The Devil and Disguises

I glanced through the eyeholes I’d cut in the newspaper, trying to see how the devil was getting on with the girl he’d been chatting to for the last few minutes. Things seemed to be going well for him so far. She was smiling, holding his gaze, and generally seemed to be enjoying their conversation. Satan had an air of confidence about him that I didn’t get to see all that often, so much so that when he made a ‘finger pistol’ motion at the young lady it actually came across as kinda cool rather than irredeemably dorky. I, on the other hand, felt utterly ridiculous. Wearing a long raincoat, oversized glasses without lenses in the frames, and one of those plastic ‘Groucho Marx’ fake noses, I was expecting to be arrested as some form of pervert at any moment. This was made worse by the fact that wearing the fake glasses prohibited the wearing of my real glasses, thus making me leer and squint at anything I wanted to see clearly. In fact, the more I thought about it the more worrying it was – a leering, raincoat clad man wearing an obvious disguise, apparently spying on another man as he talked to girls barley older than eighteen? In my mind, this little scenario was quickly passing through the various mental categories that I’ve come to associate with any contact with the devil. It had started as a Jaunt, then developed into a Caper, quickly passed into being an Escapade, and could at any moment become an Incident. After that, the only stage left was a full blown Fiasco. I cursed myself for agreeing to watch over Satan while he tried to pick up chicks at the shopping mall.

Now, I’m sure you have a couple of questions at this stage, the first of which is probably ‘why the disguise?’ Well, you know the old phrase about the devil taking many forms? While that’s true, he doesn’t do it in quite the way you might imagine. You see, while it is perfectly possible for the devil to accurately mimic any living creature in existence, what rather messes this up is his irrepressible sense of theatre.

On this occasion, for example, he was trying to appear as a handsome man in his early twenties, dressed in that indie style that the young ladies seem so keen on these days. However, rather than changing his physical shape in any way whatsoever, he just decided to put all his effort into the costume. So, his shaggy goat legs had been squeezed into a pair of skinny fit jeans, his winged torso clad in a Klaxons T shirt, and his little horns were covered by an angular, tousled wig. The seams of his Converse trainers visibly strained around the shape of his cloven hooves. Weird thing was, this seemed to actually work. Not one of the young women he’d spoken to today seemed to have batted an eyelid at the fact they were being chatted up by a red skinned, fork tongued, cat eyed, fanged terror. In fact, no matter how ridiculous the disguise, nobody ever seemed to question it. What Lucifer didn’t seem to understand though, was that the same logic didn’t apply to me. When he’d handed me the costume, he explained I was to be a man of mystery, blending into the background seamlessly until he needed me to bail him out of an awkward moment with one of tha ladeez. Instead, I looked like the kind of guy who’d get his house burnt down by torch wielding vigilantes. I sighed, but realised that it was in my interests to help him nonetheless. After all, he needed to fill out the ranks of his diabolical concubine one way or another, and the quicker he could finish that job the quicker I could get him to help me with some wallpaper that needed putting up round at my Nan’s house. You know how it is, one of those jobs that you can do alone but really is so much quicker with two people. As the last unwitting girl disclosed her phone number to Satan, I stared across at the nearby branch of Homebase with envious eyes. Well, I thought I was looking at a branch of Homebase, but without my real glasses on it turned out I was in fact leering at a shop selling women’s lingerie. A fact not lost on the burly mall security guard who’d been monitoring my activities for some time. Needless to say, the devil pretended not to know me as I was forcefully escorted from the premises.