NOTE: For a far more chilling account of a similar obsession, one must read The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.
Dramatis Calavicci
He was ready. Doctor Samuel Beckett, that simpering, altruistic young fool, would rue the day he had stepped into that accelerator. The plan had been worked out to perfection. The computer would be easy enough to confound: computers were, after all, one of his best tools. The remainder of the scheme was more complicated, but therefore that much more exquisite. It all hinged upon his acting abilities.
Fortunately, he had always been an excellent actor.
He could scarcely believe his luck. Usually the Enemy was more careful than this. For once He had played right into his clutches… it was almost too good to be true.
You see, Doctor Beckett was not quite alone on his journey. He had one contact. A guide. An "observer", Beckett called him. The only person who could see the imbecilic physicist for who he was. A person only Beckett could see and hear. His trusty hologram. A stray dog Beckett had taken in one day when no one else was foolish enough to touch one so cursed.
For he was cursed, in the sense the humans used the word. He was cursed in the sense that Someone had been watching him very closely almost from the moment of his conception.
Because of that, this Someone was very ready for what he was about to do. Just to reassure himself, however, before he made the—as it were—leap, he reviewed a few choice encounters. It did wonders for one's confidence.
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The little boy sat quietly in a corner of the flat's shabby living room. He was playing with an empty tin can and a handful of pebbles gathered on one of the trips to buy bread. He very carefully set each pebble into the can, careful not to make a sound. When they were all resting in the bottom, he drew them out again, one by one, with almost painful meticulousness, and set them gently on the floor.
He had been at it most of the afternoon, one small knee tucked up to his chest as he held his thigh against his empty stomach. He was hungry, but he was trying so bravely to hide it. His Momma's milk had dried up a few weeks ago as she began to succumb to malnutrition, and abruptly the small child was no longer immune to the economics of the household. His parents' poverty was now his poverty. Their hunger was his hunger.
He was only sixteen months old: a tiny little thing with enormous brown eyes that seemed to grow larger every day in his progressively thinning face. His hair was dark and curling. He wore a ragged dress that had probably started its life as the rudest play garment of one of the little princes of Fifth Avenue, decades before the boy's parents had been born. It was thin and shabby, and not really adequate to protect his small body from the draughts that crept in through the windows of the tenement apartment. He was shivering a little, and his wee hands quivered as he began his simple game over again.
In the next room, his mother sat at the rickety table, staring at a handful of small coins. Eighteen cents and a rusty kopeck: all the money they had in the world. Somehow it had to be sufficient to keep the two of them alive until her husband returned from Vermont. She had been struggling alone for almost a month, trying to make the meager wages he had brought back from his last job stretch as far as she could. But rent took so much, and they she had started to get sick, and now she couldn't nurse the baby…
The burden of worry furrowed her brows. She was so close to the edge. So close to breaking. All it would take was one more little problem, however insignificant, to make her snap.
Suddenly a sharp, frightened cry tore the air. It dissolved quickly into loud, bewildered sobs and plaintive cries of, "Momma! Momma!" The weary young woman sprung to her feet so quickly that she almost fell into a swoon of inanition. Angered by her own weakness, she moved into the living room.
The boy was sitting on the floor, his game abandoned, wailing desolately. "Momma!" he cried again.
She gathered him into her arms, trying to soothe him. "Ssh, Albert, what's wrong?" she asked. He cried all the louder. "What is it, baby?" Still, the sobs grew in volume and intensity, and the bony little body writhed against her ribs, fighting her. Tears coursed down the pale cheeks, and the small face was contorted in agony.
As her efforts to quiet the child produced no results, the young mother grew more and more discouraged. The accumulated worries of the last weeks began to reach their breaking point. She tried one more frantic, "What, Albert? What is it?". Then she slapped the child sharply.
"Be quiet!" she cried. "Be quiet!"
The child tried to stop, but the pain started again, and in his already beleaguered state he couldn't resist it. He howled all the louder.
"Stop it! Be quiet!" the woman shrieked, marching through to the closet-like back room that their small family had not yet any use for. She dropped the child on the hard, cold floor. "Be quiet, Albert!" she sobbed, and she slapped him again. Then she left the room, slamming the door and leaving the child alone in the darkness. Back in the kitchen, her eyes fell on the half-ounce of bread, the last food left in the house. She had been saving it for the child's dinner, but in her moment of weakness and despair, she took it up and devoured it herself.
In the back room, shivering and hurting and frightened, the boy subsisted into silent, heartbroken sobs. He was a very intelligent child, precocious and eloquent, but he hadn't been able to defend himself. He was only a baby, and he didn't know how to describe the sudden pains that had seized him in the living room. Sharp, stabbing pains in all the most sensitive places of his tiny body.
Like the deliberate, malicious pinching of cruel and invisible fingers.
