Fisher of Devils (eBook)

Chapter Two

THE DEVIL DROPS IN

Satan arrived in Eden a week later: by then, a small problem had arisen with God’s plan to generate twenty human beings.

Adam refused point-blank to go through the requisite actions.

It was partly to do with Eve’s birth. At first, he had loved and admired her as much as anyone else. He had touched her hair wonderingly, felt dizzy looking into her eyes, run his fingers over neck and shoulder and breast. The love that was within her swept over him like warmth from a sun just freed from a cloud, and he felt at one with the others, and put a beetle back on its feet, and even told the dinosaur his dancing was coming on nicely.

It was therefore quite by accident that he once again stepped on the serpent. Both of them were so busy thinking about Eve that neither was really looking where he was going. But the serpent thought it was deliberate as usual.

“God, did you see that? I’ll do him one day, the ribless cretin!”

Unfortunately, God wasn’t there, and Adam enquired, while banging the serpent’s head against a tree to a steady woodpecker rhythm, why he had chosen to use the word ‘ribless’.

The spluttered answer quite destroyed his good mood, and that evening he accosted God and complained with great vehemence about the unauthorised intrusion into his internal structure and the purloining of parts.

“Adam,” said God quietly, too quietly, “I made Eve for your sake, to help you and to give you pleasure. Your ingratitude doesn’t please me. In fact, it displeases me greatly. Indeed, I’ll even go so far as to say you’re beginning to get up my nose: and if you travel any further up my nose, I may be left with no choice but to sneeze you back into Clay, and let Eve alone represent the human race.”

Now this was pretty tough talk from God, but he was very proud of Eve; it wasn’t every day that four kidneys, six ribs, a couple of feet of appendix, and a slice of liver underwent such a wonderful metamorphosis. Moreover, he was angry about the further damage inflicted on the serpent, whose head, from once being a perfect oval, was now looking both flat and splintered.

He wasn’t aware of it at the time, but he was suffering his first attack of Righteous Indignation, later bouts of which were to prove so costly to the human race in general, and the Sodomites, Egyptians, and Philistines in particular. He reflected afterwards that he might have been more understanding towards Adam’s sense of outrage.

But the damage was already done. Until now, Adam had shared in the general admiration of Eve, but now that God had not only shamelessly ransacked his body, but had even threatened to supplant him with the new creation, he saw in her only his stolen organs, and a threat to his own continued existence.

And the love that Eve inspired in all the other creatures only fuelled his resentment. They much preferred her to him, and the smaller and slower ones made no secret of it when he wasn’t around, while the larger and fleeter ones made no secret of it even when he was around. The giraffe would pick the most succulent fruit for her, the termite would build mounds for her to sit on and the weaver bird matting for her to lie on, the crocodile would raft her along the streams, the hedgehog would scratch her back. And the serpent worshipped not only the very ground she walked on, but even the ground she might walk on.

They all found her beautiful because she found them beautiful, they loved her because the love she gave them filled their beings and left a surplus. Every creature had felt the love of God, but just because he was God, because he was their creator, the love they returned was filtered through respect and gratitude. When they loved Eve, they were responding to the aura of himself that her creator had left in her, but now it was love between equals. She gave every creature significance and dignity. It was, for instance, generally agreed that the hedgehog was horrendously erudite and the slug regrettably unintellectual; and when she spoke to the hedgehog, he still felt erudite; but when she spoke to the slug, he also felt, if not exactly erudite, at least interesting, and soon discovered that he really did have ideas hidden under his sloth.

Eve loved Adam, too. But she was still young, and didn’t understand that the human male is a weak, insecure creature who needs to be loved more than others. Instead of being healed by her love, he only became more resentful; resentful that she loved others, resentful that others loved her.

Under these circumstances, it was not surprising that his dangly continued to visibly sulk in her company, and when once or twice, it did show an inclination to defy both its master and gravity in her honour, Adam marched away and put down the rising as he had done before.

And it wasn’t long before he became aware that Eve’s admirers weren’t limited to the animals in the Garden.

**********

The Archangel Gabriel – Seraph of the First Circle, Deputy Vice-President of the Council of Seven, Protector of the Garden of Eden – was not, despite the titles, overmuch concerned with rank or hierarchy. If he’d thought about it – which he rarely did – he would have made a simple distinction: God – and Everything Else. God was God and that was that. So when God had announced his intention of performing a second Creation, Gabriel had been mildly surprised but otherwise quite unruffl ed. God was God, and if he chose to create more beings, that was his privilege.

Nevertheless, when it was done, and the Whiteguard took their first walk around the Garden, Gabriel did wonder why God had bothered to make all that effort. There was clearly only one reasonable shape – angeliform – and an optimum size – his own: was it not just a little bit ludicrous to be a spider or a starfish, just a little bit pointless to be a tick or a bacterium?

So he was polite and courteous towards each creature, but a little distant because he couldn’t really see the point of their existence. Perhaps the nearest he came to friendship was with the dinosaur, with whom he had good-natured wrestling matches. There was, of course, the man, Adam, who had the right shape and a size not to be ashamed of, with whom he was quite prepared to be friendly; but the man spent all his time complaining, an attitude which Gabriel found both offensive and shocking.

He was therefore only mildly interested when word came to him on the thirteenth day that God had created a second human, and Eve was already half a day old before he finally flew across to meet her. The creatures surrounding her parted for him as he approached, and he saw Woman for the first time.

And stared straight into his own worst nightmares!

For beneath the calm pragmatic Gabriel of the daytime lurked the furtive sweating angel of the night, tormented by the images brought back millennia before by the explorers who had discovered the Saragashim. He had listened in horror to the lurid descriptions of the Saragash rituals. But that night, his own dangly had glowed in the darkness as he recalled with terrified fascination the stories he had heard.

From then onwards he had lived a double existence, deeply ashamed of the dreams that ravaged the dark hours, until with the passage of time they came less and less frequently, and he began to feel that he was at last cured.

But now a creature far more desirable than any he had ever imagined was standing naked in front of him with an open smile and, worse, a hint, just a hint, of the first anti-dangly he had ever seen, and he knew at once, from the throbbing in his head and veins, that his disease had never been truly vanquished, but had simply lain dormant. He noticed his treacherous dangly begin to glow, and tried to bring his wings round to cover it, but they would not reach, and all he could do was stammer a quick greeting and stutter that he was needed elsewhere, then stumble away terrified of his sudden desire, knocking over the elephant in his flight.

“Oh dear, doesn’t he like me?” asked Eve anxiously.

Not until the terrible business of the Virgin Mary was Gabriel to suffer such torment as he did that afternoon. He had been able to live with his fantasies for a few thousand years, since they had been totally removed from his daily existence, but how was he going to live with himself now that there was a real snuggery in the Garden?

That very evening, however, God explained his plan to dilute Adam, as it were, by letting the humans produce eighteen more of themselves. He also explained how it would be done. For most of the angels, it was a severe shock: the underlying assumption of all angelic thought, the foundation of their morality, was that danglies were for self-gratification only, in no way designed to probe and pry in other bodies.

But Gabriel was delighted. God obviously felt it was OK for human danglies to venture into realms unknown, and though it was true he hadn’t had the same intentions for angel danglies, that was, as he had just openly admitted, simply because he hadn’t thought of it. The idea was not, after all, as unnatural as he had thought.

And so, freed from guilt, Gabriel allowed himself to fall in love with Eve. Not in the innocent, asexual way of the other creatures: if the serpent always chose to lie curled round her breast, it was simply because he found...