BALANCING ACT
Act 1
Imagine, if you will, the charming town of
Overprud just outside Bristol, England. There sits a smallish church of late
Tudor construction, which is named St. Jerome and Our Lady of Scriptures. This
church is presided over by Reverend Hubert Dunch, who had once been as average
as reverends get, concerned about the world and his soul and those who looked to
him for guidance. But he has lost his faith, and it drags him down. It has led
to a lack of conscience, stealing from his own parish, cheating on his wife,
drinking, gambling, and many other unimaginative vices. The reasons behind his
lost faith are numerous and tedious, and therefore shan’t be recounted in this
story.
The reverend is teetering upon a precipice that
threatens his soul. And worse, the reverend is one of those individuals with a
bit more psychic ability than he realises. Thus his lack of conscience has
become so very metaphysically strong it has overlapped the souls of his
congregation, some hundred plus people. They, feeling the tug of his
steadily blackening soul, have begun to sin as well and scarcely wonder why.
They haven’t the will to stop.
Thanks to this parasitic situation, St. Jerome
and Our Lady of Scriptures is now the church with the most concentrated
wickedness in all of England.
And this fact niggles terribly in the back of a
certain angel’s mind. He is the Principality of England and feels like he ought
to be doing something about it. He has, in fact, tried. Being that he isn’t
allowed to fully manifest as an angelic presence, he is reduced to visiting St.
Jerome’s and sending out positive vibrations to the church-goers, and trying to
focus thoughts of righteousness and good will on the reverend’s mind. He hopes
that he’s done a good job of influencing without interfering with human free
will. But alas, the church remains ever-resistant, as though it simply doesn’t
want to be good. And though the angel despairs, he knows he’s done all he
is allowed to do. Plus he has many other tasks that press upon his time, such as
collecting rare Bibles and feeding ducks and enjoying life after the
Apocalypse-which-didn’t-happen.
Imagine now that a span of time, say half a year,
has passed, and the church grows ever darker. The angel senses it still, but
feels he can do nothing more about it. He does, however, whine a great deal
about the situation while drinking with his best companion who happens to be,
most oddly, a demon of only remotely evil persuasion. The angel sighs softly and
lolls his head against this demon’s shoulder, and tugs repeatedly at the demon’s
necktie while babbling about goodness and wickedness and effability, oh silly
me, in-effability. And the demon grits his teeth and barely holds himself
back from either strangling the angel or snogging him, just to shut his mouth.
The demon prefers the latter option. He is now wondering if the angel wants the
same thing, but the damned angel could just as well be clueless about the
signals he’s presumably giving. The demon is getting frustrated.
The demon and the angel have long been sharing
their duties in the world. A little temptation here, a little thwarting there,
and both have become rather expert at doing one another’s jobs so long as it
doesn’t involve extremes. It would all get done anyway, and neither Heaven nor
Hell seem to care who did the job as long as it got done. So the demon
decides he’ll do something about the little church himself, but not to tell the
angel about it until he succeeds. Then he plans to use the angel’s undoubted
gratitude and delight over this good deed to, if possible, seduce said angel. He
is a demon, after all, and therefore still a bit devious.
And now, we come to present time (even though the
tense of the story changes to past… you get the point)…
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Crowley could smell the church miles away. It
certainly didn’t approach a level of Inquisitorial evil, but with humans you
could never tell what would tip them over the edge and into the Pit. And it was
always their own fault. If he could prevent such horror, then he would do
so.
The bloody angel was going to owe him big for
this.
He parked in front of the deceptively quaint
church and, as he’d guessed, easily entered the building without so much as a
whiff of holiness to singe him. It was worse than he’d thought. Time to pull out
the big guns, so to speak. He sniffed around the altar, looking for
de-sanctified Communion wine, but then he sensed a human presence. It seethed,
waiting like a spider in its lair. Crowley smiled. Down a side hallway, he found
a door behind which was the presence he sought.
“Oh, good,” breathed the man in black vestments,
a tumbler of whiskey in his shaky hand. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d
gotten lost. I must say,” he looked at Crowley and licked his lips, “your advert
didn’t describe you nearly well enough.”
Advert?
Crowley almost said aloud. Oh, oh-ho-ho. The demon grinned broadly, and
when he grinned like that it looked lecherous even when it wasn’t meant to. The
reverend’s thoughts were broadcasting so clearly now that any occult being would
see them. An old-fashioned demon might see scenes from the Malleus
Maleficarum, witches and demons consorting in poorly done woodcuts. Crowley,
being more modern, saw slick magazine pages in blazing colour, with lots of
lubrication and open-arsed leather trousers.
