George: I wish I had a million dollars... Hot dog!
We all have stuff. If we didn’t then we’d all be the same and in my experience none of us are ever exactly the same. This is good. I think that most people would agree that it is the differences about us that make us interesting and unique.
It’s stuff that makes me not a widget and even though I can be hard work at times I don’t think I’m repeatable. “Thank God” some of you are probably muttering.
As part of the stuff that makes ‘me’ me is the fact that I am more than a little superstitious. I salute single Magpies, run away from black cats, and throw an awful lot of salt over my shoulder - you probably thought it was dandruff, well it isn’t!
My wife on the other hand thinks that superstition is nonsense and she’d no more turn around three times on seeing a full moon than fly to it.
Anyway I think it’s best to hedge your bets where superstition is concerned; you never know what may be watching and waiting for you make that tiny mistake that lets bad luck in.
The Spilling of Salt
Part 1. In which some salt gets spilled
Mark Harrington was not a superstitious man, so when he knocked over the salt one Friday morning at breakfast he wasn’t bothered unduly. Neither did he know or care that this particular Friday was the thirteenth, and he cared and knew even less about Frigg or Freya - so how was he to understand that spilling the salt had annoyed them. The notion that any Friday was a bad day to spill salt on - and that the thirteenth was the worst Friday of all, simply never entered head. He just swept the salt up in his hand and threw it carelessly into the kitchen bin rather than taking the trouble to throw a little of it over his left shoulder with his right hand. If he had then he may well have prevented the events that took place after the salt spilling, but as I have already mentioned, Mark was not a superstitious man. He didn’t understand that this small event was a warning from his Guardian Angel that bad luck was on the way, any more that he knew that by ignoring it he’d opened the door for evil to enter his life.
Not all evil is big and there are never enough demons and devils to go around on Friday the thirteenth. So Mark was lucky – in a very unlucky way - that the only creature not fully tied up that day was a rather small Imp. It is likely that if it hadn’t been Friday the thirteenth Mark would have had much bigger problems on his hands - but Bael, Zoper, Byleth, Astoroth, Sanac, Oze and the rest of the many that were ‘Legion’ were tied up creating havoc and catastrophe all over the world and far to busy to bother with 13 Lilac Avenue, Siddington. Even so, any evil - even an evil as small and unimportant that it went both unnamed and unrecognised in the confusion of Hell - can cause a deal of trouble for the unwary. If Mark could have looked into the future and seen what was in store for him then he may well have rummaged through the kitchen bin for a grain or two of salt in order to save his bacon, but unfortunately the only future vision that Mark possessed was a plan to pay off his mortgage and retire on a reasonable pension.
The bacon was sizzling in the frying pan on the electric cooker when the Imp materialised out of thin air on Mark’s left shoulder. Mark felt it dig its claws in hard but assumed that he must have strained his shoulder mowing the lawn the previous week. He gave it a rub - which annoyed the Imp. Imps don’t like to be petted; and in a rage it flew across the kitchen, picked up the pan and threw it high into the air. It landed with a clatter on the tiled kitchen floor and the bacon was sent tumbling, coming to a greasy stop by the refrigerator. Mark was a little taken aback but - ever the rational sceptic - he simply assumed that he hadn’t put the pan on the stove properly and that it’d toppled off on its own accord. So nonchalantly, he picked up the pan, wiped the grease from the floor, dusted down the bacon and made himself a bacon sandwich.
Of course if Mark had been living only a hundred years ago then he wouldn’t have taken the flying bacon so lightly. Back then he’d have rushed from the house screaming at the top of his voice; “an Imp, an Imp! Send for a priest! I’m possessed by an Imp!” But in these more enlightened times people don’t behave like that any more and the term ‘Imp’ is hardly ever used. Scientists, ghost-hunters, and even the clergy prefer to call them by a more respectable and acceptable title these days - they call them poltergeists. This doesn’t make them any less nasty or vindictive though, an Imp is an Imp no matter how you dress it up and an Imp’s job, its passion and raison d’être, is to make mankind’s life a misery - that and to steal souls for the Master.
