Cat, Of the Apocalypse - I

21st December 2012. The day humans today thought the Mayans had prophesied the end of the world. Not that the humans know very much. Its peculiar how they declare absolute knowledge from vague things that they can only presume. Nevertheless, it is rather an utterly human thing to do.

Predictably enough, the day dawned bright and sunny. Almost too sunny and cheerful for winter, as if to protest the indignity of having been designated as the day of the apocalypse.

 My human though was scared out of his wits. He peered suspiciously from under his numerous coverings at the bright new day, probably muttering something about deceitful Satanic illusions. With much loath he wriggled out from the safety of his bed and poignantly prodded the floor with a toe. Testing the fabric of the alleged diabolic illusions no doubt. A sigh was let out: disappointment of its solidity and consequent reality, and thereafter the prospect of having to deal with the unavailability of a viable excuse of not going to work. 

See, of the seven deadly sins, my human was guilty was of all save pride. And as for wrath, his supreme sloth had firmly rooted notions concerning too much hard work of which wrathfulness was a part. You'd think for someone as devout as him, he'd take all that sinning seriously and harbour a healthy fear of purgatory. 

While he busied himself with a meagre breakfast of cereal he switched on the television as if to affirm that there was nothing wrong with the outside world, though I dare say he hoped there was so he wouldn't have to brave another day at the office. As it turned out, everything was fine in every corner of the world. No ground erupting open, no tsunamis or nuclear disasters. Everything was peculiarly well. Not even a murder or a rape in the great bustling city. 
After he finished the retinue of things that humans do in the morning, he gestured around his head with a cross and braced himself for the outside world. Following which I set about my daily snoozing schedule with utmost diligence. 

By the time I was done with my eighth round of dozing for the day, I heard my human return.  By the looks of him, it was another one of his curiously unremarkable days. I purred at him to remind his pitifully preoccupied brain to feed me. Which he did benignly enough so I rubbed my head around his heels for sometime. 
Then came the time of the day when my human dozed before a blaring television while I pranced around some bugs and pests to entertain myself. As I was engaged thus near the balcony, I would see at some point the lumpen body of my human trudging sleepily to bed. 


 The 22nd of December dawned a wee bit foggy. My human got out of bed with his customary reluctance. The television was switched on once again to see if was foggy enough to not go to work. Alas, it wasn't. Thus began the morning rituals. 

I was perched on the windowsill, fluffed up against the cold with my gaze set upon him fixedly. He put out some food in my bowl so I wouldn't go hungry all day. He then felt the need to pet me following which he proceeded to exit and held the door open. He must of course brace himself for the day ahead and hence reached into his pocket for his cross. The regular gesturing and muttering followed till suddenly his clothes and the cross fell to the floor. 

And he was nowhere in sight. 

I judged the gravity of what I'd just seen. Deciding it needs investigation, I stalked off out of the gaping door. 

The Curious Incident of the Devil and the Lizard

It was meant to be a quiet Monday evening after a particularly tiring day. For the Devil’s Advocate (let’s call her D.A. for convenience), alas, such luxury was not to be had. She had meant to spend it in her apartment flipping through a few scandalous magazines perhaps, but no. She had barely rested her bottom on the plush armchair before the hearth grew brighter, wilder and a booming voice demanded, “Come see me at my chamber at once!”  Sighing dolefully, shaking her head in frustration, she clicked her fingers and disappeared in puff of red smoke. [1]

“Yes, dark sire?”  The D.A. drawled patronizingly, “What can I do for you ….now?”

The scene before her was thus: her beloved boss’s apartments looked like it had been through (quite literally) hell.[2] The Devil himself was nowhere in sight, but you mustn’t let that fool you. Only his atrocious little Spawn sat on an upturned antique dresser, smirking impishly and dangling it’s legs.

“Ah, Lawyer!” said a voice very likely to belong to that Physics teacher you had in school. “I have a severely important task for you.” There was a small puff of red smoke near the door as he materialized. “It seems we have been infiltrated…. My chamber that is….” He looked exceedingly perturbed and for some reason refused to step past the door. “It’s been invaded…”

“Sire perhaps we should alert the troops…?”

“Oh! No, not at all! Its just one….got rid of the rest….maybe…..er….you could deal with the last?”

“My liege, I’m flattered, but don’t you think the guards are more equipped to handle a breach?”

“LAWYER DO AS I SAY OR I’LL FEED YOUR SOUL TO THE HOUNDS!”

“Very well.” said the D.A. in a grudging huff. “Where is it?”

“It’s hiding! Behind the cupboard! That COWARD!!”

“It’s a lizard, lawie!” chirped the despicable little Spawn gleefully as it shifted its repulsive little body over to the mantelpiece. The D.A. glared at it and then looked questioningly at her master. The Devil was examining his feet with utmost preoccupation.

“A lizard, my liege?”

“Yeeeas. As you can very well see, I tried to bomb it...uh...them!   Got every single one too, save the last. Come now, Lawyer! Enough with the questions! Make yourself useful. Chop- chop!”

