‘“False compassion or pity is the last string the Devil holds you by.” Remember when I spoke to you those words as a child?’ Lucifer interrupted my stream of thought, without any warning, coming like an uninvited guest. He speaks to me when he wants when he deems it necessary. Not necessarily when I expect, or even want to hear it. I am thrown back to a childhood memory, one of a particularly incendiary and ominous sort.
I remember when those words were spoken. It was one of my father’s odd one-liners that came out of nowhere. I was sitting next to him in a car, barely old enough to be allowed to sit in the passenger’s seat. We were on our way back home from the school council’s child abuse hearing, where I was called as a witness. The abuse was heinous, my classmates were probably filmed for underground SM pornography. I am eleven years old. Too young to be facing things like this, yet strangely accustomed to things that I shouldn’t be, and my connection to Lucifer is a part of that. He would speak to me in a disembodied voice, and sometimes, through my own father.
‘False compassion is the last string of the Devil.’ He said that, and nothing else. I sat there in silence, too shocked to speak. I was aghast. I don’t remember if I pretended interest in his odd philosophy, and asked him to elaborate, or maybe figured that he wouldn’t, that this was one of his games, to teach me something, like a zen koan, his one-liners were not meant to be disputed, or even understood properly. They were used to shock my mind out of habit.
What I clearly remember is that I thought that he was a psychopath for saying that. Surely we, as Christians, were to pity the poor and the innocent?
‘There are no innocents in my country.’
Lucifer speaks with disinterest and dramatic passion at the same time.
I am twenty years older now. Living in the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. It’s fucking Wild West. ‘No country for old men?’ I reply, facetiously, with a movie name.
The Dark Prince catches my drift. ‘He is like the bubonic plague.’ A reference to said movie, No Country for Old Men. A line that references a contract killer, one of the lead characters. This vocation, it fits almost every man of my past. Past, present, perhaps, a vocation of my own. Lucifer himself is a killer, and he doesn’t mince words today. ‘People have to leave your life. Execute them, one by one. Do it in the correct order.’
‘Is this mercy?’ I ask, knowing the answer already.
‘It is mercy. There is places a man needs to go all by himself and you are preventing that, with your magic. So, stop trying to save all these Black Magicians. It is very unsatanic for a Black Magicians to either feel or elicit pity amongst themselves. They know what they had signed up for. Just like yours, their prices were stated. Show your comrades dignity by allowing them to go out and go down on their own terms. Stop getting in the way of my Dark Plan.’
Lucifer
