For Heaven’s sake, I’ve even consulted a genie! So I’ve turned to you.”

The Devil snapped his fingers, and a scroll appeared in his hands. “So, to be clear, these are your wishes: to restore all interpersonal relationships with your classmates and teachers; to have a stable source of income after your investments and your lemonade business failed; to look attractive; and to be cured of your subsequent mental health problems.”

“That seems about right,” I agreed. I finished the hot chocolate. Despite its glamorous appearance, it was dull and tasteless. 

The Devil spread the scroll across the coffee table. He had pre-written all of my requests in black ink in beautiful calligraphy. There was a dotted line at the bottom of the scroll. 

“When you sign this contract, all of your wishes will be granted,” the Devil explained. “And my powers are guaranteed to be one hundred percent effective in eliminating problems.”

“Excellent!” I exclaimed. 

“However, there’s the matter of payment to be settled.” The room seemed to darken. 

“I already told you, I don’t have any money,” I retorted. “I can’t possibly pay you until you grant my wishes.”

“I don’t need money.” The Devil’s plastic smile vanished, being replaced with a frozen glare. “In exchange for granting all of your wishes, I get to take away anything I want from you.”

“Um…why?”

“Everything has a cost, Samael. And don’t you think letting you live a happy, rich, fulfilling life has the most expensive cost? The price I’m setting is merely this: I want to have your soul.”

“You’re going to steal my soul?” I echoed. 

“I never said that. All that will happen is this: a sliver of my existence will wrap around your soul, safeguarding it, should you sign this contract. A pretty simple deal, if you ask me. Remember, the contract gives you limitless joy in your currently mediocre and melancholy life.”

A quill pen appeared in my hands. 

I thought about my disappointed parents and my estranged best friends. But what would happen to me if I gave in to the Devil’s demands?

But then again, the worst thing that could happen would be hearing the Devil’s voice in my head from time to time. And the Devil couldn’t possibly betray me with the amiability he had displayed. 

So in the history of the worst decisions anyone could’ve made, I signed the contract. 

***

“How have you been?” The Devil grinned, spraying whipped cream onto two mugs of hot chocolate. As usual, there were vibrant marshmallows haphazardly thrown about. The smell of vanilla wafted from the mug, filling the room with a dizzyingly sweet aroma. 

“Wonderful,” I replied, fingering the diamond watch locked onto my wrist. 

It had been six months since the Devil had granted my wishes, and every single one of them had been met. The Devil had reconstructed my social life, enhanced my appearance, allowed me to become bright and optimistic, and granted a fortune to me. I had all but forgotten about the Devil until last night, in my dream, and ordered me to come to his office. 

“I trust that your life is now free of problems?” he asked, handing me a cup. 

When I nodded, he continued, “I need your help for something. In exchange for everything I’ve done for you, I think it’s a pretty minor favour.

“All I need you to do is end something.”

“What?” I asked, lost in thought. “A relationship? A business?”

“A life.” He sipped his hot chocolate while carefully studying me with those wine eyes. 

My heart stopped. “What?”

The Devil slowly stalked towards the window that overlooked the stormy beach. From where we were, the swirling clouds of dust looked like hazy and dynamic outlines of the beach, and the stormy ocean itself was a crumpled-up sheet of navy-blue paper.

“Eons ago, there was a large community of deities that ruled over the cosmos in Mount Olympus. The King of All Gods, Zeus, appointed every minor god with a role to fulfill. 

“Zeus granted me the role of gatekeeping all of the ancient powers and energy in the world, and I dutifully guarded knowledge from the unworthy. 

“But over time, I trained myself in the most ancient and most powerful forms of magic. I learnt how to make all desires come true, for example. I also learnt how to cast an execration spell that could destroy even an immortal deity’s life force, something not thought possible before.”

“And you killed someone?” I whispered, barely swallowing the huge lump in my throat. 

The Devil snorted. “Every single day of my life, I regret not having done so. As soon as Zeus and the other gods learnt about what I had been doing, they banished me from the heavens and taught mortal followers that I was inherently diabolical. They tied my consciousness to a lonely beach bombarded with a constant tempest.”

“But you’re here,” I reminded him, pointing at him and the diamond watch he had practically bought for me. 

Within Stormy Beach and this skyscraper, my full self exists. But outside of these premises, only slivers of my abilities can escape. Which is where you come in.

“Ever since my banishment, my sole mission has been to bring down Mount Olympus and destroy everyone living on it by casting the execration spell. But since I can’t very much do anything, I need someone on the outside to do it for me.”

The world started spinning. “You don’t mean me, do you?”