“A lizard, my liege? A little, bloody common hemidactylus behind the cupboard and you wreck havoc?”

The Devil laughed nervously, “Kind of comes with the job description you know. The wreaking havoc part that is…”

A peculiar mixture of a steely yet disgusted but amused expression settled on the D.A’s face.  More nervous laughter from the Devil , who eventually shiftily managed to blurt, “You will get rid of it, won’t you Lawyer? Er…please?”

Now being the Devil, ‘please’ was not something you heard every few thousand years. It was the sole indication of decisive desperation which the D.A. had heard only once before. This was the Devil, knowingly revealing his vulnerability to her, his lawyer.  Though why he would chose to do it with the Spawn around did not cease to amuse her, given that the vile Spawn of his was bound to blab. The Spawn was the P.A. system of the Devil’s gossip to Hell’s minions. She could already picture Beelzebub and all the rest around a table sharing a round of devil’s juice and laughing themselves silly over this. She was sure they all knew, like she did what a pansy coward Devil really was though their loyalties could not once be questioned and over the millennia they had grown fond of their whimsical Lord. Still the Devil had appearances to maintain, within and without Hell. It was her job to make sure that he did. Except she can’t have done a very good job seeing as all of Hell knew that when the Devil said he was off to ‘intricately plot the apocalypse’ he actually meant ‘fancy tea-party with delicately painted creepy porcelain dolls.’

The D.A. screwed up her face and set about looking for all the world like a brooding mouse. After a substantial amount of time she managed to murmur, “Very well, I will deliver you.”

A visibly relieved Devil sighed for a second, “Phew….” before standing tall and declaring gruffly, “I mean erm...excellent Lawyer! I knew I could count on you.”

“Of course you can. It’s what you don’t pay me for.”

“If you..er…don’t mind me asking that is….how? As in how will the enemy be defeated?” said the fumbling and quivering mass of unholy matter that passed for the Devil these days.  Though to be fair, he could usually seem quite fearsomely commanding when not threatened by a lizard hiding on the opposite wall across the room.

“Well I could sing to it till it contemplated hara-kiri. Or better still ask the damned Spawn to sing.” pronounced  the D.A. matter- of- factly. To which the Spawn howled with laughter. Clearly it was thoroughly amused with the turn of events. 

Undermined but not entirely discouraged, the D.A. continued to contemplate and formulate ways of exterminating the lizard of which the noteworthy suggestion was thus: “Let us read Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey to it till it withers at the evil ineffability of it all and falls.” Very few people in the world actually know that those two pieces of literature were sent to the world as a part of the great diabolic plan of winning over more people to the dark side. The aim of this particular ploy was that they were both written to be so terrible, so excruciating and so painful that humanity would literally lose faith in itself. If it worked for humanity, the  D.A. reasoned, why not a damn lizard?

However the effectiveness of those two pieces of literature on the lizard shall remain forever unknown to us as the Devil deemed the venture far too risky given the stubborn resolve of lizard in question. After a while at brainstorming the D.A. now turned to look at her master with a maniacal grin pasted over her face, she declared resolutely, “Watch as I proceed to smoke out the enemy!”

The Spawn squealed delightedly at that and sprung off from the mantelpiece. Giggling like it had some hideous insight into the matter (that often tended to leave the D.A. unnerved and uncertain of herself) the Spawn evaporated in a puff of red.

The Devil shrugged and but still put on a brave face and promptly refused to move past the threshold. The D.A. rolled her eyes and clapped her hands. A single incense stick materialized and floated onto her hand. It was light. Cruel flames licked its pointy end and subsided to a mean red glow.

 Thus armed, the D.A. faced the cupboard behind which the alleged enemy had thus far stationed itself, and was as of now, missing in action.

Our resolute D.A. was undeterred. If it was a siege the fiend of a lizard wanted, it’s a siege it would get. Brandishing the smoking incense stick she charged. The battle-hardy D.A. prepared for the storm of the cupboard: as the incense stick touched the cupboard it exploded. Billowing smoke filled the room leaving the Devil’s previously wrecked apartments in a scene of utter desolation beyond all help and repair. What had once been decorated with careful pomp to be chambers befitting THE Devil was now a barren, sooty waste. The damned lizard or its corpse was nowhere to be seen.

In this waste, one could at that point have seen two pairs of unblinking eyes, gazing fixedly at nowhere in particular. Defeat. Astonishment. Charred. The Devil and his advocate.

A contemptible, loathsome, despicable, blood-curling guffaw was heard. “Oh dear me Lawie, did I forget to mention? Our little reptilian friend escaped up the chimney while you were deciding what to do with it.”

---

[1] Not that she preferred the red smoke. Infact she would much rather diffuse without any smoke. Honestly, it just made her cough and it was also messy and stuck to your clothes like brick dust. But the Devil insisted vehemently on such trills to “keep the show going” apparently.

[2] Unusual that, since the Devil had always demanded that his personal quarters remain cheery and orderly, seasoned with a few skulls and some random fires bobbing up every now and then, but that’s where he drew the line.