My first encounter – personal encounter – with Satan came quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, and on a day like any other. I was in the flat and it was late on a November Saturday morning, around 11 o’clock. I was walking from the bathroom into the living room for some reason or other, perhaps in order to tidy the place.
And there he was: Lucifer, sitting on the sofa. He had the frame and appearance of a large and portly man. He looked entirely human, in fact, but for his head and neck which – whilst also human-like – were oversized and grotesquely distended. Leathery, wart-covered skin covered his enormous face and fell in rolls from his jawline. His swollen neck bulged from an ill-fitted shirt collar. But for his listless, dull black eyes – glibly adorned by drooping, warty lids – he might have appeared vaguely comical, like an anthropomorphic egg. He wore a kind of Edwardian get-up: an ill-fitting white shirt with a greasy pale green cravat spilling out of it, underneath a greyish patterned waistcoat. His vast forehead glistened with sweat, and he looked to be in deep discomfort – pain, even.
The door into the living room is positioned such that someone entering through it would find themselves facing sideways onto the sofa. Not expecting to find anyone in the living room – and least of all the Devil – I strode in and was caught off-guard by the sight of him. His bloated, down-turned lips were moving, and his face was part-turned towards me, as though he meant to address me but was only half-interested in doing so. It took a few moments before I realised those moving lips were uttering the sounds I could hear, the sounds which were reverberating about me but which I had failed to connect with this toad-like apparition. His voice was that of a normal man’s, only slowed down to half the normal speed: hypnotic, bass trumpeting, syllable-notes slurring one into another. It was gibberish: menacing and incomprehensible, though not entirely unpleasant.
What did he say? I don’t know; if I could somehow repeat the sound, it would amount to nonsense all over again. But of course I understood the meaning precisely, because he was speaking not to my brain but my heart. He told me he had watched for a time with growing interest. He told me he had high hopes for my career. I suppose you could say he was ‘checking in’ on me.
You will have many questions. You will ask: how did I know who he was? As shocking as it must have been to encounter a bizarre-looking intruder in one’s own living room, how was I able to identify him? He did not, after all, introduce himself. Well, that is true, he did not. I knew who he was the moment I stepped into the living room and caught sight of him in profile. Something inside me shuddered in his presence; I felt whatever poison he exuded, which hung in the air about him like a dust cloud. And he knew I knew him. He did not stand to greet me, or even fully turn his bloated, leprous head. He spoke to me as one speaks in boredom to a familiar, and I listened – almost without fear – in the same manner.
Why did he come to me of all people? I couldn’t say. All our names are in scrawled in the Book, indelibly. My name, evidently, was pricked with a nib. The Book existed long before we arrived here; long before our simian forerunners; long before the universal spark burst forth into conflagration. Does that sound absurd? Of course it does. The very concept of destiny is at once above, below and beside human comprehension.
What happened next? I fainted. The triple bass voice had grown louder and slower, and I had felt my vision dull, as when intoxicated with spirits. With a sensation of sudden heat, I fainted clean away. I woke up on the floor shortly before midday. Light was streaming through the living room window, casting shadows over a now empty room. I crawled gingerly to the sofa, to where Lucifer had appeared to sit. There was no indent in the cushions; no lingering smell as I might have expected from that fat, hideous creature.
Summoning my strength, I climbed to my feet. I walked into the kitchen and placed the old-fashioned kettle pot on the hob, and lit the gas with a match. The water inside the kettle drummed pleasantly against its rounded copper walls. I then returned to the living room, removed the telephone directory from the book shelf, opened it and thumbed through a dozen or so pages until I found what I was searching for.