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halfpricelint · 7 years

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Satan’s Little Helper, Part I

A small blue LED ticked on and off from the top of the smartphone. The Devil turned his attention from his paperwork to the shining black surface. He took a deep breath.

It can wait. Probably just one of the Holy Ghost’s damn chain letters.

He turned back to the neat and tidy rows and columns of printed out spreadsheets and forms. Aides had tried to get him to go digital for decades now, but he wasn’t about to ruin a millennia-old system. This did nothing to stem the tide of tech-savvy sinners badgering him to change. After all, this was hell.

The LED kept blinking. Satan shook his head and rotated in his chair away from the annoyance. Even with it out of sight, he could see it flashing in his mind. A metronome tap-tap-tapping away in a rhythm out of sync with his heartbeat. That lumpy meat pump–the one his colleagues said he didn’t have–tried in vain to catch up with the rhythm. He felt a bead of sweat pool around the base of his horns.

“Fuck it.” He groaned.

Lucifer set the documents down in order before reaching for his phone. With a click of the home button, the screen lit up to reveal a notification bubble.

“New Summoning Requested.” It read.

Satan pitched his head up toward the ceiling and grunted in exasperation. God and Jesus got to choose their gigs and which prayers to answer. He had to answer at the beck and call of anyone with a mastery of stars and circles.

With a long sigh he pushed himself away from the table and out of his office chair. His back ached. A migraine pounded at his eyes and forehead from the inside. Lucifer grabbed his cloak from a coat rack and stomped out of his chambers.

Down the hallway there was a room. Inside stood a stout and sturdy soul manning the portal between Hell and Earth. He fidgeted violently. In an afterlife where sleep and time don’t exist, boredom is a useful means of torture. An eternity with only guilt for entertainment was sufficient to punish most souls. As Satan opened the room, the attendant chuckled under a labored sigh.

“I get to do something? How wonderful.”

“Yes,” Satan replied, “I need to visit a summoning.”

He slid his phone out of his pocket and unlocked it. Turning away from the fascinated eyes of the portal guard, he tapped the notification to see where the summoning had occurred. Somewhere in the middle of Montana. Another tap revealed the coordinates, which Satan showed the attendant.

“Yeah, alright.” The attendant grunted.

Lucifer waited for the spirit to do something, but they both stood in silence.

“Take me to this place. To these coordinates.” He demanded.

“I don’t feel like it.”

“I don’t care.”

“You make us all do your bidding and then you torture us for it.”

“Well, yeah.” Satan shrugged. “This is Hell. What did you expect? Now open the portal.”

“I don’t want to.”

The migraine throbbed through Satan’s head. He placed his hand in the pocket of his cloak and fingered the trigger of a device. It was designed to inflict massive spiritual pain. Like sticking a finger into a light socket on earth, but through the soul. He had nicknamed it “Sparky.” When he was younger, the Devil used Sparky often. These days, he used more precise methods.

“Then you really should have thought of that before you cheated on your wife with a third-grader, Hans. By the way, she’s here, too. Mostly thanks to the damage you did to her. Shall I arrange a reunion party for the two of you?”

“Oh go fuck yourself.”

“I’m fine, but maybe you should have considered that option back on earth. Probably would have saved you all of this.”

Hans’ eyebrow flinched. Satan grinned cruelly and stepped toward Hans, backing him against the wall and towering over him.

“Do you know why I station you here, Hans? Not because I need you to open the portal. I can do that on my own. I put you here so you can watch me travel across the entire world, exploring destinations you always dreamed of on earth. Every site you wanted to see, every mountain you wanted to climb, every shore you saw from your ship but never visited.” He lowered his voice to a whisper, leaning even closer to a squirming Hans. “I want you to watch me beat you to every last one of them. To know I got there first. To know that I’m a better explorer than you.”

Hans tried to spit in the Devils face, but nothing emerged from his incorporeal form. The return to reality seemed to hollow him out somehow. Even more so when the tears couldn’t come either. Satan grinned and took a step back, folding his arms.

“Ah, masculinity is a funny thing. No shame at wounding your wife or raping a child, but chip away at a man’s ego and he crumbles.” Satan stepped back under the portal and touched the round frame with his hand, unlocking the machine in the process. “Now be a dear and do the one thing you can do for the rest of eternity.”

Hans continued sobbing, tearless and snotless. He punched in the numbers from the phone, and the machine roared to life. Satan smiled and turned to Hans.

“What a good boy. I’ll be sure to get you something from the gift shop.”

Satan pulled the portal down over himself calmly. Hans wasn’t the first soul he’d decimated. He took less satisfaction from the pain he had caused as much as the completion of a job well done.

My job is to punish the wicked. He reminded himself. And I’m good at it.

#satan's little helper #longform #pilot

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