Now, Master is a relative term. Any demon can become Master. It all depends on which of them is at the top of the ‘catching’ league at the time; but the Imp desperately wanted to be the Master one day.
Soul stealing is not an easy business, and the more souls you steal the bigger you grow, which probably explains why the Imp/poltergeist was such a small specimen. This is how it works - it’s a very simple principle: the more souls a demon manages to steal the bigger on the demonic scale the demon gets. So far the Imp had two credits to his name and he needed another eight to become a mini-demon, eighteen for a semi-demon, twenty-eight to become a demi-demon, ninety-eight for a full demon, a full five hundred for a mega-demon and an ultimate thousand souls for a terra-demon. Once you made terra-demon you had to fight it out with the other TD’s for absolute supremacy – and the Imp had a very, very, long way to go, so getting hold of Mark Harrington’s soul was very important to him.
Despite popular belief the only way to steal a soul is to make the owner so enraged that they do something completely out of character. It isn’t about sinning. It isn’t as easy or as simple as that - otherwise getting to TD status would be a piece of cake. After all everyone sins and merely committing a sin, however heinous, just isn’t enough to make you automatically lose your soul and get yourself dragged off along the fiery road to Hell. God makes sure of that. It’s what forgiveness is all about. In order to lose your soul it has to be stolen and the only entities that can steal souls are Demons and Imps (and the occasional woman) - so it’s no use them making a murderer commit another murder because that doesn’t work - that is totally in character. No result. On the other hand getting said murderer to give up murder and become a monk will definitely work. That is totally out of character. Result. There’s no point in encouraging your murderer to massacre a gaggle of old ladies on the bowling-green, because he’d probably have done that anyway - better to get him to make them all a cup of tea and serve them up pink and white fairy cakes in the interval. That will work.
The key to stealing a soul is to simply get the soul-owner to do something that they wouldn’t normally do - make that happen and the soul is yours.
The first rule of soul stealing is observation. It is lesson one in ‘Six Key Steps to Becoming a Demon, a Beginners Guide’ by B. L. Sebub - in which he explains that you have to get to know your victim, understand their psyche, and look for - and take note of - their little foibles. If you’re really lucky you’ll stumble upon the odd perversion or two (isn’t all perversion odd?), or you’ll find their weaknesses. All you have to do is create the right situation and exploit it to the limit – and then you pounce!
The Imp observed Mark closely as instructed. But unfortunately for it Mark Harrison didn’t appear to have any weaknesses - or strengths for that matter. He really was Mr. Average. If Mark had been a book then the book’s author would have owned a dictionary where words like risk, excitement, unpredictability, spontaneity, chance and superstition had all been removed and replaced with rationality, prudence, caution and evidence in larger and bolder type. People didn’t think Mark boring, because people didn’t think about Mark at all - he hardly registered on their radar, not even as a very small rain cloud drifting across a vast blue sky.
Mark was grey.
‘Still a grey soul is better than no soul’, thought the Imp as it jumped back on to Mark’s shoulder and settled down to watch and wait for the right opportunity.
The journey to the office was uneventful. Mark had the correct money ready for the bus driver and carefully held the ticket in his hand during the short journey to work - depositing the used ticket in the bin provided on arrival at his stop. At the office he removed his coat – almost knocking the Imp to the floor - hung it on the hanger provided and commenced his working day promptly at nine. At eleven fifteen he took the designated ten-minute break (exactly ten minutes) during which time he drank a sugarless cup of tea and ate a plain digestive biscuit. At one, Mark stopped for lunch and walked to the park where he sat on a bench and ate a processed cheese sandwich and a small apple - he ate this completely including the core and pips. At one-thirty he returned to work, placed his neatly folded sandwich bag back in his briefcase (for re-use) and worked diligently and carefully until three. At three he took the designated ten-minute break during which time he drank another sugarless cup of tea and ate a rich tea biscuit. He then worked solidly and methodically until five. At five Mark tidied his desk to the required “clean desk policy” standard, put on his coat, walked to the bus stop and caught his bus home with correct change, carefully held ticket and subsequent disposal in provided bin at his stop on the junction of Swaningdale Road and Lilac Avenue.
