A VISIT TO HELL

A ghastly shudder shot through me at the thought of it all ...

"So what happened?" Heather asked again, staring at me with genuine concern. "I want to hear all about it!"

I could tell by both the concerned look on her face and her demanding tone-of-voice that she really did want to hear all about it. Not for a long time had I endeavoured to explain any such experience to her.

"Well," I began, feeling slightly nervous and self-conscious but relieved, all the same, for the opportunity of being able to unburden myself, "I had just come out of a large West End bookshop in the vicinity of Tottenham Court Road and was slowly walking along the pavement when I felt a hand on my arm, a hand which sufficed to stop me in my tracks. 'Excuse me, sir,' the bearer of this hand - a tall, dark, handsome man of about thirty-five - said, 'but aren't you the philosopher, Justin Thomas?'

"Not surprisingly, I was somewhat startled by this mode of introduction, if such it was," I went on. "For no-one, having recognized me as the said person, had ever stopped me in the street before, considering that I'm not particularly famous or subject to public curiosity. Yet, much as I dreaded the prospect of having to listen to this man's appreciation of my work or, worse still, answer questions about it and justify myself to him in some way, I was secretly gratified that someone had recognized me in these terms and thought it worth his while to confess the fact."

Heather smiled her understanding of this egotistical confession. "Ambivalent as ever," she commented in a playfully reproachful tone.

"Anyway, realizing that an acknowledgement was expected of me, I replied in the affirmative, though not very positively, since I couldn't be certain that the stranger would be appreciative of my work. But his hand was still on my arm and, much to my dismay, he tightened its grip on me. 'I'm so glad to meet you,' he proceeded in a smooth well-educated accent, which indicated a person of some social distinction. 'For there's something I have to tell you.'

"'There is?' I responded, my initial misgivings beginning to worsen.

"'It's about your wife,' he whispered, tightening his grip still further on my arm until it became virtually paralysed. 'She's being unfaithful to you.'"

Heather's expression suddenly turned apprehensive, as though in anticipation of some such accusation from me.

"'But that's impossible!' I cried, momentarily forgetting where I was, as I allowed my feelings their instinctive expression. 'How can you say such a thing?'

"'Because I know the man with whom she's being unfaithful to you,' the stranger asserted, automatically fixing me with a hard stare.

"He must be a madman, I thought, flinching from his smouldering gaze and politely endeavouring to extricate myself from his clamp-like grip on my arm.

"'And I can prove it to you this very afternoon,' he continued, ignoring my impatience.

"'You can?' I responded involuntarily.

"'Provided you're prepared to make it worth my while,' he hissed."

At this point, I couldn't help noticing a deepening of the apprehension which had come over Heather's ordinarily passive and charming face. Could she really be expecting an accusation of infidelity from me? I wondered.

"'In what way?' I asked, unable not to take him seriously, despite my misgivings.

"'To the sum of £500,' he gravely replied.

"'Five-hundred pounds?' I felt outraged, the victim of a mean exploitation.

"'Come, come!' he gently chided me, patting the arm he had just released from his clutches with a reassuring benevolence before summarily returning it to them again. 'This is a very modest sum for the services rendered, I can assure you. Once you learn what your wife gets up to while you're out lecturing at college, you'll consider it a bargain. Now by coming with me this very moment to the scene of the crime, so to speak, you'll learn about it in no uncertain terms, and with the minimum of inconvenience.'

"Despite my outrage over the amount required and, as I quickly realized, the base accusation being levelled against you, Heather, I felt my resistance to his proposition breaking down, giving way to a mild curiosity as to whether you could, in fact, be betraying me behind my back. After all, could I be absolutely certain you weren't?"

Heather's apprehension suddenly burst through the reserve in which she had patiently contained it ... to voice itself in a grievous complaint. How could I say such things to her?

"I'm sorry, darling," I responded sympathetically, "but you did want to hear all about what happened."

"Yes, but, really, Justin! I didn't think it would be like this!" she objected.

