“Crowley had always known that he would be around when the world ended,
because he was immortal and wouldn’t have any alternative. But he hoped
it was a long way off. Because he rather liked people. It was major
failing in a demon. Oh, he did his best to make their short lives
miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was
half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have
a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born
into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then
devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years
Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to
do which showed up against the natural background of generalized
nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he’d
felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look we may as well give
up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and
everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they
don’t do to themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of,
often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got
imagination. And electricity, of course. One of them had written it,
hadn’t he…”Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.” Crowley got a
commendation for the Spanish Inquisition. He had been in Spain then,
mainly hanging around cantinas in the nicer parts, and hadn’t even known
about it until the commendation arrived. He’d gone to have a look, and
come back and got drunk for a week.”~
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Comments
Post a Comment