From the Devil's Deathbed: A Little Book of Evil Stories
By Carl Reader
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About this ebook
With the Devil on his deathbed, he decides to indulge in a final literary effort to clear his name and put the blame for all the madness and cruelty in the world where it belongs, on humans. He offers up this little book of evil stories that detail the violent, twisted, sick souls of people, noting how humans view such behavior as normal. The Devil spares no one in his indictment. It is a tragic spectacle he presents: he exposes the rottenness of mankind. And when he passes, all is wiped away ...
Carl Reader
Carl Reader trained as a journalist at Temple University and has worked as a reporter, photographer and editor in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Montana. He's published short stories in literary magazines and on the Internet and has self-published a children's Christmas story called THE TWELFTH ELF OF KINDNESS.That book was partially published in Russia under the Sister Cities program. He's also self-published a novella called THE PERSECUTION OF WILLIAM PENN, which has been well-received in several college libraries. He works as a professional photographer and freelance writer.
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From the Devil's Deathbed - Carl Reader
From the Devil’s Deathbead
A Little Book of Evil Stories
By
Carl Reader
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2019 Carl Reader
Smashwords License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
From the Devil’s Deathbed
Human behavior is utterly abominable. It is the fruit of twisted, sick souls, with such souls the norm in the human world. I spent eons teaching you through pain about yourselves, but to no avail. I have impaled you on my horns and burned you with my red skin, and still you persist in sickness.
So do not blame me for the things you’ve done or the abject miseries you’ve suffered: you have created those things for yourself. Do not make the excuse that you were fashioned that way or grew that way out of the mud or fell out of a tree as a new form of life fully deformed as you are. You are responsible for your behavior, and I hate the excuses you make for it for engaging in it. I resent it that you blame me for all the evil in the world when all of you are so clearly corrupt and responsible for it. As the devil, I am responsible only for myself. All the silly stories you have heard about me offering your ancestors an apple or me bringing wars and plagues down upon you are just that – silly. Those things are on your shoulders.
Do not talk of excuses for why evil exists in the world. Those words fall off your forked tongues.
If God did create you, which I doubt, he made you stupid and foolish, but worst of all, he made you greedy. I never offered your ancestors an apple for their souls or offered the world to them from a hilltop. Those stories suggest I might as well have offered a pea or a feather, as believable as they are. And as stupid and foolish as you are, I still knew you would never take an apple or pea or a feather in exchange for worshipping me. A mountain of gold wouldn’t have been enough, given how greedy you are.
What I offered and you accepted was the world as it is.
A sane animal would accept such a generous gift without question, but no, you had to seek more and more and more for each individual one of you, and you would gut your mother to attain it. Each individual one of you would not accept a castle, vast lands, a long life, love, vengeance, a suntan, good health and chewing gum as his due. No, each and every one of you wanted more. If another person had a radish, you wanted that, too, and bickered endlessly over it. You wanted everything. You wanted it all. Why did you deserve anything?
You say God is always watching you and has always been watching humans, but not one of you believes that, or you wouldn’t have coveted that radish. If your soul’s salvation depended on allowing that other person to have his radish and eat it, too, would you have desired it? Of course not. You needed to believe that fairy tale that God was watching you or you wouldn’t have made war for a vegetable.
What you acknowledged from the beginning (whenever that was), was that God never existed. Your lack of belief is written all over your behavior. Since belief is merely faulty reason, I have to applaud this part of your being: it might be the only intelligent thing you share among yourselves. Get down on your knees and pray or go on a pilgrimage or build a cathedral, whatever you do, your next act will be to covet that radish or feather and cut off the nose of the person beside you to obtain it. You don’t really believe in any sort of morality, since your actions speak louder than words.
Human behavior is abominable. You are abominable.
So I would have to say you know that God is dead and always has been, since he never existed and never watched over you. Your behavior speaks volumes about your true beliefs. You have always been atheists. God could have lived in your hearts, but no, you wanted radishes.
I understood this when I first tempted Puff and Pfff, that man and that woman many of you claim to know as Adam and Eve. It seemed silly to offer them a fruit or a vegetable, so I went all-in on your utterly depraved species, recognizing them as my distant relatives. From me, they received the world and everything in it, but it was never enough. You even craved bird droppings if someone else owned them.
Do you mean we have to stay here in this world and never travel to another?
Puff asked, upset with me that I limited him to this one glorious place.