No, of course she didn't, and I was fairly ashamed of myself for not having bothered to spare her the details. Still, now that I had committed myself to an account of this extraordinary experience, I felt I had to press on and bring it to completion. Besides, the part of it which dealt with her alleged infidelity had been accounted for, or almost so, which meant that most of what was to follow probably wouldn't disturb or worry her quite so much. Of this I now informed her in my most reassuring manner.

"Oh, go on then!" she sighed, slightly encouraged.

"Well, having come to a brisk arrangement whereby I would consent to writing him out a cheque for £500 only after I'd seen what he had allegedly to show me, I followed him down a nearby side-street to a waiting car, a large black limousine which he said he owned and which would take me to my destination within a mere twenty minutes. Since the rear windows of this limo were tinted black, I couldn't see into its interior and felt a distinct misgiving at the prospect of having to get inside. But when he opened the nearest rear door and ushered me in with a wave of his powerful arm, I realized that, short of making a damned fool of myself by betraying my trust in him, I had little option but to comply. Thus it happened that I found myself sitting on the back seat and staring at the rear of the driver's head through a plate of transparent glass which served to compartmentalize the limousine. Who-the-devil the driver was, I didn't know. But no sooner had the man of whom I'd just made the acquaintance opened the front door and taken a seat beside him ... than I became aware of a strange smell entering my nostrils and, before I could say or do anything, quickly lost consciousness."

By now Heather had got over her bout of self-pity and was once more looking at me with unfeigned concern. "You were evidently gassed," she concluded, her voice harmoniously supporting her expression.

"Well, when I came to my senses again, or perhaps I should say was brought to them again, I found myself in a large square room without windows and lit solely by fluorescent lighting. I was sitting on a couch in front of a tall, medium-built man of indeterminate age, a man who, in my dazed state-of-mind, I initially took for the one who had earlier accosted me in the street. But as soon as the ability to focus returned to my eyes, I realized that this man was in fact a complete stranger to me, someone whom I had never seen before and, to judge by the cruelly inhuman nature of his face, someone whom I hoped I would never see again, assuming I got out of there alive! Draped in a long black cloak, he seemed closest in appearance to the popular conception of Count Dracula, though there was something about his fiery eyes, contrasting pale face, sharply aquiline nose, sardonic mouth, and pointed chin which suggested the possibility of someone even worse. Not until he opened his mouth and smiled down at me through jagged teeth, however, did I realize that he actually was someone much worse! For, in addition to this terrible dentition, I now noticed that he was also the bearer of two small red horns which jutted out of his temples beneath a mass of curly red hair. I almost screamed my horror at this recognition of the demonic, and would have got up from the couch and run towards an exit, had my limbs not been bound to it by invisible fetters. Besides, there wasn't an exit in evidence to run towards. In this room, doors had no more place than windows!

"'Welcome, Professor Thomas!' the creature's voice suddenly addressed me with guttural relish. 'I've wanted to make your acquaintance for some time now: in fact, ever since the publication, last year, of your most recent book. What you said in it suggested a profounder grasp of the modern world than I'd have expected from a mere mortal, a grasp which, while not omniscient and by no means tallying with all the facts, nevertheless caused me a few doubts over my power to influence it for the worse.'

"'Who are you?' I managed to ask, in spite of the state of my nerves and, more surprisingly, the stark evidence of my horrified senses.

"'I am the personification of evil in the world,' the fearsome creature replied, clearly not a little relieved for the opportunity of being able to verbally advertise himself. 'In vulgar parlance, the Devil.'

"I quaked at the mention of it! Could I be imagining things? Surely the Devil was nothing more than a perverse figment of the imagination, a superstition of bygone days? And even if he wasn't, what could he possibly want with me? What had I done to deserve his horrible company? I put a question to that effect to him.

