THE DIVIL

In the days when I was a man of the cloth I would bless the dying before they passed on and I’d often be called out at all hours to do so. It was on one such night that I met him. ‘Who?’ you ask. I’ll tell you but brace yourself before I do. Are you prepared? Right. I met the Divil.

In this account, the one I am about to relate, you will hear how I got the better of the Divil but this was so to his annoyance that he later returned and got the better of me and the holy church itself.

Twas a dark and stormy night, the roof rattled and nervous cows could be heard berating the elements from the surrounding sheds. I was in the vestry drinking cans when the call came. ‘Father Fugger, you must come, my father has taken a fall on the road and I fear it may be his last.’

I got into my automobile and took the road out of Nathaer. It was at the junction where you turn for Gooly that the Divil stepped out in front of the vehicle. He looked square at me. Square at me mind, not in a triangular or roundabout circular way. You could tell it was the Divil because it wasn’t anyone else.
‘Are you the Divil?’, I asked.
‘I am that’, said the Divil.
‘And what is it you’d be wanting?’ I asked again, as a kind of follow up question.
‘I intend to impede your progress so that I may lay claim to the soul of the man who took the fall upon the road’, said the Divil.
‘And what if I say that you will not impede my progress?’ I asked in response to his second answer, the one he just gave.
‘I will call you a fucker’, said the Divil.
‘I do not like that’, I told him.
‘Few do’, he said and laughed a fierce laugh that I could only describe as fierce and would be reluctant to lay any other adjective before it.

I considered saying a few decades of the rosary but there was not time for that so I drove over the Divil and reversed upon him also. I repeated this vehicular grievance somewhere between fifteen and twenty times, maybe more than that. The Divil howled like cat in the act of Godless congress.
‘You have been run over now’, I said to the Divil.
‘I have noticed that and it vexes me greatly’, replied the Divil.
‘Am I safe to continue my errand?’ I requested of him.
‘You are that for I am royally fucked now here on the road and doubt I will ever rise again but let me inform you now that I will have revenge upon yourself and your institution’, he said to me and I drove away.

I reached the man who had taken the fall on time and gave him the rites and watched as he ascended to heaven. ‘I see before me the Lord God and several dead celebrities’, he said before he died in peace. I returned to the vestry to resume the drinking of cans.

Upon arrival at the vestry, I found the Divil taking a shite in the tabernacle.
‘I saw you mangled and banjaxed upon the road, what are you doing here?’ I asked him.
‘There is many of me and that was only one of the many of me that you did injure upon the road’, the Divil informed me.
‘Will you desist from befouling the tabernacle?’ I asked of him.
‘I will not’, he said.
‘And why will you not?’ I asked because this had clearly become a conversation of sorts.
‘Because it pleases me’, he said.
‘Is there anything I can do to stop you?’ I asked then, another question because this night required many.
‘You must give me your cans’, said the Divil.
‘I will not give you my cans because they are an immense source of pleasure to me’, I told the Divil.
‘Well’, he said, ‘if you will not give up the cans perhaps you will give up your vows to prevent me depositing another sulphuric log into this most holy of cabinets’.
‘That I will not do either’, I said to the Divil.
‘Then perhaps you will give me your video cassette with the Ukrainian twins in the bath’, bargained the horned menace (i.e. the Divil).
‘I have no such video cassette’, I said.
‘You do indeed and watch it often’, he pointed out.
I could not lie again for to lie to the Divil is to play by the rules of the game that it his intention to make you play by the rules of.
‘You may have the tape’, I said to the Divil and went and got it for him and he took it and, the next day, posted it to the Bishop who requested I leave the parish and be replaced by another who was said to have had a great fondness for young people. It was this fondness that brought about a scandal that saw mass attendance in the locality fall by some considerable measure. The Divil did indeed have his revenge and cannot be bested long. I know that now and it is for that reason I have become his servant. All hail the Divil! The Divil is great! Let’s hear it for the Divil!

That is the end of my story. I will now resume the drinking of my cans. Good day to you.