What a day! Safely and uneventfully home Mark cooked his dinner (an individual steak pie, boiled potatoes and tinned processed peas), then washed, dried and put away the dishes. He worked on his plastic model kit of Henry VIII and his six wives until three minutes to nine, switching on the television at nine o’clock precisely to watch the news. As soon as the newsreader had wished Mark “a very good night” he switched off the set, boiled a small amount of water in the kettle, and made and drank a mug of very sweet instant hot chocolate. After this - and only after putting his model of Henry VIII and his wives back in the sideboard where he kept them - he washed, dried, and hung his mug on the mug-tree by the kettle. Finally, after checking that the doors and windows were locked, the downstairs lights were switched off, and that all electrical appliances had their plugs fully removed from the sockets, he went upstairs to the bathroom and ran a shallow bath to make ready for bed. He washed himself from head to toe, got out of the bath and removed the plug - carefully coiling the silver chain around the black rubber sphere- then he dried himself, rinsed out the bath, folded the towels, hung them on the bath rail, and cleaned his teeth - side to side and up and down - for four minutes exactly.
In his bedroom Mark undressed, folded/hung/put for wash his clothes and replaced them with pyjamas, buttoning all of the buttons on the striped pyjama jacket. He got into bed and read a few pages from “Model Makers Monthly” - a very interesting article comparing the properties and adhesive qualities of ten different brands of adhesive – at ten-twenty he set his alarm clock for three minutes to seven, switched off the bedside lamp, and went to sleep.
The Imp wasn’t impressed by Mark’s performance. It could see right through it. Any man who was as methodical and ordered as Mark must have something big and darkly deep-rooted to hide - and if Mark were hiding something then he would have a good (and probably disgusting) reason for hiding it. People who hid things could usually be “catched”.
Getting “catched” is not the same thing at all as getting caught, there’s a difference. Getting caught is a physical thing - but when someone is ‘”catched” it’s both a physical and a philosophical thing. The catcher gets “the all" of them - body and soul. It’s a bit like cricket with the demon acting as the wicket keeper. The bowler bowls, the batsman tries for the ball, clips it and gets caught out by the wicket keeper. Only in this game the catcher gets to keep the ball, the bat, the batsman, and the batsman’s soul. It was just a question of watching and waiting for Mark to miss the ball, make a slip, and give away the nature of whatever nasty little game he was playing.
The Imp could wait - slowly, slowly, catchy monkey.
After three days of carefully observing Mark’s lifestyle the Imp was beginning to get bored and a little worried. The only daily difference that Mark conceded to his routine was the substitution of sausages, a lamb chop, and finally – on Monday - some pig’s liver for dinner. Even the weekend hadn’t been that different to his working days. Mark food shopped on Saturday morning, did housework on Saturday afternoon, listened to “The Archers” then pottered in the garden Sunday morning, and went for a brisk walk in the park on the afternoon. Over and above these small digressions Mark’s daily routine was exactly the same.
The Imp was getting frustrated. Nobody could be this boring! Everybody had something to hide! All you had to do was observe them for long enough and you’d begin to see how best to tempt them - how to get them out of character. Observation was the key - the book said so! All it had to do was keep looking and wait for a chance to make the catch to come along. So it waited and watched, and watched and waited – four days (salmon steak), five days (chicken), six days (individual shepherds pie), seven (pork steak) - then on the eighth day…steak pie again. The Imp began to realise that Mark really was as orderly, habitual, methodical, and downright flat and boring as he appeared to be - and nothing was going to change that.
It was time to make things happen!
'Making things happen’ in Demonic terms is not quite as open-ended as it sounds. There’s a well laid down code of Demonly conduct that has to be adhered to stringently if a soul is to be successfully ‘”catched”.