"'Haven't I already told you, Professor?' he responded, a menacing smile revealing the jagged edges of his monstrous teeth again. 'I was both impressed and concerned by your latest publication, and would accordingly like to clarify a number of issues you raised in it, to put you in your place, despite your considerable knowledge, and to demonstrate how deluded you are to imagine that I can be conquered and driven into moral exile. To put it frankly, I was a trifle disconcerted by some of the things you wrote. Yet I'm confident that, by lecturing you on the actual extent of my influence on the modern world, and the Western part of it not least of all, I'll not only be able to break your self-confidence but, more importantly, enhance mine in the process!'

"'But what about my wife?' I asked, recalling to mind the ostensible reason for my presence there. 'Aren't I to witness her alleged infidelity?'

"The personification of evil bared his gruesome teeth in an even more menacing fashion than before. 'All in bad time, all in bad time, Professor!' he replied. 'In the meantime, however, you must be patient and allow me to defend myself.'"

Once again I could see that Heather's facial expression had veered in the direction of apprehension, that her concern for me had duly turned into a concern for herself, albeit silently.

"As soon as the Devil had said this," I continued, centring my concentration as best I could on what there was to relate, "he clicked the thumb and middle finger of his right hand - if hand it was - and immediately the room fell into darkness, a darkness which was instantaneously relieved, however, by the projection on to the wall in front of a bright light. From behind me came the whirring sound of a film projector and, before fear could take possession of my soul again, I realized that I was about to be treated to a film show; that the Devil, contrary to my expectations, had not taken a step nearer me in order, presumably, to strangle me in the dark, but had gone over to stand beside the picture which now appeared on the wall in front. By craning my neck around as far as I could, it was just possible for me to discern the outline of a figure seated behind the film projector a few yards to my rear, a figure who had evidently appeared, as though by magic. Because of the partial darkness, however, I couldn't quite discern his facial features. Nevertheless, I wasn't particularly grateful to discover that the Devil had company!

"'Now then, Professor,' the latter's blood-curdling voice rang out above the whirr, 'pay careful attention to what I have to show you!'

"I made a brave attempt to. From aerial clips of small villages in various parts of Europe and North America, the film progressed to similar clips of towns, and from those to cities, the largest cities, principally, of the Western world. One saw, in quick succession, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Paris, Berlin, etc, with occasional clips of the countryside in between. Although it wasn't possible to see the Devil's face very clearly or distinctly from where I sat, I could tell, as much by the nervous twitching of his facial muscles as by various of the comments he was making, that he much preferred the cities to the towns, the towns to the villages, and the villages to the countryside, with due gradations of feeling in between.

"'As you correctly pointed out in your book,' he remarked, while the projector whirred on, 'Western society underwent a radical transformation with the Industrial Revolution, one that was to undermine the entire fabric of rural life and, in its more obvious manifestations, isolate a majority of the rapidly rising population of the cities from regular contact with the land. See how the Culture, in Spenglerian parlance, was supplanted by the Civilization, which is its very antithesis, in consequence of this transformation brought about by the Industrial Revolution. How faith, grounded in nature, was replaced by reason, that artificial growth of the great cities, and how the man-made came to predominate, in these places, over natural creation. See how little vegetation there is in these urban environments, Professor, and how wonderfully sterile they are by contrast with nature, how they set themselves up against it!'

"Frankly, it wasn't difficult for me to see how much this deplorable state-of-affairs pleased the Devil, and how he gloated over the immensity of the largest cities like one whose personal dream of success had literally come to pass there. At that very moment, we were looking at numerous tall buildings in New York.

"'Delightfully sterile,' the Devil went on, pointing towards some of the tallest and most grandiose of these buildings, a few of which were clearly skyscrapers, 'and admirably indicative of the triumph of man over God. As you rightly remarked, Professor, the Culture blossomed with the collaboration of nature and withered once that collaboration was impaired by the rapid development of both industrialization and urbanization. Ah, how it delights me to behold this cancer of industrial technology eating away at the foundations of life! You can well imagine, Professor, that nothing would delight me more than to assist in the further growth of these monstrous cities until nature has been eaten away altogether and my triumph is complete! Alas, man has still not succeeded in entirely banishing God from the world, even in the cities. As yet, there are still remnants of faith and allegiance to God there, though particularly in the villages and smaller towns. Believe me, Professor, the chief threat to my power comes from these latter places, places, in short, where there's still too much nature!'