I need to rearrange everything you offer and make changes and make more of everything and everyone,
Pfft said, sniffing when she first looked around and saw the bounty of the earth.
To her credit, I have to say that she is the one who first desired to make earth tidier and more orderly, even though at that time there was no need for tidiness or order. It was perfect as it was. Puff immediately started tearing things down and building them up again to please her like the silly frustrated over-sexed fool that he was. She rode him like a horse, out of greed and human stupidity. He rode her like a cow, out of desire and to please her. It was never enough.
Woman is a hole in eternity that can never be filled except from within.
Man is the pig that rides the woman like a horse.
Then you started dying.
All of you came to blame me for this when it is clearly your fault and in your nature to die. There are many design flaws in life, but dying is the worst of them. Not even I could have created all the ways you die of your own volition. Since you are a child of the universe, and there are infinite combinations in it, it’s logical to think the ways you die would rain down in endless multitudes and combinations. Even that was not enough for you. The endless circumstances that lead to your death are beyond your scope, but still you devised more ways to bring on death. You devised war. You devised disease though unclean living. You devised every sort of shooting, stabbing, immolating, clubbing, drowning, suffocating, television entertainment and pre-packaged snacks. For goodness sake, you can’t even keep clean the earth, for which the earth will wipe you off its surface eventually. You are earthlings and depend on it for everything, but you will never acknowledge it and be grateful that the earth has been given to you. You wish to travel to the stars where you can not breathe and would burn up or explode in an instant of exposure to stellar conditions. You wish even to gobble the stars. You can have no lifestyle or life but that of an earthling, since the earth made you. You desire the unedible.
So, yes, this is an indictment of all of you and what you’ve done or wish to do. I need to say this since it’s clear that to my surprise even I am dying of your greed and wish to clear my name. Immortal beings do not die, but somehow I am. It is you who have inflicted death everywhere, even on me, for you took my soul as your own. You have called me Satan and the Devil and Beelzebub and countless other names but you never knew my real name because I don’t have one. What sort of eternal being has a name? Of what use would it be to him? Do you call a star Fred? I suppose you might, but that is another one of your shortcomings. You wish to destroy what you covet.
Yes, you somehow you managed to murder me.
I blame you for my death. How else would it be that an eternal being has to die except that humans wish him to?
So that is why I am offering you the following stories of contemporary life on earth. They illustrate the points I made above and how you destroy everything out of greed. I have millions more stories from the beginning of time, but to tell them would take too long and you are mortal and can’t see beyond the tip of your gluttonous noses. Therefore, I thought it best to relate to you these evil stories in the hope that you would recognize yourselves for what you are and stop blaming me and someday even fix yourselves. It is my last noble act.
So let me die now in peace. Soon I’ll be gone and won’t be able to defend myself and you can make your choice: follow me into nothingness or love the earth as you once loved me.
Writing these stories is my last entrapment by humans. If after reading them as modern people in the modern world you have created, you still blame me for all your trouble, then you are completely mad and beyond hope. You are utterly delusional. You should know your own history and literature by now. You wrote all these ridiculous holy books and Bibles and Korans and Books of Manu and all the others, so when you finally have a manuscript created out of true divine inspiration instead of your own human fears and gullibility, you should listen.
Now, looking back, I suddenly feel sorry I wrote these stories. I feel fear: they will do no good. You have always been beyond hope. Nothing I can do will change that, so I suppose you will go on vilifying me after I’m gone, despite what you read about yourselves here.
Let this be my report on the ultimate failure and final extinction of mankind, whether you believe it or not. I suspect these stories will be a wasted effort, but I give you the opportunity to lift your head out of the slop bucket.
No use.
You truly are beyond redemption.
You are all wicked clowns.
The Virgin and the Nun
Ken Emacher was a gloriously handsome young man, or so all the girls said, but he was so shy and withdrawn, and suffered so terribly from low self-esteem, that no one thought he would ever melt a woman’s heart enough to find his way into her bed. At six-foot-three and one-hundred-and-ninety pounds, topped by a shock of dramatic wavy black hair and piercing blue eyes, he was the kind of physically imposing specimen, male eye-candy, that would make girls stop mid-sentence and spit out their gum, or choke on it, or trip on their ponytails.
In those days, young females did not often talk first to men, but in Ken’s case, that rule was broken often – with disastrous consequences. The tall pillar of handsome man-flesh would blush, stammer, choke and often