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Chromosomes. So tiny, so fragile, so fundamental to the formation of the miserable human creatures. Everything about their mortal lives was determined to some degree by these forty-six delicate strips of protein and sugars. Their lives… and the lives of those around them.
Oogenesis. The birth of the egg. A critical time: perhaps the most critical time. He watched with care as the spindles formed, drawing the chromosomes into even halves. Twenty-three to one pole, and twenty-three to the other. A snip of the cosmic scissors, a flick of the cosmic suture, and there! The cell split into halves… almost. One orb held twenty-two. The other, twenty four.
Had he been human—Hell forbid!—he would have smiled. The overloaded egg moved towards the fallopian tube.
A recipe for a retard.
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He should have known better, he thought as the barefoot little boy threw himself at the bigger lad with a shriek of righteous anger. The Enemy had an infuriating way of twisting these things to His advantage. Unlike His miserable human animals, He didn't see deformities. All He saw where their "souls". It wasn't fair! It just wasn't fair!
Watching the five-year-old's fists pummeling the older boy, he began to despair of turning the little wretch against his imperfect sister. But it might be possible to separate them. There, just up the street, was a shiny new Ford with a row of red books on the back seat. The driver looked around the neighborhood and shook his head.
The man behind the wheel was an old friend. It wasn't hard to put the idea into his head. Maybe that tenement on the corner… the back apartment on the fourth floor…
The encyclopedia salesman pulled over to the curb.
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The wonderful thing about humans was their eagerness for wealth and their eternal willingness to believe in the pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow.
Africa! Ivory! White gold! Forward Romans all! Distant Cathay! Spices! Silks! Men of Italy, go thou east! Venezuela! Virginia! Newfoundland! California!
Saudi Arabia! Oil! Riches for all!
You can't take the kids to the Middle-East. What kind of a father would even think of such a thing? You selfish man. Better if you left them behind. You have to do what's best for them…
Yes, humans are absurdly easy to manipulate…
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"Pop? Pop, can you here me? It's Al…"
The nasal, plaintive cries of a child trying so pathetically to hide his pain.
"Pop… Poppa, please, wake up! Please!"
He tried to approach the boy, striving to whisper the necessary words into his ear. He was rebuffed. The barrier, knit so carefully to protect the fragile, failing flicker of the child's candle of faith, would not let him past. The Enemy was here, safeguarding that last bastion of so-called hope for the boy's religious fervor. If he could be kept from doubting now, the later doubts would be easier to overcome. That couldn't be allowed to happen.
"Poppa, please! Talk to me! Pop, I gotta… Pop, please…"
There were tears in the brown eyes. Now, now would have been the perfect moment, but he was blocked! Prevented at this most crucial moment from toppling the teetering tower of faith!
"Pop…"
The Enemy's sycophants surrounded the boy, sheltering him and trying to bolster him despite his sorrow. He began to despair of reaching in to corrupt the child.
Then he realized with relief akin to glee that the invalid, the dying man, lacked such a fortress. Of course: he had never wavered in his devotion. He had never doubted. There was no reason to guard him.
But the dying man didn't need to doubt. His soul was lost to the Enemy already, and no deathbed reservations would change that now. No, all he needed to do…
…was show a little faith.
He leaned towards the ear of the cancer-ridden man. A tiny prompt, and the dull eyes opened. The failing voice croaked the necessary words.
"Pray… for me, Al. Just… pray for me…"
He watched in satisfaction as the two lights flickered out. The one was the light of the man's life. The other, the failing flame of the boy's faith.
A small victory, but important.
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It wasn't working. It just wasn't working, and he didn't understand why. He had lit a fire in the boy's loins such as few men in history had been afflicted with. Those few had all turned out very nicely: Marcus Antonius, Giovanni of Verona… there was a man in China now, a Mao Tse-Tsung, who was showing a great deal of promise. But this little brat just wasn't cooperating. At the age of sixteen, his count was already well over a dozen, but each successive conquest wasn't making him less respectful of women, the way it should have. He treated each one of his little teenaged concubines like a princess! It was unfathomable. It was disgusting.
Perhaps, then, the thing to do was go after the sister. He couldn't influence her, of course. That was the trouble with the mentally deficient. Too innocent.
It wouldn't be hard, though, to let her die…
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He wouldn't sleep with her! The whelp had slept with more women than some men his age had met, but he wouldn't sleep with her! Marcie Riker, one of his best servants, sure to give the foolish boy a thirst he would never be able to slake, if only he would sleep with her!
Just look at his friend, the intrepid "Chip". Now, that was what sexual desire was meant to be like! Perverse, obsessive, all-consuming. Not flitting fondly from one sweet thing to another and then settling on fidelity, of all vile notions! At least the woman was married…
Chip. Well… perhaps all wasn't lost. How much good could the worthless cur do from the gallows? How much evil could be done in the world by a man who had let his best friend die for a murder that he had committed…
All thoughts of the hooker that the young ensign had been dreaming about vanished, and the black Corvette streaked towards the Officers' Club.
