Pandora's Box: The Deleted Scenes
Eight
(From Chapter Twenty-Seven)
Caroline flopped forward onto the kitchen table, her eyes closed.
"What have you done?" shrieked Della, meaning to lunge across the room towards the Devil, feet in fluffy slippers ready to spring. It took both Mildred and Constance to hold her back.
"No, Della, remember what happened last time," panted Constance as the younger woman struggled against her captors, growling all the time. She had never seen the usually mild-mannered bookbinder so enraged, excepting one incident in which rather a lot of her precious stock had been damaged. Della instinctively grimaced at the memory of the incident that had taken place that morning and touched the bandage round her head. "We don't want you back in A & E six hours after you left it."
The thought of being eaten alive by the charge nurse of the local accident and emergency department seemed to calm Della down considerably and she sat back in her chair, glowering at the Devil through narrowed eyes.
"It's alright Della," said Amelia, who had been checking Caroline's well-being. "She's just asleep."
To illustrate this point with impeccable timing, Della's mother gave an earth-shattering snore, causing the gathered witches to clap their hands over their ears. Della gave a wry smile.
"Oh yes," she said. "She'll be fine." The young woman looked at the Devil with an expression of butter-wouldn't-melt. The demon himself looked to be in physical pain at the volume of Caroline's snores.
"I suggest…" Amelia began, but she could not make herself heard over the intermittent snorts from Caroline's mouth, which was hanging open on the table and now drooling slightly. She shook her head and raised her hands in a gesture of defeat.
"Tony," said Constance with a sigh, "you're going to have to reverse the spell if we want to continue this argument."
The Devil rolled his eyes, a gesture that would have been a lot more effective had it not been for his fingers in his ears.
"Let me finish this first," he mouthed, and Constance peered round the edge of the table to see what he was doing. Upon divining the task that was distracting him, she brought her hand to her forehead in despair. The demon had a plate of cream crackers in his lap and was using his tail, a long, red, pointed protuberance usually kept well-hidden within his trousers, to spread them with cream cheese…
It's a long story… Someone mentioned the Devil having a tail, then a couple of photoshopped pictures of Michael Sheen followed, and this was the result…