The Worm of the Ages and Other Tails: Six Short Fantasies Read Online Free PDF

they cannot do human souls any good. You have probably seen some of his unsigned work on television, or in high-toned art galleries.
    Smiggy looks down on creatures like Screwtape, whom C. S. Lewis so famously wrote about; the kind of devils who tempt individual souls. ‘Mere retail damnation,’ as he sneeringly calls it, is beneath him. But he knows a few gentledevils in that branch of the disservice, all the same. I think Mr. Flivverpuff came calling on him, and it was our mutual misfortune that he chanced upon me instead.
    Anyway, here is our conversation, pretty much as it occurred. Remember, though, that devils are liars, and you cannot trust everything they say. The fate of suicides, particularly, is not so clear-cut as Flivverpuff makes it seem; though if some warped soul killed himself for the express purpose of going to Hell, it is hard to see what could keep him from getting there.
    ‘—Not exactly a  ghost story,’ said the Middle Management Devil, between slurps at his tea. ‘They are not, aha,  ghosts when we have them Down Below.’
    (Never let anyone tell you that devils are witty or urbane. Only their P. R. department believes this, and a P. R. devil will believe anything. Devils are uniformly hideous, ill-mannered, awkward, and smelly. Imagine the worst science fiction convention you have ever heard of, and then imagine that the common interest binding the people there is not rocket ships or rayguns, but terrorism and torture. The very most polished devil is not quite as urbane as a farting contest at a NASCAR rally.)
    ‘Go on,’ I said, not because I meant it, but because there was no point in saying anything else. The stranger had slouched into my booth at Denny’s uninvited, taken a seat (now covered in slime), and struck up a tedious conversation, all without a word or glance of permission from me; and he had shoved a grimy business card at me—
     
    B. FLYSPECK FLIVVERPUFF, M. M. D.
     
    —explaining, as if it were something that tickled him all over with pride, that the initials stood for that title which I gave in the first sentence above. He was clearly one of these mad monologuists that you see at diners after the bars have closed, and there was nothing for it but to hold fast and let him talk himself out.
    ‘Yes,’ he was saying, ‘the passion of vengeance is, aha, very good for  business, you understand, but we know better than to indulge in it ourselves. The essential work of Middle Management would go completely to pieces. It’s enough to do to tyrannize one’s subordinates and backstab one’s superiors, when one does it in a purely professional and disinterested way. If one did it because of a petty personal grudge – now, I ask you: is there anyone in Hell that you would  not hold a grudge against? Nothing would ever get done; nothing at all. The damned would pile up like cordwood, humiliated perhaps, but not actually tormented. Lower Authority would never stand for it.
    ‘Now this one fellow we had, oh, some centuries back, was absolutely eaten up with that very passion. Revenge, revenge,  revenge. It was all he ever thought about; and the only person he ever thought of taking it on was some trivial malefactor named Salazar or Salamander or something of that kind, who he thought had cheated him in some matter to do with – money? a female? a pat on the head from some titled twit? It doesn’t matter; everything Salazar did thereafter, even things of a quite innocent nature,  this customer managed to twist it into a further insult against himself. He worked himself up into a froth to anyone who would listen, saying that death was too good for Salazar, even the death of a thousand cuts, or dipping in acid an inch at a time. But he killed him just the same. Oh, he killed him. He caught him by ambush one night outside a tavern, when Salazar was so full of drink that it was leaking out of his ears, and he split him down the middle with three feet of good Toledo steel: