The Hell You Say!

So, the demon was getting very annoyed with my attitude, as I had already likened his appearance to the traditional image of a devil, with the horns and Pan-like lower extremities, and his sulfuric stench. I said he looked like that devil-like creature being accosted by the handsome gentleman in the cover art of the album A Trick of The Tail. He seemed to take great pleasure in correcting me by explaining that my vision of his appearance was due to my own prejudices of how a demon should look. He literally looked the way I wanted him to look. He haughtily declared that he was actually quite a beautiful fallen angel, and his kind had gotten a bad rep over the millenia with all the Church propaganda and the very fanciful and horribly inaccurate illustrations by those 'snooty monks'.

I was in that hotel room with that demon to get the proverbial scoop for my blog. Something new, something big, something no one has ever been able to get. What did I know of demons? I just wanted to get a sense of what they were about, what was their existence like? He was busy giving me a brief history of their eternal battle with the angels. A lot of the boring he smote this, they begat that stuff.

I then made the comment that Good must always triumph over Evil. Big mistake. He got hot, and smelled like it.

“That is superhero movie horseshit!”, he snorted. “Its sole purpose is to perpetuate the Big Lie! You see, Good and Evil must remain in perfect balance. Like a ledger, every single act of Good must be countered by an equal act of Evil. The Universe must remain in balance!”

“Wait,” I said, “You mean you and your kind can't be destroyed? You can't be defeated once and for all?”

He looked at me as if I just crawled out of cheese.

“Physics, you dumb human! Mass can't be destroyed, only converted to energy. You haven't the knowledge yet to convert energy to mass directly. Only...” the demon winced, “He is capable of that! What I am saying is that it is impossible in this reality to have Good without Evil. This is the great dichotomy you must live with. Male and Female, Up and Down, Day and Night, Inside, Out, without it the Universe can't operate.”

“I think I get it,” I admitted. “But, what if... what if Good and Evil were to... I dunno... get together and make peace or something?”

The demon flew into something between a rage and a panic. He got so rank it made my eyes sting to the point of blindness, and I choked on the fumes of the cloud of stench his mood created. He almost literally bounced around the room, screeching so my ears felt like bleeding.

“Are you INSANE?”, he screamed. “Do you know what that would do to your world??? To MY world??? You are fooling with fundamental forces! Like an infant who found the button to his father's atomic bomb! You FOOL!”

I was taken aback by the ferocity of his reply, and, frankly, more than a little nauseated. I didn't think my question was unreasonable, if admittedly naïve. I pushed him for an explanation.

“I said, the Universe can only exist with opposing forces counteracting each other in perpetuity. This keeps everything in Balance. A very specific Balance. You tip that even a tiny iota in either direction, and the whole of Existence will spin out of control, and rip apart like a cow in a blender!” I looked at him, my brows furrowed. “Okay,” he said, “A really big blender! Think, Human, think!” He stormed about, his hooves clip-clopping angrily on the tiled floor. His clawed hands flailed about as he paced back and forth, the fumes wafting behind him as a cloud that hung on to his arched, burnt-sienna back.

“Imagine the worst way to die! Ripped to shreds one atom, one molecule at a time! Now, multiply that by a billion! That's just a miniscule idea of how painful your demise would be!”

I chose that moment to make a snarky remark. “Worse than Hell, huh?”

The demon spun around and lunged to within a millimeter from my nose, his breath making me want to retch. “Yessssss,” he hissed, his eyes burning into mine, “Hell would be a vacation to Six Flags by comparison!” His clawed hand waved as he strode away from my turning-green face. “Get it over with...”

I was involuntarily bent over as he spoke, trying to say 'what do you mean' when I tasted the bile and sulfur rise in my throat. I dry-heaved until I thought my body would remain in that hunched position forever. It was his hellish-no-pun-intended breath. He reminded me that it was all my own fault for thinking him to that shape. He then suggested that I perform some kind of meditation to dispel my preconceptions of what he appears to be. I wanted him to remain devilish, I needed him to remain devilish. I was pretty sure he knew it.

After a while, I managed to clear my throat and asked, “So... Are we doomed to repeat our actions, good or bad, for eternity?”

I didn't think it possible, but for a moment, the demon's countenance actually changed so that he appeared almost angelic and the expression on his face was one of compassion. “I'm sorry,” he said in an unexpectedly gentle voice, “That is exactly the nature of Existence as you and I know it...”

A feeling of profound sadness washed over me, as the realization that we are indeed immortal souls bore into my consciousness, but souls doomed to an eternity of a never-ending battle with forces we would never completely understand. The demon was slowly returning to his former state of ugliness, but with a softer expression on his less-evil looking face, and did I detect regret in his fiery red eyes?

I thought maybe it would have been better that I hadn't insisted on calling him up to interview him. A simple request, I had thought. I didn't want to exact revenge on someone who had wronged me, or place a curse anyone I hated, I just wanted to ask some questions. I got something I didn't expect, and now I wish I hadn't. I got a glimpse of Reality. And it scared the Hell out of me.