"He turned his evil eyes upon me for an instant, causing me to quake anew. With an element of anger on his hideous countenance, he was even more menacing than previously.

"'By comparison with the country and provincial clergy, the city clergy are virtually atheist,' the Devil continued, returning his attention to the film, which was now showing the denser, more built-up parts of London. 'The city clergy are surrounded by too much concrete, glass, and steel to be of any real threat to me, and, with notably few exceptions, are as much the victims of their sterile environments as the laity. Whether they like it or not, whether they know it or not, they've fallen under my influence, their worship of God is little more than an hypocrisy, a mere shadow of genuine worship, a mask which the civilized West, rotting in its decadence and moral deceitfulness, considers it incumbent to wear for appearance's sake. For God, as you well know, has long ceased to play a major role in the big cities, and his churches are really quite out-of-place there.'

"At this point, I wanted to protest against the Devil, to defend myself from his hateful opinions. But, even though I opened my mouth to speak, nothing emerged, and I was left to my troubled silence.

"'You can't imagine the pleasure it gives me to spy on the clergy who most struggle against my influence, who do everything they can to strengthen their tottering allegiance to God in the face of their sterile environments!' the Devil went on grinningly. 'How it has amused me to watch them at work in their tiny gardens, trying to rejuvenate the sickly-looking plants there, or strolling in the nearest public park, or taking day trips into the country in order to acquire some contact with nature! And how I have delighted in the defeat, disappointment, and humiliation of those who were desperately keen to secure a country or provincial parish for themselves but, due to fierce competition, failed to do so! Ah, to see them return to their city manses with a look of deep dejection on their pallid faces such as would have shamed even the least of the medieval clergy! How I delighted to see these so-called men of God up against it! Particularly the brightest and most sincere, the ones who, despite the overwhelming odds stacked against them, fought night and day to protect themselves from me. I can assure you, Professor, that there aren't too many of them in the large cities!'

"Meanwhile, the film had progressed from aerial shots to close-ups of various buildings, and it was not before I had seen about thirty such buildings that I realized what the intention was. Again, from relatively small towns with large cathedrals, one progressed to large cities where the cathedral was literally dwarfed by commercial and other secular buildings of gigantic proportions. Where tradition was strongest, the cathedral still dominated the town, establishing or reflecting the natural hierarchy of nature over civilization, God over the State, religion over commerce. But where, by contrast, the vast cities were concerned, the cathedral, surrounded by so much towering concrete, was comparatively insignificant, since smothered by the numerous secular buildings which dominated the skyline and proclaimed the triumph of civilization over nature, the State over God, and commerce over religion. In Paris, the Eiffel Tower soared way above even the tallest cathedral or church spire. In New York, the Empire State Building did likewise. And, in London, it was left to the Telecommunications (formerly Post Office) Tower to proclaim the triumph of commerce and technology over God in one of the most unequivocal fashions imaginable! Wherever one looked or went in the great cities of the Western world, it was exactly the same story: nature had ceased to be the governing influence on man's endeavour and, as such, the symbols of his acknowledgement of its influence had been buried beneath the steadily-mounting avalanche of industrial progress. The Devil had taken the reins out of God's hands and was lashing this society on towards its apocalyptic destination. And, as I had personally discovered, it was unable to rebel against its new master.

"'I trust you're getting the picture, Professor?' the personification of evil at length sarcastically remarked, inflicting what seemed like a conspiratorial glance upon me. 'One can learn a lot more from these aerial and close-up shots of your civilization than you might have thought possible. Take the churches. Have you noticed the extent of the dilapidation into which so many of the older ones are falling, and deduced from this the apparent reluctance of the relevant authorities to restore or renovate them in any degree? And what about the newest ones, those built during the last thirty or so years - isn't there something distinctly secular-looking about a majority of them, comparatively few and far between as they are, which could lead one to confound them with any of the smaller commercial organizations?'

