The Fallen Devil

He stopped by the kitchen to pick up something to eat. Not that he was really hungry, but it had been almost two nights since he’d eaten anything.

Neither Ravine nor Sam were in the kitchen. They knew something was going on—Philip’s and Lucifer’s lack of appetite had not escaped the attention of the cook—but they didn’t know what. Ravine had asked about it a few times, and Philip had given her only terse lies.

He cut a few slices of bread and sausages and was about to leave the kitchen, but then he stopped. Looked at the plates and the glasses that sat shining on the counter. Sam, who didn’t resent his new kitchen duties but actually seemed to enjoy them, had done the dishes, and all that was left for him to do was to put them away.

Did Philip feel a buzzing in his forehead or was it his imagination?

He put down his own plate and walked to the counter. Grabbed one of the clean glasses. Felt the weight of it in his hand. Then he swirled around and flung it into the wall. It exploded in a clatter, and before all the shards lay still, he’d taken another glass and flung it. Then another and another. It sounded like a torrential downpour, and when one of the glasses broke in his hand, cutting him, he barely felt it. Instead he picked up the tall stack of plates and hurled it to the tiled floor with all his strength. The noise was deafening.

"What are you doing?”

He turned around. His face was covered in sweat, he felt his pulse pounding in his neck and temples.

It was Sam, standing there with a bucket and a cloth, staring at him, flabbergasted. Without hesitating, Philip snatched one of the shards on the counter, stepped closer to Sam, yanked his collar, and forced him backward until he hit the wall.

“It’s your fault!” he shouted and held the shard to Sam’s chin, almost piercing his skin. He breathed through clenched teeth, every muscle in his body was taut, and there it was at long last - his hatred. The roaring, rushing hatred that made his blood boil and made the world flicker. “It’s all your fault! If it weren’t for you, none of this would have happened! Don’t you get it? Don’t you see what you’ve done and what you DESERVE?” The shard quivered in Philip’s hand and a droplet of blood ran down Sam’s neck in a dark line.

“Ph-Philip…” he gasped. “I don’t … You can’t …”

“I can’t what?”

“Philip! What under earth are you doing?” Like a whip, the voice slashed through his thoughts, and he came to with a jerk. Ravine stood in the doorway to the courtyard but right then it wasn’t her he saw; he saw what she saw. Himself.

What he was doing.

He let go of Sam and slowly backed away, feeling the onset of severe nausea. For a second he thought he was going to throw up. He stared at the dark line of blood on Sam’s neck. At the shard in his hand. It slipped from his grip and landed among the others on the floor.

Then he turned and bolted up the stairs, all the way to his room, slammed the door, locked it and stood in front of the mirror. He held onto its frame as he fought back the nausea.

“Come on then,” he snarled, he hissed, he shouted. “Come on, come on!”

He shook the mirror so that everything shook and trembled and his own face became a blur.

“COME ON, DAMMIT!”

But his eyes stayed blue and his face remained unchanged. His scars weren’t even tingling, and with a roar he banged his forehead into the mirror with such a force that it cracked. He pulled back and something inside of him seemed to abate as he stared at the red blood he had left in the middle of the web-like pattern in the mirror.

In the middle of his broken face.

* * *

A soft knock on the door. “Philip?”

He got up and unlocked it. Left it ajar and returned to his bed.

“What do you want, Lucifax?” He pulled up his hood and tugged it far down his forehead.

The cat slipped in but then stopped when it saw the broken mirror. The blood resembled a smashed spider in the center of its web. It had congealed and looked almost black. “What on earth happened?”

“What do you want?”

The cat looked at him for a moment. “I’ve heard that you… I’ve heard about what happened in the kitchen. Ravine was very upset and Sam was scared out of his wits.”

“I didn’t hurt him”

“That’s not the way they see it. Ravine insisted that Lucifer tell her what’s going on, and when Ravine insists on something … This must be the first time the master has had to fess up. He told her everything and she understands everything, Philip.”

“She does, does she?” he said. He balled his fists. “She understands everything?”

“Yes, well, why you did what you did. That you weren’t yourself. With everything that’s been happening, it’s completely understandable that…”

Philip stood with a suddenness that made Lucifax shrink as though the cat was afraid of what Philip might do. It should be, he thought to himself.

“Is Lucifer still in the study?”

“Oh, well, yes, but… Philip, what are you doing? I don’t understand…”

“No, and neither does Ravine,” he said. “You don’t get it at all. I was myself. That’s the problem.”

He went down to the study and opened the door without knocking.

Lucifer was standing by the Globe of Evil, his hand resting on its dark, twinkling glass surface. He turned toward Philip—not surprised but as though he’d been expecting him.

Philip closed the door behind him.

“I want to be an apprentice of evil,” he said. “I want to be a devil again.”