‘Successful Soul Catching Every Time!’ by Louis Cipher is a ‘must read’ for any aspiring Terra-Demon. It lays down these rules of conduct: 1. No trickery. 2. No cheating. 3. No lie telling. And 4. No pushing. All of which are pretty hard for a Demon to stick to - after all trickery, cheating, lie telling, and pushing are the very things that Demon’s do best. However, ‘rules is rules’, and they have to be followed - even if you are a lying, cheating, tricky, cloven-hoofed, triple-horned son of snake who isn’t beyond giving a nun a bit of a push if it helps to get things moving.
There’s also the ‘seriousness of activity’ clause; this basically states that each “to be catched” individual must commit an act (or acts) that is proven (beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt) that he/she has acted in a manner outside of his/her normal behavioural pattern. The seriousness of the act(s) is cumulative and should add up to no less than three ‘tuts’ - a ‘tut’ being a measure of abnormal individual behaviour
Given thes rules I'm fairly sure that our tea and fairy cake wielding murderer at the bowling club would easily get a score of three ‘tuts’ for being nice to the old ladies rather than hacking them to pieces with a meat cleaver. Tut, tut, tut…without a doubt - as would a vicar if he were to massacre his congregation - both would be acting outside of their normal behavioural pattern. But Mark Harrington was no murderer, he wasn’t even a vicar; so anything out of character that he might manage was likely to be only a very slight deviation from his straight-line norm and it was very unlikely that a single event would merit three ‘tuts’.
After consideration the Imp decided that in Mark’s case it would probably be best to go for three separate events and aim to score only a single ‘tut’ for each one. The problem was that the Imp had no clue as to what would entice Mr. M. Harrison to do something so unusual and out of character as to prove (beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt) that he had acted in a manner outside of his normal behavioural pattern. After all, he was so teeth-grindingly normal.
But then - with a flash of Imp-spiration - he remembered the salt!
We all have stuff. If we didn’t then we’d all be the same and in my experience none of us are ever exactly the same. This is good. I think that most people would agree that it is the differences about us that make us interesting and unique.
It’s stuff that makes me not a widget and even though I can be hard work at times I don’t think I’m repeatable. “Thank God” some of you are probably muttering.
As part of the stuff that makes ‘me’ me is the fact that I am more than a little superstitious. I salute single Magpies, run away from black cats, and throw an awful lot of salt over my shoulder - you probably thought it was dandruff, well it isn’t!
My wife on the other hand thinks that superstition is nonsense and she’d no more turn around three times on seeing a full moon than fly to it.
Anyway I think it’s best to hedge your bets where superstition is concerned; you never know what may be watching and waiting for you make that tiny mistake that lets bad luck in.
The Spilling of Salt
Part 1. In which some salt gets spilled
Mark Harrington was not a superstitious man, so when he knocked over the salt one Friday morning at breakfast he wasn’t bothered unduly. Neither did he know or care that this particular Friday was the thirteenth, and he cared and knew even less about Frigg or Freya - so how was he to understand that spilling the salt had annoyed them. The notion that any Friday was a bad day to spill salt on - and that the thirteenth was the worst Friday of all, simply never entered head. He just swept the salt up in his hand and threw it carelessly into the kitchen bin rather than taking the trouble to throw a little of it over his left shoulder with his right hand. If he had then he may well have prevented the events that took place after the salt spilling, but as I have already mentioned, Mark was not a superstitious man. He didn’t understand that this small event was a warning from his Guardian Angel that bad luck was on the way, any more that he knew that by ignoring it he’d opened the door for evil to enter his life.
Not all evil is big and there are never enough demons and devils to go around on Friday the thirteenth. So Mark was lucky – in a very unlucky way - that the only creature not fully tied up that day was a rather small Imp. It is likely that if it hadn’t been Friday the thirteenth Mark would have had much bigger problems on his hands - but Bael, Zoper, Byleth, Astoroth, Sanac, Oze and the rest of the many that were ‘Legion’ were tied up creating havoc and catastrophe all over the world and far to busy to bother with 13 Lilac Avenue, Siddington. Even so, any evil - even an evil as small and unimportant that it went both unnamed and unrecognised in the confusion of Hell - can cause a deal of trouble for the unwary. If Mark could have looked into the future and seen what was in store for him then he may well have rummaged through the kitchen bin for a grain or two of salt in order to save his bacon, but unfortunately the only future vision that Mark possessed was a plan to pay off his mortgage and retire on a reasonable pension.
The bacon was sizzling in the frying pan on the electric cooker when the Imp materialised out of thin air on Mark’s left shoulder. Mark felt it dig its claws in hard but assumed that he must have strained his shoulder mowing the lawn the previous week. He gave it a rub - which annoyed the Imp. Imps don’t like to be petted; and in a rage it flew across the kitchen, picked up the pan and threw it high into the air. It landed with a clatter on the tiled kitchen floor and the bacon was sent tumbling, coming to a greasy stop by the refrigerator. Mark was a little taken aback but - ever the rational sceptic - he simply assumed that he hadn’t put the pan on the stove properly and that it’d toppled off on its own accord. So nonchalantly, he picked up the pan, wiped the grease from the floor, dusted down the bacon and made himself a bacon sandwich.
Of course if Mark had been living only a hundred years ago then he wouldn’t have taken the flying bacon so lightly. Back then he’d have rushed from the house screaming at the top of his voice; “an Imp, an Imp! Send for a priest! I’m possessed by an Imp!” But in these more enlightened times people don’t behave like that any more and the term ‘Imp’ is hardly ever used. Scientists, ghost-hunters, and even the clergy prefer to call them by a more respectable and acceptable title these days - they call them poltergeists. This doesn’t make them any less nasty or vindictive though, an Imp is an Imp no matter how you dress it up and an Imp’s job, its passion and raison d’être, is to make mankind’s life a misery - that and to steal souls for the Master.
Now, Master is a relative term. Any demon can become Master. It all depends on which of them is at the top of the ‘catching’ league at the time; but the Imp desperately wanted to be the Master one day.
Soul stealing is not an easy business, and the more souls you steal the bigger you grow, which probably explains why the Imp/poltergeist was such a small specimen. This is how it works - it’s a very simple principle: the more souls a demon manages to steal the bigger on the demonic scale the demon gets. So far the Imp had two credits to his name and he needed another eight to become a mini-demon, eighteen for a semi-demon, twenty-eight to become a demi-demon, ninety-eight for a full demon, a full five hundred for a mega-demon and an ultimate thousand souls for a terra-demon. Once you made terra-demon you had to fight it out with the other TD’s for absolute supremacy – and the Imp had a very, very, long way to go, so getting hold of Mark Harrington’s soul was very important to him.
Despite popular belief the only way to steal a soul is to make the owner so enraged that they do something completely out of character. It isn’t about sinning. It isn’t as easy or as simple as that - otherwise getting to TD status would be a piece of cake. After all everyone sins and merely committing a sin, however heinous, just isn’t enough to make you automatically lose your soul and get yourself dragged off along the fiery road to Hell. God makes sure of that. It’s what forgiveness is all about. In order to lose your soul it has to be stolen and the only entities that can steal souls are Demons and Imps (and the occasional woman) - so it’s no use them making a murderer commit another murder because that doesn’t work - that is totally in character. No result. On the other hand getting said murderer to give up murder and become a monk will definitely work. That is totally out of character. Result. There’s no point in encouraging your murderer to massacre a gaggle of old ladies on the bowling-green, because he’d probably have done that anyway - better to get him to make them all a cup of tea and serve them up pink and white fairy cakes in the interval. That will work.
The key to stealing a soul is to simply get the soul-owner to do something that they wouldn’t normally do - make that happen and the soul is yours.
