The Devil You Know
By: David Wiseman
I met the Devil today. He was walking down main street, right by the undertaker in B____, which is a little town near here, and which, for obvious reasons, I’d better not name. I recognized him straight away because he had furry legs with hooves for feet. Well, almost right away, at first I thought he was just some guy in fancy dress, but who dresses up like that on Christmas Eve? Not only that, he clip-clopped as he walked, and who has an outfit with sound effects?
And he wasn’t alone.
He had at least two smaller devils with him. I say at least because although I can picture them now, the edges of that picture are a little fuzzy, so yes, two for sure but maybe three. I took them for boys out with their dad doing last-minute shopping, looking for something for their mom, so two fits the picture I have in my mind. But who dresses their kids up in fancy dress to match their dad?
I was so taken by the dad’s legs – well, all the way from his chest down, the more I think about it – and the clip-clopping, that even now his face is hard to place, but I’m pretty sure he was wearing a hat and when I picture that, I reckon it was a white cowboy hat, and with some horns on it too. Horns like cattle might have with black tips, although I seem to recall by convention they’re supposed to be goat’s horns. Besides the horns, the hat had a black band round it but wouldn’t you expect the whole hat to be black? Maybe that old black-hat white-hat thing isn’t true after all. Either way, horns on a cowboy hat didn’t make a lot of sense, even for a fancy-dress costume.
But then I haven’t been to a fancy-dress party for a very long time, so I’m no expert.
The three of them, or four maybe, were coming right at me, the low winter sun straight in their eyes. There’s not space for four abreast outside the undertakers so I stepped off the path into the road to make room. Maybe they hadn’t seen me at all, ‘cos they just walked on till they were level with me and I just stood there gawping.
“Hey, fella, what’s up?” said the dad, stopping and turning towards me.
What’s up? Only everything. Where to start? So I mumbled, “Nothing,” but I couldn’t leave it, could I? “I just er… I wondered if…”
“Ah, surprised eh?” He looked up and down the empty street before asking, “You’re not from around here, right?”
“No, we just moved to…” I waved vaguely in the direction of my new home, about thirty minutes down the road.
“Ah, okay. Well,” he said, ready to move on, “Merry Christmas to you.”
“Wait,” I blurted out, louder than I meant. “Who are you?”
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