The Devil's Pet

Chapter 6

Friday June 20, 2008

Sean hung his head in frustration. Driving behind some clueless woman, talking on the phone, doing thirty in a forty five mile an hour zone was making him angrier by the minute. He was supposed to meet Dr. Fostel at nine-thirty this morning and he didn’t want to be late.

Before he left the hospital they told him he shouldn’t drive until after his head wound had sufficiently healed. But he was too cheap to pay seventy five dollars each way for a cab ride to see his daughter. Besides, with the way his life was headed, he felt it was especially important to be in control of his own destination. Driving had always been a pleasure for him, but not today. It was enough that his head wounds throbbed, but trying to concentrate on driving was compounded given that his mind was engulfed over his encounter at Monk’s yesterday.

Sleep was a scarce commodity last night due to dreams so vivid they kept him from knowing the difference between when he slept or wondering if he slept. Morning brought no solution when he awoke, just deep feelings of anxiety and fear.

Looking back, he wished yesterday was a dream. A dream he could shake off and rationalize as his overactive imagination getting the best of him. However, it was clear that conversing with Sam was real, as real as anything else in his life, and it occupied every niche of his mind with strange ideas. Bouncing from one thought to another, he kept coming back to asking what the hell he had gotten himself into.

If the devil was playing a game then he thought there had to be rules. He was raised a catholic and knew that of all things the Catholic Church is built upon rules. Hell, that’s what any religion is about, rules. What sets them apart is that different religions have different sets of rules. Just because it’s Satan doesn’t mean he won’t have rules, after all in a way he has his own religion, the antithesis of God. Would Satan have an anti ten commandments as rules? Thou shall kill, covet, steal, fornicate on Sundays and wreak havoc on thy fellow man?

Always the scientist, Sean surmised that if there were rules then there also had to be limitations. He wondered how he could test the rules to see if they only applied to him or if they also bound Sam and maybe even his creator, Satan. Based on the religious legends he found it hard to imagine Satan having limitations, but Sam was a different story.

He found himself taking it for a fact that Satan actually exists, a near impossibility only a week ago. He had gone over it in his mind time and time again from yesterday, and could come to no logical explanation as to how Sam was capable of performing what were essentially miracles. Every rational reason failed to explain his abilities. No manmade devices could have been responsible for closing off his throat, bringing Cathy out of her catatonic state, predicting the exact time of Dr. Fostel’s phone call and teleporting Sam wherever he went from the bathroom at Monk’s.

His mind wandered to the far edges of rational thought and he recalled a quote from the writer Arthur C. Clarke that said

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” 

Yeah right, and this advanced civilization sent a representative here from another planet, time, universe, dimension or whatever with its amazing advanced technology just to fuck with his life? As much as he didn’t want to believe he had been visited by the Devil, the real biblical Satan, he was unable to convince himself otherwise.

When Sam told him Satan was an entity with unimaginable power, it struck Sean as a confirmation of sentient life outside the human plane of existence.  He was being informed that Satan was an advanced being from some other place or dimension and he liked to play games with people. Dangerous games, for the people, that is.

Maybe his twisted logic that brought him to the idea of an advanced civilization sending a representative here wasn’t as crazy as it first sounded.