The first rule of soul stealing is observation. It is lesson one in ‘Six Key Steps to Becoming a Demon, a Beginners Guide’ by B. L. Sebub - in which he explains that you have to get to know your victim, understand their psyche, and look for - and take note of - their little foibles. If you’re really lucky you’ll stumble upon the odd perversion or two (isn’t all perversion odd?), or you’ll find their weaknesses. All you have to do is create the right situation and exploit it to the limit – and then you pounce!
The Imp observed Mark closely as instructed. But unfortunately for it Mark Harrison didn’t appear to have any weaknesses - or strengths for that matter. He really was Mr. Average. If Mark had been a book then the book’s author would have owned a dictionary where words like risk, excitement, unpredictability, spontaneity, chance and superstition had all been removed and replaced with rationality, prudence, caution and evidence in larger and bolder type. People didn’t think Mark boring, because people didn’t think about Mark at all - he hardly registered on their radar, not even as a very small rain cloud drifting across a vast blue sky.
Mark was grey.
‘Still a grey soul is better than no soul’, thought the Imp as it jumped back on to Mark’s shoulder and settled down to watch and wait for the right opportunity.
The journey to the office was uneventful. Mark had the correct money ready for the bus driver and carefully held the ticket in his hand during the short journey to work - depositing the used ticket in the bin provided on arrival at his stop. At the office he removed his coat – almost knocking the Imp to the floor - hung it on the hanger provided and commenced his working day promptly at nine. At eleven fifteen he took the designated ten-minute break (exactly ten minutes) during which time he drank a sugarless cup of tea and ate a plain digestive biscuit. At one, Mark stopped for lunch and walked to the park where he sat on a bench and ate a processed cheese sandwich and a small apple - he ate this completely including the core and pips. At one-thirty he returned to work, placed his neatly folded sandwich bag back in his briefcase (for re-use) and worked diligently and carefully until three. At three he took the designated ten-minute break during which time he drank another sugarless cup of tea and ate a rich tea biscuit. He then worked solidly and methodically until five. At five Mark tidied his desk to the required “clean desk policy” standard, put on his coat, walked to the bus stop and caught his bus home with correct change, carefully held ticket and subsequent disposal in provided bin at his stop on the junction of Swaningdale Road and Lilac Avenue.
What a day! Safely and uneventfully home Mark cooked his dinner (an individual steak pie, boiled potatoes and tinned processed peas), then washed, dried and put away the dishes. He worked on his plastic model kit of Henry VIII and his six wives until three minutes to nine, switching on the television at nine o’clock precisely to watch the news. As soon as the newsreader had wished Mark “a very good night” he switched off the set, boiled a small amount of water in the kettle, and made and drank a mug of very sweet instant hot chocolate. After this - and only after putting his model of Henry VIII and his wives back in the sideboard where he kept them - he washed, dried, and hung his mug on the mug-tree by the kettle. Finally, after checking that the doors and windows were locked, the downstairs lights were switched off, and that all electrical appliances had their plugs fully removed from the sockets, he went upstairs to the bathroom and ran a shallow bath to make ready for bed. He washed himself from head to toe, got out of the bath and removed the plug - carefully coiling the silver chain around the black rubber sphere- then he dried himself, rinsed out the bath, folded the towels, hung them on the bath rail, and cleaned his teeth - side to side and up and down - for four minutes exactly.
In his bedroom Mark undressed, folded/hung/put for wash his clothes and replaced them with pyjamas, buttoning all of the buttons on the striped pyjama jacket. He got into bed and read a few pages from “Model Makers Monthly” - a very interesting article comparing the properties and adhesive qualities of ten different brands of adhesive – at ten-twenty he set his alarm clock for three minutes to seven, switched off the bedside lamp, and went to sleep.
The Imp wasn’t impressed by Mark’s performance. It could see right through it. Any man who was as methodical and ordered as Mark must have something big and darkly deep-rooted to hide - and if Mark were hiding something then he would have a good (and probably disgusting) reason for hiding it. People who hid things could usually be “catched”.