"The Devil was pointing out one such 'church', a building which one might have taken for a factory or even a dance hall, so far removed was it from any traditional concept of church!

"'It would appear that the God Whom men worship in such buildings isn't given quite the acknowledgement or respect He used to get in the days before His works were shut-out from their lives to the extent we now see about us,' the Devil sarcastically averred. 'Being predominantly surrounded, as the vast majority of city-dwellers now are, by the works of man, it isn't altogether surprising that the latest churches should come to be patterned on them, and thus approximate to a reflection of contemporary urban society as opposed to an acknowledgement of God's essential transcendence. Yet that, as you doubtless realize, amounts to a contradiction in terms. Before long, city people will have no need of even those buildings, Professor, but will either cease worshipping God altogether - if one can call what now goes on by that name - or worship me instead.... Which is mostly what does happen, if unconsciously, in any case. For I am at work as much in the design and erection of the new churches as in encouraging the dilapidation and neglect of the old ones. Admittedly, I don't have as much influence on the Church as on the secular establishments. But what influence I do have is certainly no disgrace to me! Believe me, Professor, it's growing all the time, and not only in the cities! My corruption is gradually spreading to the towns and villages as well, though not, alas, on a very large scale at present. For wherever nature prevails over civilization - as it still does in a number of places - resistance to my influence is at its strongest and I therefore have to make do with small gains. Fortunately, however, the city has more influence on the town than vice versa, so I needn't fear for my future! Every year, billions of words compiled in the cities are disseminated throughout the provinces in the forms of newspapers, magazines, periodicals, leaflets, and books, especially of the paperback variety; thousands of films, documentaries, and TV serials made in the cities are likewise disseminated there; and, thanks to the benefits of mechanized transport, millions of city-dwellers are unleashed upon the towns and villages to spread their urban corruption far and wide. With such an onslaught, there's little the provinces can do to resist being tainted. My evil dominion grows stronger and more firmly entrenched with every new day!'

"The Devil bared his jagged teeth in indication of his immense satisfaction at this fact, and induced me to quake yet again. How much longer, I wondered, would I continue being subjected to these frightful revelations, these ghastly scenes? But before I could wonder anything else, the evil creature had become reabsorbed in the film, which was now showing the interior of an elegant-looking room in which an audience, garbed in eighteenth-century costume, were listening to a chamber orchestra performing one of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, the Fourth, as I quickly recognized by the music which issued from the direction of the film projector to my rear. Surprised as I was by the sudden introduction of music into the room, and no less so by the historical spectacle before me, I duly fell under its spell and allowed myself, in spite of my surroundings, to take a certain pleasure in its gracefully-flowing melodies and harmonies. Yet it wasn't long before I realized that the Devil was feeling anything but pleasure at this performance, that he was patently agonized by its euphonious nature. The twitching of his facial muscles, which I had already noted in connection with various provincial environments, became intensified here to a point which made it seem that his face was alive with millions of tiny worms writhing and criss-crossing it in all directions, as though goaded-on by some unspeakable agony of spirit. Also, his breathing became so heavy, so tensed and laboured, that one might have expected to hear it above the music. But just as he appeared to be on the verge of collapsing or exploding - it was impossible to tell which, though it was evident from the noise coming from his lungs that the Devil was a heavy smoker - the film suddenly switched from the clip of an eighteenth-century audience entranced by the heavenly sounds of J.S. Bach to one of a contemporary audience seated in front of a large symphony orchestra in some vast concert hall and listening to it perform a modern work, the title and composer of which completely eluded me. Almost at once, however, I could see that the Devil was immensely relieved by this abrupt change of musical context. For both the agonized twitching of his facial muscles and the heavy breathing to which his smoke-infested lungs had been subjected by the preceding scene quickly calmed down, to be replaced, as the music progressed along its allocated route, by signs of mounting pleasure. But was this intensely discordant and seemingly chaotic composition to which I was now obliged to listen really music? Wasn't it really a noise, one of the most diabolical noises I had ever heard, full of scrapings and bangings and sharp blasts of disjunctive sound? I couldn't help noticing, while the Devil gloated over his pleasure, the agonized and hate-filled expressions on the faces of the musicians, which sharply contrasted with the serene and comparatively joyful expressions of the chamber orchestra in the previous clip. And, by a similar contrast of experience, it was apparent that the audience were being infected with expressions and emotions corresponding to those of the musicians. To all appearances it seemed like a species of sadomasochism was in progress, a torture chamber for ears and mind!

