He comes upon them from the left, of course, for such is his
ancient tradition. The Devil always approaches from the sinister
side.
“Would you like a penny?” asks the Devil. He produces one out of the air, a playful conjuring trick he employs for the entertainment of the weak-minded. “Take it, then. A penny for your soul.”
The Devil smiles, but the boy just looks at him. He is ten or twelve years old, the boy, sullen and filthy. The little girl is younger, with hollow cheeks and hair that might be golden underneath the grime. A little sister, apparently: clumsily cared for, dearly loved. She shrinks against her brother as the Devil’s gaze falls upon her, and the urchin hugs her protectively. There is of course no hope for such as these, nor should there be.
“Is she cold?” asks the Devil.
The boy shakes his head, but the night wind is keen, and the little girl shivers. The Devil extends the shawl. “This will keep her warm.”
The boy hesitates, but finally he takes it, and wraps it around his sister’s thin shoulders.
“There,” says the Devil. “Snug as a bug.”
When the boy looks up, the Devil is stalking away, trailing a faint odour of sulphur and eau de toilette. Clip-clop. Clip-clop.
Perhaps he will go out into the country. The Devil despises the countryside even more than he despises London, but at least it is different there.
IAM NOT the devil. I need this to be understood, from the outset. If you won’t accept it, then please stop reading. Set these pages aside, and go away. Go and judge someone else.
God knows I am not an angel, either. I don’t even profess to be a very good man, for we are none of us good, not in the way that Heaven yearns for us to be. I am just a man. I have needs and desires, some of them lamentable, for like yours my nature is Fallen. I have from time to time indulged these desires, for like you I am weak. At moments indeed I have walked at the Devil’s side, and heard his sweet seductive whispers, and perhaps even for the span of a heartbeat been his man—as you have—body and soul. But at all times I swear that I have wished to be better. I have prayed to be good, and fixed my eyes upon the image of Goodness Itself that winked and glimmered on the far horizon—so remote from us, and separated by such torturous terrain. I have staggered towards it all my life, and stumbled and fallen, and grovelled for a time and then stood up and staggered some more, though my feet were lacerated and my poor heart ready to burst. Just like you, my friend. Just exactly like you.
Are you still there? Still reading? Wherever it is you like to read—in the comfortable chair in your parlour, perhaps. Or stretched out beneath your favourite tree, with Trusty the spaniel dozing close to hand. Fine: if you’re still reading, then I’ll trust we have a bargain. You will not judge—and I will tell the truth. Or at least you will withhold your judgement as far as seems humanly possible—which is seldom very far—and I will tell as much truth as can reasonably be expected from a man—which is seldom as much as one might hope—and between us we’ll do the best we can.
Yes? Then we begin.
It is 1888 as I write these words. I am an old man now, scratching syllables by candlelight at an old desk in a dingy room in Whitechapel. The wallpaper peels in the ever-present damp, and a filthy window overlooks Dorset Street. Sometimes I write of the Devil, and of his activities amongst us in London some decades ago, my connection to which may grow more clear as we proceed. But mainly I write of a man named Daniel O’Thunder. I write of Daniel as I knew him, and since no man may know the entire truth about anyone or anything, I have collected as well the accounts of others. In some cases these have been set down in writing by the teller. In other cases I have had to go beyond an editor’s role and conjure the tale as the teller would surely have told it, had he or she the opportunity. In these instances I have relied scrupulously upon such details as have been made available to me, supplemented where necessary with judicious suppositions and my own insights into human nature. In short I may here and there have invented certain facts, but always in the service of a greater Truth. As indeed did Matthew and Mark and Luke and John—and every single word they wrote was Gospel.
Daniel O’Thunder was—and remains—the most remarkable man I have ever met. He was a complicated man of deep and abiding contradictions, and yet he was at one and the same time a simple man with a very simple goal. He wanted to call the Devil forth, and face him and fight him, and—finally and forever— defeat him.
This, then, is my Book of Daniel.
In writing it—in telling you the tale of Daniel O’Thunder, and his deadly Enemy—I am of course telling the tale of myself as well. And to tell my story we must begin where it all began to go so wrong.
A SUNDAY MORNING in 1849. We are in Cornwall. More specifically we are in the little church of St Kea’s-by-the-sea. It is a church in the stark Gothic Perpendicular style, dating originally to Norman times, set upon a hillside above the village of Porthmullion. The churchyard is a riot of colour, for it is spring and the daffodils have begun to bloom amidst the headstones. There is a towering grey Cornish Cross outside the front door, carved atop a granite column. Nearby is the Holy Well where miracles were wont to occur in bygone days, and might—we are Christians, and live in hope—occur again. Here inside the church it is cool; it smells of damp and piety and distant sea-brine. Sun slants in through stained glass, and dust-motes dance like angels. Mounted upon the walls are slate tablets with inscriptions commemorating bygone parishioners, such as young William Barnstable:
Short blaze of life, meteor of human Pride, Essayed to live, but liked it not and died.
In the windows are Bible scenes, and images of the Four Evangelists. Set into the west wall is a portrait of St Kea. His golden head is haloed, and his eyes glow with an unsettling admixture of humility and fervid derangement. This conceivably reflects the limitations of the artisan, but possibly it doesn’t, St Kea being one of those Dark Age divines who paddled to Cornwall from Ireland on a boulder. There is in Kea’s expression a certain agitation as well, an incipient alarm, as if he glimpses Someone Else amongst us, and would call out a warning if only he weren’t trapped forever in stained glass.
The saint is quite correct, of course. The Devil is here, and he is watching. He’s watching dear old Petherick, the verger, nodding off in the choir. He’s watching young Bob Odgers—pay attention, Bob, and stop pinching your sister. He’s even daring to watch Sir Richard Scantlebury, Bart., slumbering in his family pew. Oh yes he is—open your eyes, Sir Richard. Beware! He’s watching right this second.
And on that fine spring Sunday, looking out from the pulpit in my cassock and my jampot collar, I told them so. Behold the young Revd Mr Jack Beresford, in earnest oratorical flight.
“For the Devil does not sleep,” I said, “and he does not blink. The Devil’s eye is a basilisk’s eye, and it is fixed upon you, and you, and you, and upon each and every one of us, from the moment we draw breath until the moment we are Judged. And if in this Judgement we are found wanting, then that eye will remain fixed forever.”
In
