I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (9 page)

Bugger. You see what happens, I only mentioned the
woman because I meant to tell you that's how Gunn got the
flat. Now my screen's ambushed by maudlin guff.

Salutary should other demonic presences pass this way:
manifestly you can't squat in someone's body without some
of their life filtering through to yours. It's been the toughest part of the whole trip, so far, accommodating Gunn's leftovers; approximate omniscience notwithstanding, I never
quite know which unfortunate tic or nasty habit of his I'm
going to run into next. Couldn't they have picked someone
else? Some rock star with an entourage of sycophants? Some
sheikh with a hooker habit? Some coke-fiend with a yacht?
Anyone would've been better than this noncer with his
objective correlatives and his Earl Grey and his sorry-ass
bank balance.

On the subject of Gunn's bank balance - two words: Oh
dear.

Mrs Karp is Declan Gunn's Account Supervisor at the
NatWest. The day our boy bought the razor blades a letter
arrived from Mrs Karp. Its tone was stern but regretful (the
next was just stern) and it requested the return of Gunn's
cheque book and cheque card, cut in half, immediately. It
pointed out, regretfully, that Gunn was upwards of 03,500
overdrawn (£2,500 over his limit) and that despite repeated
efforts on her part to get him to come in and discuss the situation he had been unwilling to do anything but continue
spending money he didn't have. Which left her no alternative, etc.

Which left me no alternative to a bit of hands-on, you'll
be delighted to hear: get out of Gunn's body for an hour or
so, nip round to Mrs Karp's semi in Chiswick, scare the
living rectum out of her and get her to do something creative with Gunn's balance. But if there's a flaw in a simple
plan it's usually fundamental, and the flaw in this simple plan
was no exception: it hurt so bad the minute I exited Gunn's
flesh that I shot straight back in without even leaving the flat.

You can see Someone's thinking behind this, can't you? I
get so used to the absence of angelic pain that even living out
my days in Gunn's flatulent corpus is preferable to the flames and nukes of disembodiment. God's coup: Lucifer's voluntary demotion to the life of a penniless pen-pusher in
Clerkenwell; maybe the Old Fruit's developing a sense of
irony after all. One of the things I never tire of (it's a prob-
1ern, for eternal superbeings, tiring of things) is my own
astonishment at how stupid He must think I am. Is He arrogant enough to think that a brief sojourn in the dank and
clunking rucksack of Gunn's body ...?

Relax, fans. Come August I'll slip into that pain like
Biggles into his flying jacket. Meantime, I'll find ways
around things.

'My Lord, I didn't recognize you.'

Nelchael. There aren't many you can trust. Nelchael's
one of them. My numbers man. Most of the world's numbers are bound by God to make sense. Occasionally there are
glitches. It's Nelchael's job - when it suits us - to exploit
them.

`Account number 443U0217336. See what you can do.
Doesn't have to be millions. Fifty grand should do it. Got
that?'

'My Lord Lucifer, I -'

`You remember, Nelchael, what I told you before I left?'
Not easy to maintain dictatorial dignity when you're sitting
on a moth-eaten couch smoking a Silk Cut and biting your
nails, looking for all the world like that sallow chimpanzee,
Declan Gunn.

'That this mission was top secret, my Lord.'

`Top /iickint' secret, Nelks,' I said. `And that's the way it's
going to stay. Do I make myself clear?'

'Yes, my Lord.'

`Apart from you, no one else knows of my business here
on earth. If I returned to Hell to find that word had spread -' `My Lord, I assure you -'

`To find that idle tongues were wagging, then my reasoning, Nelchael, would lead nee to conclude that you had
betrayed my trust, would it not?ff

`My Lord I exist to do your bidding.'

'Yes, that's right. Keep in mind Gabreel.'

Gabreel disobeyed my ruling placing a moratorium on
incubism back in Ancient Egypt. Disobeyed it royally, you
might say. He fucked Cleopatra. (Gabreel was an inveterate
letch, of course, and Cleo couldn't keep her femurs crossed
for five minutes at a time - it was inevitable.) I had to make
an example of him. Ugly. I know gentle Nelchael has nightmares to this day. Gabreel himself got over it centuries ago.
Besides, I made it up to him in the fifteenth: a long weekend
with Lucrezia Borgia.

I should explain. It's been a problem, this business of angels
having sex with mortal women. Not that all angels are
straight: Usiel's queer as a cat-fart; so are Busasejal and
Ezequeel, or Eezaqueen as we call him, to mention but three
of thousands. Most of us, when it cones down to it, will
enjoy carnal congress with the ladies and the gents. Same
goes for you, really - boarding school, stir, Navy -just needs
the right conditions to bring it out. Plus, queer consorting
has one huge advantage over straight action: no issue.

... the sons of God saw the daughters of men that
they were fair; and they took them wives of all which
they chose ...

says Genesis 6:2. The `sons of God' were angels. My lot
(His lot acquired neither the taste nor the opportunity); the
`daughters of men' were, naturally, mortal women. What you're looking at here - though no one seems to notice - is
crazy copulation between renegade angels and up-for-it
earth girls. A pack of trouble. There are two ways of having it
off with mortals. The first is incubism (a word you haven't
invented yet but certainly should have, given the amount of
humping we've done), the second possession. With incubism, the angel stays an angel; with possession, the angel
slips into a human host to get the job done. Incubism's decal,
possession's bill roast. You lot do it with each other and half
the time barely feel a thing. When we get involved ... Ivah.
Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. But as I've
said, possession's no mean trick. Incubism, on the other
hand, was something most of the fallen could turn their
hands to, and was still popular despite its want of salt. The
girls seemed to enjoy it, too, though they went through the
whole business somnambulistically, waking flushed and
guilty - `you wouldn't believe the dream I had last night,
Mari . . ' - not to mention the risk they ran of being burned
at the stake if word got out.

But there were two b problems with inter-being highjinx. The first was what became known as carnal dementia.
An angel in this condition would become obsessed with his
earthly squeeze, at best to the point of neglecting his proper
functions and at worst to the point of leaving his post altogether to moon around the beloved, pining to become
human himself. Unacceptable, obviously. It's one thing to dip
your angelic wick, it's quite another to start dreaming of settling down in a two-bedroomed wattle and daub in Ur. That
would have been grounds for a ban sooner or later, even
without the second problem, the Nephilini. Genesis 6:4:

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also
after that, when the Sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bear children to them, the
same became mighty men which were of old, men of
renown ...

Rubbish. There were no giants in the earth in those or any
other days, and the idea that the Nephilim, the fruit of spiritflesh coupling, became `mighty men' is one of the most
preposterous distortions in the Old Testament. Through
some occult law governing congress between the Seen and
the Unseen realms, the Nephilim were dreary, whinging,
neurotic, useless, ugly little cretins. It's one of the few
remaining mysteries for me, why those kids turned out so
utterly without merit and aesthetic appeal. If they'd been
morally good, I'd have allowed them to survive in the hope
of corrupting them. If they'd been morally bad, I'd have
allowed them to live on the basis of their contribution to
fucking up the world. But they were so utterly, solipsistically
miserable and boring that they were, frankly, an embarrassment. It's amazing, isn't it: you think you're beyond
embarrassment, what with being Purely Evil and all that.
Then these_farking whining, self-obsessed freaks turn up as
the issue of your lust and it just makes you ... ugh. Never
mind. Point is I wiped them out. One Mr Sheen-style sweep
across the surface of the earth, and the excrescent offences
were gone . .

Or so I thought. I've no conclusive proof, but I've long
suspected that some of my brethren - no more than a handful - somehow managed to snaffle their wretched offspring
away, concealed in some cranny from the scythe of my
wrath. Every now and then I'll spot someone (a Fleetwod
Mac documentary, an Elton John special - the music industry does seem suspiciously fertile in this respect) and wonder
whether Nephilim blood doesn't still course through human veins. I keep thinking I should do something about it, but,
you know, I'm so busy all the time ...

`Now, Nelchael. What of your other charge?'

`Charge, my Lord?'

I rolled Gunn's eyes. (I'm getting the hang of these gestures. That Gallic shrug-with-downturned mouth's one of
my favourites just now. That and the tut-with-eye-roll I'd
just delivered to my servant.) `Give me strength,' I said,
under my breath. `Your other task, idiot. Your other errand.!

