The Devil in Detail by Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ghost, fantasy, horror, supernatural, devil
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2016-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER X

If ever the Devil tells you that it’s safe to drink with him because you won’t throw up and won’t get a hangover, don’t believe him.

I wish that weren’t true, because I really would have liked to believe his assurance that he never tells lies, but in my experience, at least, he is not a person to be trusted completely, and once trust has gone, once one simple lie, however trivial, has exposed the falsity of the universal generalization, then you can never be sure of anything that a person tell you is true.

Actually, you never can anyway. Even if you never catch someone out in a lie, you simply cannot believe anyone’s assertion that they always tell the truth. There is no such thing as perfect reliability, even on the part of Him—especially, in fact, on the part of Him. It is literally true that no one is or can be perfect. No matter how spotless their record to date might be, the possibility always exists that the next affirmation might be a downright lie.

The Devil might have tried to counter an accusation that he had lied about the vomiting and the hangover by reminding me that he’d only said that I wouldn’t suffer those things unless I wanted to unconsciously—but that’s an essentially dishonest strategy, and an unfalsifiable assertion, because it always leaves you the option of arguing that whatever happened is what you wanted to happen, unconsciously.

With all due respect to Eric Berne, I did not want that hangover. Depressed I certainly was, but certainly not determined to punish myself for my sins in such a futile and underhanded fashion.

So, to get back to the story, I woke up on Wednesday morning with one hell of a hangover, at least sufficient to suggest to me that even though there were two used glasses on the coffee table, I really had drunk the whole two bottles myself, and felt the entirety of their metabolic effects myself. Doubtless, if that had been the case—or even if it hadn’t, and the Devil really had taken his fair share of intoxication away with him—the effects of the dust of Glofeydd Diafol had added their component to the synergistic mix.

I had, of course, had a sleepless night the night before, and I was suffering from some kind of insidious poisoning as well as the effects of the alcohol, so it’s not particularly astonishing that I had slept unusually heavily and for an unusually long time, but I was still rather surprised to find, when I woke up—still fully dressed and lying on the sofa—that it was half past eleven.

By the time I’d scrubbed the vomit out of the carpet, as best I could, and drunk half a pint of water and two cups of black coffee, taken three paracetamol and had a bowl of Weetabix, it was way past noon and half the day was gone, utterly wasted without a shot being fired against the besieging forces of writer’s block.

I wasn’t feeling much like working anyway.

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