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A sweet little girl. A nurse. A virgin. Loving, compassionate, intelligent. And worst of all, a Christian. It was a nightmare. They had to be separated. He had tried, year after year—six years now he had tried! Yet despite the separations, despite the niggling doubts so carefully planted in the man's mind to disenchant him from the notion of fatherhood and the proportionate broodiness nurtured in her white bosom, despite all this he had been unable to achieve it!
Jamming the controls of the A-4 at the critical moment, however, was infinitely simpler.
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The human creatures were by their very nature hideous and loathsome, but there was something about the form of this battered lieutenant that was beautiful. The twisted ribs, the flayed back, emaciation in every quarter. The dry crusting of dehydration on scabby lips. Filth and misery and despair, deep in an alien jungle. Exquisite. Punishment for long years of resistance. Retribution for almost four decades of refusing to give in to the allures of evil.
He watched smugly as the guards hauled the limp captive from the cage where he had broiled for five long days without food or water, contorted like a cripple, isolated, plagued by insects and tormented by the village children. They dragged him towards the hootch where the young man lay dying, a fever ripping through his body.
He waited eagerly. He knew what would happen. He was privy to the tortured captive's thoughts: to the silent vow that he'd kill or die for a little water. Time for another small, soul-eating victory.
The guards let him fall to the dirt floor, and he lay there, too weak to resist. One of them brought him a bowl with half a cup of tepid, dirty fluid in the bottom. They left it, and locked the prisoners in.
For a moment, the mongrel lay still. Then he raised his aching head and crawled towards the bowl. The observer waited, watching with delight as he lifted the dish to his lips without concern for his dying comrade…
Only it didn't happen. The naked, sunburned prisoner crawled towards the younger one who shivered beneath his black pajama-like garments. Then he watched in horror as the wretch lifted the bowl to the other man's lips, allowing him the first drink. Horror turned to panic as the captive began to bathe the boy's face with what remained: tenderly, gently, with no thought of himself or his own decaying body's needs.
His anger and desperation discharged itself in the only way it could: on the far side of the world, the front left-hand tire of a red convertible fizzled and went flat.
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Nightmares, hallucinations, intrusions. The man couldn't get through an hour without some echo of Vietnam. Some memory of his accursed wife. So he buried the pain, glosssing it over with whatever came to hand. Women, fast cars, bright clothes: the trappings of materialism. Finally, the slow march towards victory!
The sweet siren-song of the bottle. Ah, the joy of watching the man who had resisted so long slowly, surely destroying himself and those who cared about him. One by one they fell away.
At the last, only the whelp himself would be left: bitter, disillusioned, lonely. And angry. So very angry.
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For the target, it had been the day from hell. He, however, could not have been happier. The wretch was so near the edge now that he would be easier to push over it and into the abyss than his harried mother had been, all those years ago.
The stomach wasn't hard to control. A craving for sugar. In his inebriated and long-alcoholic state, the man was malnourished almost to the point of shutting down. It wouldn't be difficult at all…
Unsteady feet found their way to the lab, where a workman had oh, so thoughtlessly abandoned his hammer earlier. Coins in the slot, and the last one… technology was so easy to manipulate! The digital reading did not acknowledge the last dime. The coin return jammed. Simple. Brilliant.
The roar of irrational, feral rage was music that soothed his heart.
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Of course, the victory of that day had been premature. Along had come Beckett. Fifty years of careful maneuvering, and along had come Beckett. The goody-twoshoes. The meddler. The fool.
He would pay. He wasn't going to get away with this. He had put right one wrong too many, and now… he would suffer.
A smile visited the lips. They were familiar lips. How often had he sent them lusting after a woman's soft mouth, only to have the wretch use those same lips to murmur words that made the slut feel she had dignity and worth? These hands, that he had raised more than once in anger, only to have their owner twist them to acts of kindness. Shoulders he had tried to bow with pain and torture and loneliness, but that had always, somehow managed to raise themselves to bear the burdens of others, stoically, uncomplainingly, generously.
Ah, well. It was all the more ironic that these shoulders, these hands and these lips would be the tools used to bring down Samuel Beckett. The foolish time-traveler was about to learn a valuable lesson in helping those specially targeted for misery and downfall. There was poetic justice in the fact that he would take the form of one such mutt in order to teach this. He knew precisely how to act, what to say, how to sound. After all, he had been watching this specimen very closely, almost since the moment of his conception…
He focused carefully, and at once he was there, physically present to Beckett in the form of his best friend.
"Them that dance with the devil," he said, suppressing the delight that wanted to filter into the voice; "are bound to get scorched."
FINIS