Did the Devil Really Make you do It?

© 2002 Gregory Ewald
All rights reserved.

Life, as it was, really was hell for Charrion ... after all, here he sat in the flames of perdition itself, with one chin moodily perched on one cramping and taloned hand ... everything had been going fine last year until the federal government had pulled the plug on his whole deal with Gates and Microsoft was crippled ... ten years of dealing with that little whining geek just in trade for a soul was just not worth it, especially now.

Ariaoch had pulled a major coup with the massive destruction in New York, and the resulting bloodshed from the terrorist maniacs continued to skyrocket daily ... suicides were falling in at an alarming rate, along with the souls of all the murderers spawned by a simple bit of propaganda that Ariaoch hadn't even invented! Some of the other devils had put the manuscript into the slush pile, maybe just to use for reference or to look at the pictures now and again ... Charrion couldn't even decipher the Taliban babbling ... no wonder they were insane; anyone would be, spouting such nonsense!

He hacked up a large chunk of bloody phlegm onto the steaming floor and went to sit on the can for a while ... Charrion knew that the computer gig was good somehow ... the whole Microsoft plan had been nearly foolproof. It was obvious that a meddling angel had stuck his nose into the whole scene just before the climax. After fifteen minutes of reflection upon the vagaries of fate, he stood, wiped with some sandpaper, and flushed the remains of last night's feast down the tubes ... lots of skulls undigested in that one ... maybe he should see a proctologist.

It was while picking his front fangs that an idea slowly burbled from the depths of his perverted mind to the forebrain, a subtle, subtle idea. With a long grin growing on his face, Charrion stomped over to the Mac G-4 on his workdesk and began to type in code ... Yep! The smoking power-cube told him that his idea might work; in fact, should work.

It was his idea to plant the codes for violent insanity and the will to do wrong into a format that had nothing to do with the actual rhetoric of the written word at all. The words would just be a way of designing the necessary glyph to cause the reader to do evil. The only thing the words would have to do is entertain the mortal long enough for the pattern created by the whole structure to etch itself into the cortex, and voila! Hell on Earth!

Souls would begin to fall like hard rain in a matter of days, maybe even minutes if the unsuspecting reader were in an office cubicle! And oh! Glory! Lucifer was going to love this one ... Charrion suspected another promotion coming up for him; maybe even a vacation?

His fingers clicked away madly, of course, on the keyboard, and with a few more flourishing strokes and

Back to top of page