The Devil and The One That Got Away

Well, I thought to myself, it was probably time to upgrade anyway. I said a final goodbye to the melted laptop, and dropped it into the skip. I had considered harvesting it for useful parts, but I knew deep down that it was damaged beyond repair. A full blast of hellish flame tends to have that effect on most electronic goods, and even if the machine hadn’t been fried beyond redemption I would have felt bad poking around under its casing after causing its destruction. Because it was my fault, really. Obviously it had been Satan that had thrown the fireball, but it was my foolishness that had provoked him into doing so. I should have known better than to show him the Downfall parodies in the first place.

It should have been a fun evening – a few jars at the local boozer, then back to mine for some Youtube hilarity. It was a laugh at first – we started off poking fun at some clips from Fox News, then moved on to videos of cats falling off things and knocking stuff over, and that clip of a guy getting pushed out of a window by his dog. After that I felt we needed to watch something slightly more sophisticated, so I cued up a few of the Downfall parodies. I mean, what’s not to like about someone changing the subtitles of a serious film about Hitler so that he rants about pop cultural trivia? I knew Satan liked a good parody as much as the next being, because he had the complete Naked Gun box set and frequently organised screenings of Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs. However, I’d forgotten how much the Hitler thing still bugged him after all these years, as was evidenced by a roar of anger, a jet of flame, and one seriously overcooked computer.

I’d originally found out about Satan’s Hitler fixation over a few sherries with Mrs Devil. Normally she was pretty reticent when it came to discussing her husband’s many flaws, but the booze had loosened her tongue and she was happy to list his failings. It started with the usual stuff like leaving the toilet seat up and not using a chopping board when he made sandwiches, but then took an unexpected turn when she knowingly referred to “The one that got away”. I’d always assumed that Hitler was kicking around Hell somewhere, but to Satan’s eternal chagrin, this was not the case.

It had all, rather predictably, started in 1945. The war in Europe was over, and The Fuhrer was dead. However, he hadn’t shown up in Hell, and all the other afterlife providers had made it clear that they wouldn’t touch the little bastard with a bargepole. The whereabouts of his body remained unclear but it was thought that the Soviets, as was so often the case, knew more than they were letting on. It wasn’t long before a meeting was arranged, which Satan hoped would allow him to bargain for info that might help him track down the Great Dictator. He might have even succeeded, had his approach not been flawed from the start.

The first problem was that the Soviet negotiating party were all atheists who didn’t technically believe in Satan in the first place, thus forcing him to disguise himself as a normal mortal. A simple, businesslike disguise was all that was needed, but Satan had to go too far. When he turned up at the meeting, he couldn’t have more closely resembled the stereotypical portly capitalist if he’d tried. He had it all, from a ridiculously oversized top hat to a silver tipped cane. He’d even daubed his hooves in black and white paint in a ludicrous attempt to make them look like spats. It was a classic example of failing to understand your audience, and he was pretty much doomed to failure even before he made his opening offer; 500 fur hats and twenty cases of vodka. If there were two things the Soviets already had in spades, it was fur hats and vodka. Safe to say he was laughed out of the meeting within seconds. Decades later, my melted computer stood as testament to just how fresh those painful memories remained.