The reverend quickly scanned Crowley’s form - the
flashy younger man, dark and handsome with high cheekbones and tempting mouth,
sunglasses and stylish suit just waiting to be replaced with something more…
appropriate to the situation – and very much liked what he saw. Rev. Dunch took
a step or two nearer, obviously nervous and eager. “So, how does this start,
then? It’s all a bit new for me but as my advert said, I’m, uh, quite
up for experimenting.” He said ‘up’ as if it were a clever thing.
Crowley grinned until he thought his face would
split. This was going to be so easy it was barely a challenge. Humans and their
so-called vices, thinking that something like kinky sex was so evil. This
man was one of the worse kind – so jaded with his role as ‘upright example to
his community’ that he sought this ‘vice’ out to feel alive again. There was,
however, hiding deep behind this façade, a sadness over the futility of his
life. While Aziraphale would have tried to appeal to his memories of his
calling, of God’s love, of the Word… Crowley knew, in this case, it was too far
gone for anything more than the boldest of bold moves.
“Well,” the demon said slyly, “I guess we can
start with some… confessions.” He walked slowly around the reverend, sizing him
up. A bit paunchy, a bit grey at the temple, and definitely sweating. “What sort
of experimenting are you willing to do? What am I supposedly getting paid for
this little encounter? Is it out of church funds? Off the books, absolutely.
Have you set up a hidden camera for wank sessions later on? Got more funds ready
to bride me or anyone else who might try to expose your indiscretion? Oh dear,
we have been naughty, haven’t we…”
The reverend, face reddening, choked, “Now, see
here… I thought you were… but the ad…” He faltered, the glass in his hand
sloshing. “You’re not… “
Crowley still smiled, but it seemed far less
friendly. “No, I’m not here for any ad. No, not from the police. No interest in
blackmailing you. You can’t begin to guess my purpose... But now I suppose it’s
my turn for confessions, eh? Sit down, friend…” Crowley utterly
hated using archaic words, but sometimes it was the best way in these
circumstances. His demonic aura flared up noticeably as he intoned, “…And
hearken ye welle, mortal…”
Rev. Dunch collapsed like a limp puppet onto his
chair, and watched with growing terror as the handsome young man mutated before
him.
Crowley removed his sunglasses first and the
golden reptilian eyes gazed deeply into the reverend’s soul, raking it like the
blood-red claws he then sprouted. With a bit of irony, he seductively stripped
his jacket, tie and shirt off, exposing a shapely but scaly torso covered with
eyes, and mouths with sharp teeth. When their many tongues licked out like whips
and tasted the reverend’s cheeks, the man screamed. Crowley lashed out a
serpentine tail then, wrapping it around Rev. Dunch’s face to silence him.
“Now, holy manne,” Crowley hissed, a long
forked tongue flicking from his no longer pretty mouth, “Dost this be the
showe thou longs for? Hast thy hart lusted for suche as me.” Horns
sprouted on his head and thighs, splitting his trousers provocatively up to the
hips, as his feet became steely hooves, scraping the floor and sending up
sparks.
“Verily, thine soul hangs bye but a thread
o’er the Pitt of Hell,” Crowley boomed, unleashing his wings, feathers black as
pitch and glowing with sulphurous light. “Dost thou long’st to be cast doun? To
drag thy flocke wyth thee? For this is thy destiney, shouldst ye
continue to steale and lie, to fornicate, to indulge thyself wyth gamef of
chance, and to care notte ‘bout the World beyond thys onne! Thou doom all those
that follow ye, manne, womanne and chylde! All doom’d to
eternal fyre and pain. But now… come ye closer… feel
that which thou lust for…” There appeared a bulge of insane proportion in
Crowley's trousers, threatening to burst forth and claim the reverend’s body as
well as his soul. It seemed to be squirming like so many other parts of the
demon’s form.
With a shriek, the reverend scrabbled loose from
Crowley’s tail and away into the corner, whimpering piteously.
Seeing the man was nearly scared straight,
Crowley knew his job was almost done. “Holy manne, once pious and true and goode,”
he warned, stabbing a claw in his direction, “if ye repent thine
wayf, once more take ye up the mantle of righteousnef… and be it honest
and kinde, not merely to avoid such af me…
then ye sharle be spared the agoney of Hell and eternal firef, and thy flock as
well. Canst thou do this?”
“Yes! Yes!” the reverend shouted hoarsely, “Once
I was good! Once I believed and preached the Word with a clean heart! I can be
so again! I shall! My flock shall not suffer for my sins! Oh, please, demon,
begone! Begone!” He’d obviously caught the fever of archaic speech. Crowley
rolled his eyes.
“Alas, I see I cannot yette claim thy soul. But…
I sharl watch upon thee…,” Crowley snarled, and departed in
a blast of smoke and flames. Fortunately they weren’t enough to burn anything
other than a small patch on the carpet, which the reverend would leave forever
as a reminder of his close encounter.
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It took Crowley a few hours to feel normal again.
He kept checking himself for extra parts. Such episodes always left him worrying
he’d be stuck in a form other than the one he preferred.