Blameless in Abaddon Read Free Page A

proportion, which is why—contrary to rumor—it is by no means the Devil’s least favorite emotion.
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    Me again. Yours truly. Let’s get something straight right now. This is not Old Nick here. This is not Mr. Scratch, Beelzebub, Gentleman Jack, or any other cozy and domesticated edition of myself. This is the Devil. This is hardball.
    This is a two-month-old Bulgarian baby tossed into the air and caught on a Turkish bayonet in front of its hysterical mother. This is an Ustashe commandant splitting open a Serb’s ass with an ax, so that the Serb begs the commandant,
begs
him, to shoot him in the head, and the commandant simply laughs. A thirty-year-old melanoma victim slipping his head into a plastic bag and cinching it with the string of his son’s Batman kite. The Yangtze River overflowing its banks in 1931, flooding every acre from Nanking to Hankow and drowning 3.5 million peasants. The great Iranian earthquake of 1990, rippling through the country’s northern provinces, flattening a hundred towns, and leaving fifty thousand dead.
    Please understand, I never asked for this job. It wasn’t my idea to be the Prince of Darkness, the Principle of Evil, the Principal of Hate, or anything of the kind. I never requested that God reach into Hell’s highest dung heap, grab a glob of primal slime, and mold me as He would later mold Adam from clay. While I am willing to confess my sins before any priest with time enough to listen, the ultimate responsibility for Martin Candle’s fate—for all the world’s pain—does not lie with me. Yes, I invented the typhoon; true, my hobby is breeding tuberculosis; nolo contendere, I am gravity’s mechanic and, by extension, an accessory before the fact of every fatal fall. But just because our Creator subcontracts evil out to me, we mustn’t neglect to notice the blood on His hands.
    â€œGod dwells in the details,” wrote the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe . . . and so do I. My name is Jonathan Sarkos, I am six foot four, and I weigh two hundred and eighty-five pounds. Like a chameleon’s, my complexion varies as a function of my environment, though inversely. On asphalt, I am white. On snow, black. You must cast all cliched accessories from your mind: scepter, forked beard, scholar’s cap. I gave up cloven hoofs in the Middle Ages. I haven’t worn horns since the Renaissance.
    Of all my portrayers, it was a twentieth-century painter named Jerome Witkin who came closest to the truth. Witkin’s masterpiece is a 72 × 65-inch oil-on-canvas called
The Devil as a Tailor.
This artist saw it all. My cramped and penumbral shop with its Elias Howe sewing machine and its racks of newly made garments awaiting pickup. My massive frame, balding pate, large, turtlelike head. The one thing he got wrong was my age. While poets commonly produce their best work in their thirties, and mathematicians typically burn out in their twenties, miscreants tend to be late bloomers. Hitler didn’t get around to invading Poland until he was fifty. Ceausescu got the hang of atrocity only after turning sixty-four. I am an eternal seventy-two.
    My sewing needle boasts an honorable lineage, having been fashioned from the very spike the Roman soldiers drove through Jesus Christ’s left wrist.
Flash
, it goes in the light of my whale-oil lamp, stitching together shirts, trousers, coats, blouses, and gowns.
Flash. Flash.
The demand for my goods is great. Authentic evil is rarely committed by the naked; even rapists keep their pants on. Hour after hour, I sit here inside God’s decaying brain, hypnotized by my needle’s glitter, glancing up occasionally to watch the great cranial artery called the River Hiddekel flow past my private dock on its journey to the pineal gland. I rest only on Sundays. Military uniforms are a specialty. Copes and cassocks, of course. Flags, naturally. White hoods and matching sheets. Business