Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“Well, why don’t you tell me what a devil has to go through, then? What are you, anyway? Are you somebody who wiz very bad, or have you always been a devil? You said that you’d answer anything I asked you, so you answer that.”

The devil ground his fangs to glistering pumice, although looking on the bright side, if he absolutely had to chat to this insufferably perky young pyjama-piglet, then it might as well be about something that he never shied from speaking of at length, namely himself.

“Well, since you ask, no. No, I haven’t always been a devil. When the luminescent halo that is space-time rippled out from non-existence, all at once, then I saw the entirety of my immortal being, which included this benighted period that I must spend in service as a lowly fiend. But how I am now is not how I was back at the start of things, nor is it how I shall be when I’m further down my road. Back at my outset, I was but a glorious part, one of a myriad comprising a far greater entity that basked in simple being, there before the advent of both world and time. I was a builder back then, if you can believe that. Had the white frock and the billiard cue and everything.

“You have to bear in mind that this was back before there was time as we know it now, or a material universe of any sort. There wasn’t any trouble. Naturally, that didn’t last. It was decided higher up that part of the great being of which I was one component should be pushed down two or three dimensions to create a plane of physical existence. In effect, some of us were demoted from a world of naught but light and bliss into this new construction, this new realm of bodily sensation, of emotions and the endless torrent of delights and torments that those things entail. I’ll grudgingly admit that this disastrous reshuffle might well have been necessary, in some way that we who laboured in the lower ranks were not aware of. Even so, it bloody hurt.

“I’m not complaining, mind you. There were others far worse off than I. You might recall I mentioned Satan earlier, and said you wouldn’t recognise him if you saw him. That’s because he was the first and greatest to be cast down into emptiness, his fiery energies cooled and condensed to matter, that sublime magnificence reduced to backfill. Take a peek beneath us at the tanks we’re flying over, at the apertures that look down on the mortal plane. In their depths you can make out the contorted coral stems that are in fact the living as seen without time. Their luminous and gem-like qualities have earned these growths, amongst the spirit population of Mansoul, the name of ‘jewellery’. That’s not, however, what we devils call them. We refer to them as ‘Satan’s Guts’. That’s him, in every shuddering, mysterious particle of the corporeal universe. That’s what became of him, of his immortal blazing body. Like I say, I got off light, comparatively speaking.”

Unstuck Sam O’Day, an oriental fighting kite of threatening device, fluttered in silence for a moment down the Attics of the Breath, along the starlit stretch of passage that was Wednesday night, towards its sunset end. He’d quite upset himself with all that talk about the shining hero who’d become the solid world, become the Satan, the great obstacle, the stumbling block. Still, the distressing tale had kept his paying passenger from kicking up a fuss … and Michael Warren would at some point pay his fare as they’d agreed, the devil would make sure of it. He hadn’t made his mind up as to how yet, that was all. Mindful in case too long a pause should launch a fresh barrage of questions and complaints, the fiend resumed his narrative.

“So there we were, in a dawn world constructed from the living substance of our former governor, still reeling from the onslaught of new feelings and perceptions, left entirely to our own devices, or as much as anybody can be in a predetermined universe. Those were great times to be alive in, I can tell you. They still are, if I fly eastward far enough along the temporal axis of my being. All of those tremendous days still going on, back where we’re all still young and angry and invincible.

“We soon found out, from one of the more easily-duped builders, what this whole new earthly plane had been created for. It turned out it was something called organic life. This, in our eyes, was an exceptionally tricky form of muddy puddle, though in your terms it was probably your trillion-times-great-grandmother. But long before anything even faintly like a human being turned up, we realised that this fleshy business was the only game in town. However, credit where it’s due, it wasn’t until people scrambled wet and shivering from the gene-pool that we knew we’d hit the jackpot. Naturally, by then we’d seen a preview of the whole thing played out on the symbol-level, with the man and woman in their garden and all that, but actually, if anything the squalid mess of the reality was even better.

“Due respect to the symbolic version, though. It had its high points. The young lovely cast initially as Adam’s wife before Eve got the part was a real shocker by the name of Lil. I later married her myself, after she’d walked out on her husband in the first celebrity divorce, with incompatibility as the main reason cited. What had happened was that Adam, being up here on the symbol plane, had eyesight that perceived the world with four dimensions. It was like when you were looking down upon your house just now, and you could view your home’s interior by peering round the walls, around an edge that isn’t usually there. That’s how it went with Lil and Adam. His first glimpse of her was a disaster. He could see around her skin, around the muscles underneath, around her bowels to where the slow chyme moved within them. He was sick all up the Tree of Knowledge. Lil was understandably offended, and went off to copulate with monsters, of which, luckily, I was amongst the very first.”

The King of Wrath and Michael Warren glided down the length of Wednesday, with the sky beyond the curved glass canopy an overcast and nacreous grey, the lines and angles of its hyper-cumuli limned in a ghostly pink. The tartan package slapdash Sam O’Day was carrying appeared to be absorbed in the unfolding of the fiend’s autobiography and, grateful for the silence, the infernal eminence decided to continue with his deadtime story.

“Back near the beginning, there’s a patch where me and Lil are married, but it doesn’t last. She was too clingy when she could get suction, and I was too headstrong with too many heads. Besides, the human race was waiting just a little further up the line, with all those comely beauties. Human women were a revelation to me, I can tell you, after Lil. Once you’ve had vertebrate there’s no return, and once you look at something with a backbone, there’s no looking back. You’re only young, so you won’t understand about all this, but trust me. I’m the devil, and I know whereof I speak.

“Of all the fiends in Hell, I like to think I was the most romantic and the most appreciative of female charms. In Persia, long ago, there’s an occasion where I fall horns over tail in love with an exotic flower named Sara, daughter of a chap named Raguel. You should have seen how shy I was when I was courting her. I’d give her precious gifts and hardly let her get a glimpse of me, just leave some sign to tell her I’d been there: a necklace resting on a silken cushion, possibly, while part of the room’s carpet was on fire nearby. When finally and bashfully I introduced myself to her, as I thought in the manner of the Beauty and the Beast, her overwrought reaction was no idyll from a fairy tale, I can assure you. Barely were the words ‘I love you’ spoken by one of my mouths than my beloved suffered what I think you humans call a stroke. It wasn’t serious, and after a few days she could speak properly again, at which point she began describing her encounter with me in the most unflattering of terms.