Getting “catched” is not the same thing at all as getting caught, there’s a difference. Getting caught is a physical thing - but when someone is ‘”catched” it’s both a physical and a philosophical thing. The catcher gets “the all" of them - body and soul. It’s a bit like cricket with the demon acting as the wicket keeper. The bowler bowls, the batsman tries for the ball, clips it and gets caught out by the wicket keeper. Only in this game the catcher gets to keep the ball, the bat, the batsman, and the batsman’s soul. It was just a question of watching and waiting for Mark to miss the ball, make a slip, and give away the nature of whatever nasty little game he was playing.
The Imp could wait - slowly, slowly, catchy monkey.
After three days of carefully observing Mark’s lifestyle the Imp was beginning to get bored and a little worried. The only daily difference that Mark conceded to his routine was the substitution of sausages, a lamb chop, and finally – on Monday - some pig’s liver for dinner. Even the weekend hadn’t been that different to his working days. Mark food shopped on Saturday morning, did housework on Saturday afternoon, listened to “The Archers” then pottered in the garden Sunday morning, and went for a brisk walk in the park on the afternoon. Over and above these small digressions Mark’s daily routine was exactly the same.
The Imp was getting frustrated. Nobody could be this boring! Everybody had something to hide! All you had to do was observe them for long enough and you’d begin to see how best to tempt them - how to get them out of character. Observation was the key - the book said so! All it had to do was keep looking and wait for a chance to make the catch to come along. So it waited and watched, and watched and waited – four days (salmon steak), five days (chicken), six days (individual shepherds pie), seven (pork steak) - then on the eighth day…steak pie again. The Imp began to realise that Mark really was as orderly, habitual, methodical, and downright flat and boring as he appeared to be - and nothing was going to change that.
It was time to make things happen!
'Making things happen’ in Demonic terms is not quite as open-ended as it sounds. There’s a well laid down code of Demonly conduct that has to be adhered to stringently if a soul is to be successfully ‘”catched”.
‘Successful Soul Catching Every Time!’ by Louis Cipher is a ‘must read’ for any aspiring Terra-Demon. It lays down these rules of conduct: 1. No trickery. 2. No cheating. 3. No lie telling. And 4. No pushing. All of which are pretty hard for a Demon to stick to - after all trickery, cheating, lie telling, and pushing are the very things that Demon’s do best. However, ‘rules is rules’, and they have to be followed - even if you are a lying, cheating, tricky, cloven-hoofed, triple-horned son of snake who isn’t beyond giving a nun a bit of a push if it helps to get things moving.
There’s also the ‘seriousness of activity’ clause; this basically states that each “to be catched” individual must commit an act (or acts) that is proven (beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt) that he/she has acted in a manner outside of his/her normal behavioural pattern. The seriousness of the act(s) is cumulative and should add up to no less than three ‘tuts’ - a ‘tut’ being a measure of abnormal individual behaviour
Given thes rules I'm fairly sure that our tea and fairy cake wielding murderer at the bowling club would easily get a score of three ‘tuts’ for being nice to the old ladies rather than hacking them to pieces with a meat cleaver. Tut, tut, tut…without a doubt - as would a vicar if he were to massacre his congregation - both would be acting outside of their normal behavioural pattern. But Mark Harrington was no murderer, he wasn’t even a vicar; so anything out of character that he might manage was likely to be only a very slight deviation from his straight-line norm and it was very unlikely that a single event would merit three ‘tuts’.
After consideration the Imp decided that in Mark’s case it would probably be best to go for three separate events and aim to score only a single ‘tut’ for each one. The problem was that the Imp had no clue as to what would entice Mr. M. Harrison to do something so unusual and out of character as to prove (beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt) that he had acted in a manner outside of his normal behavioural pattern. After all, he was so teeth-grindingly normal.
But then - with a flash of Imp-spiration - he remembered the salt!
More to follow later…
never mind that, what about the cat?!!
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