The Devil chuckled. “Oh, I do mean you. The execration itself is very simple; all you need to do is find the god’s shadow and recite an incantation to store it to a solid, like a stone or a plank of wood. After that, you need to demolish the solid. Luckily for us, I know the incantation and the location of the god’s shadow; in fact, Zeus’s shadow is hidden under Hampstead Heath, which is an hour’s walk from here.”

My hot chocolate nearly made a return. “I’m not going to execrate Zeus because of a vendetta you have against him!”

The room blackened, and ice crystals pierced through my whipped cream cone. The Devil’s gripped me by the shoulder, his hand more frozen than Antarctica. 

“I don’t need to remind you of what I have in possession, do I?” he snarled, shoving me onto the ground. He placed his left boot onto my stomach, slowly adding pressure to it. “I have your soul, Samael, what your existence is built out of. What do you think will happen if I destroy it?”

“Don’t!” I shrieked. 

Faint light glinted off of the Devil’s smirk. “It sounds like we have a deal then.”

He conjured up a black book and a stone and tossed them to me. “The incantation is written on the thirty-ninth page. Find the only sycamore inside the Heath, place a block of stone in front of the sycamore where it can absorb moonlight, and recite the incantation. You mustn’t take any pauses, or else the execration will fail. When the incantation is finished, the stone should be pure white. Bring it back to me, and I’ll handle things from there.”

Before I left the skyscraper, the Devil locked eyes with me. “Remember, your entire existence is within my control.”

***

I found the sycamore tree in the dead centre of Hampstead Heath. A blood moon glared down from the sky, bathing the field in an eerie maroon glow. Combined with the absence of the wind, the dead stillness transformed Hampstead Heath into a cemetery. 

As the Devil had instructed, I placed the stone in front of the tree where enough moonlight shined onto it. I then opened up the black book to the incantation and began to read. 

“Hinc, umbra dei, lux sancta, vitaque dei essentia, Hoc solido penitus penitusque recondetur. Voluntate ipsius diaboli, hunc deum exsecratum a facie terre irrevocabiliter et perpetuo, destructo solido, annuntiabo.”

As I chanted, light streamed from the sycamore into the stone, where it began to lighten the stone’s dark grey hue, slowly morphing into a luminescent white. Meanwhile, the tree leaves started to wither, the trunk cracked and shrunk, and its snaky roots began to squirm out of the soil, gradually coiling up around the dying tree. 

However, as the stone brightened and the tree shriveled, I wondered how justified I was in execrating the King of All Gods. Sure, the Devil would erase my entire existence if I didn’t do as he wanted me to, but there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t in the future, even if I did do as he wished. 

The Devil had warned me that the execration would fail if I paused. Should I stop the execration and risk my own life?

The last light streamed from the tree, and the tree began to collapse, while the stone blindingly glowed as bright as the Sun. 

With a heavy heart, I stopped chanting. 

The rays of light froze before the stone started to quiver. After five seconds, the brilliance of the stone began to flow back into the sycamore, resurrecting it. New leaves sprouted in places of withered ones, the trunk thickened, and roots burrowed deep underground. 

As the stone returned to its grey hue, I turned towards Stormy Beach, for the last thing I had to settle. 

***

The tempest seemed to rage with more fervor as I approached the skyscraper. Lightning struck a nearby tree, lighting it up like a candle. 

Before I took another step, a black vulture landed next to me, its eyes burning with a deep violet fire. Its beak was gnarled and rotting, and its talons were daggers, stabbing the sand.

“You,” it snarled, and it morphed into the Devil. “I will erase you after what you did.”

“You won’t,” I corrected, trying to stabilise my trembling hands. 

A frozen smile stretched across his face. “And why do you think I won’t?”

I set the stone on the beach, in line with the skyscraper and under the light from the blood moon. 

“No!” The Devil lashed out a leg to kick the stone over, but in the swirling sandstorm, he lost his footing and splattered to the ground. 

“You will not erase me because I am going to execrate you,” I explained. “Thanks for the lesson, by the way.”

I began the incantation. 

The Devil reared his back and roared, morphing into his true form: a winged, black bull with a violet trident. He hurled the trident at me, but it vanished into the glowing stone, growing brighter by the moment. 

“I can still destroy your soul,” the Devil snarled as his tail began to inch towards the stone. He clutched a sphere of cyan light in his right hand–my soul, presumably. 

My thoughts arced through the air like lightning. So be it. We’ll both burn away. 

The final rays of light streamed from the building and the Devil as I finished the spell. The stone was as white as snow, piercing through the darkness like a beacon. 

As I watched, the faded Devil began crushing the sphere of light, slowly dissolving me. 

The final step of the execration was to destroy the stone by using a command word. 

The Devil and I, both disintegrating away, met each other’s eyes. 

“Goodbye,” I saluted. 

“I detest you,” he growled, flinging the shattered sphere onto the ground. 

The stone detonated.