`Of course, my Lord. Forgive nee. I see, I see what you -'

`Have you found it yet?'

'Alas, my Lord, Limbo is deceptively large. The ... the
unbaptised infants alone number -'

`Yes yes, I know all that. Time, Nelkers, is most definitely not on our side. Keep looking. And bring me word
immediately you find it. Understood?'

`Understood, Sire.'

`One more thing.'

`My Lord?'

`Keep an eye on Astaroth. I want names and rank of all
those closest to him. Now go.'

I checked the balance the following morning. 079,666.00.
Nice touch, that. Made me smile. I celebrated with a fry-up
at a Leather Lane greasy before hitting Oxford Street for a
sartorial shopping spree and a bit of how's your father.

Now this might come as a shock, so pour yourself a double
and drop your buttocks into a beanbag.

Ready?

Okay. Sexual intercourse was not Original Sin.

Truth is Adam and Eve had had sex a few times (how else
were they supposed to multiply, my dear Butthead?); it just
hadn't been much fun. It hadn't been unpleasant, but it hadn't
been sex as you know it. It had been the expression of a
design feature, that's all, like folding one's arms or hiccupping. Adam's tool worked - that is, achieved tumescence
now and again - but of its own accord. He had no feelings
about it one way or the other. Eve, for her part, felt much
the same. She didn't mind. It was just another thing they did
because that was the way they were made. Edenic sex didn't
feel good and didn't feel bad. How times have changed,
n'est-ce pas? Now it feels so gerd. Now it feels so bayered. Yes?
No, really, you're too kind.

`You know you want it you dirty little bitch.'

What astonished both of us was that it came out not as a
sequence of hisses (snakeskin looked good on me, I'd
decided; slithering was my corporeal metier) but as a perfectly
intelligible articulation. For several moments we remained in
surprised silence, Eve lying on the grass looking up at the
glowing fruit, me corkscrewed around the upper trunk with
my neck and head resting close to one of the golden globes.

`A bitch is a female dog,' Eve said, quite sensibly. `And
dirty is before bathing in the river.'

Appalled that I'd wasted the chance for a subtle opening
gambit (don't try that one in the health club bar), I said: `Do
you remember the time before Adam?'

Eve wasn't one of those people who say `What?' when
they've heard you perfectly clearly. She lay blotched with
leaf-shadows, blinking slowly and thinking about it. One
hand ran its fingers through the grass, the other idled on her
midriff.

`Sometimes I think I remember,' she said, not quite looking at me. `But then it evaporates.'

I can't take any credit for foresight or planning, but I can
and will for consummate opportunism. (Did I say I was
omniscient? Not strictly true - but 1 am a hell of an opportunist.) I didn't know what precisely she'd be getting from that
first wet bite and swallow, but I knew generally. Generally
she'd be getting a milder version of the thermonuclear toot
I got when I first recognized myself as free to stand apart
from God. Generally she'd be getting proof that she was her
own woman. Generally she'd be introduced - not before
time I might add - to the superlatively delicious pleasure of disobedience.

It was a long, eloquent seduction. I outdid myself. She
couldn't get over my being able to speak. That, really, was
the thing. The intelligent voice, soliciting her opinion.
Neither God nor Adam had ever bothered. She'd been
trying for some time to get her head - and thereby her
tongue - around the ... the ... I helped her: the inherent
appeal of an arbitrarily proscribed activity? Yes, she agreed, with
charmingly widened eyes and the relief of one Mervyn
Peake fan chancing upon another in an otherwise friendless
place. Yes that's it exactly ... Words opened like flowers
between us, each one releasing the scent of her doubt.
Adam's plodding, unreflexive nature, God's latent disapproval of her body - oh yes, she'd seen Him curling His
lip - her longing for someone to talk to, and not just any
old talk, but talk informed with imagination and ... she
struggled again - a sense of ambiguity, a sense of humour, talk
that reached out beyond the names of things and praise of
God, talk which let you grow as you talked it, that uncovered, that ... explored what was unknown . . . `All the
words seem to belong only to God,' she said, dreamily
twirling a sprig of blossom under her chin. `But perhaps,
they belong to me, too?'