"The Devil, however, had other opinions. 'Quite delightful!' he exclaimed, indicating to his mysterious assistant, by a gesture of the hand, that he wanted the music's ear-shattering volume turned down a little in order to make himself heard. And most flattering so far as I am concerned. For I am now the ideal to which, knowingly or unknowingly, a majority of contemporary composers dedicate their vile compositions, the primary source of inspiration for their cacophonous worship! Yes, how long I've had to wait for this, how long I've had to wait for so many things! But I had patience, believe me, Professor, and I wasn't altogether inactive even when God had the better of me. I knew that, eventually, things would swing in my direction, that my long-awaited dominion over Western man would come. And behold, it has come, Professor, as surely as you have! Here is yet another proof of my power over contemporary man, one dependent on the ears. This, too, is music, Professor, but music, I'm relieved to say, which is lopsided on my side instead of on God's. The euphonious sounds which your society required of composers writing in the service of the religious ideal, the worship of a good deity, have been systematically supplanted by the cacophonous sounds you now hear before you. Your composers have swung from one ideal to another, though not, it must be admitted, without a transitional period in between, when they seemed to ignore ideals altogether and concentrated on simply being themselves, on reflecting man instead. But that era, approximating to the nineteenth century, subsequently gave way to the modern era, with its emphasis on the discordant, or service to me, to an ideal which is diametrically antithetical to the previous one. This, then, is my music, Professor, and you can see how much it delights me, even though there's still room, as far as I'm concerned, for further improvement, for the possibility of even greater delight! Indeed, I'm not entirely satisfied with this particular composition so far as an approximation to the infernal ideal is concerned. It could be still more cacophonous, still more discordant, in my opinion. Perhaps in a year or two from now I shall have an opportunity to hear the work of a composer who can go beyond this and produce something so cacophonous, discordant, diabolical, and therefore decadent from a Western standpoint, as to be virtually indistinguishable from the outright barbarism of the worst pop music, acoustic and electric distinctions notwithstanding! Yet even this predominantly cacophonous composition by some contemporary American composer is quite a delight to me, especially when I think back to what I used to suffer at the hands of the greatest seventeenth- and eighteenth-century composers. The sheer agony of it all! Bar after dreadful bar of hateful euphony, composition after dreadful composition dedicated to my hereditary enemy, Le Bon Dieu! Oh, how absolutely unendurable it all was! You can hardly be surprised, Professor, when, at the end of my demonic tether, I vowed to put every ounce of brain muscle I possessed into pulling musicians away from God. What a nerve-racking tug-of-war it turned out to be! From about the mid-eighteenth century, when I really dug my heels into it for the first time, I had to labour away well into the twentieth century before I was convinced that the contest had been won. Throughout the nineteenth century, compositions continued to reach my ears that sounded as much on God's side as on mine, and in the case of composers like Schubert and Bruckner, I actually lost ground and almost slithered back to the deplorable state-of-affairs that existed in Mozart's day. To be sure, the Austrians were harder to pull away from God than both the Germans and the French put together, particularly Bruckner, whose tonal innocence, coming relatively late in the nineteenth century, caused me one of the worst humiliations of my entire satanic career! Fortunately to say, Bruckner was more or less involved in a lone-handed fight as the century wore on. For most of the leading composers, including Liszt, Wagner, Saint-Saëns (who, despite his name, was no musical saint), and Franck, were increasingly veering in my direction, so that by the time Richard Strauss made his mark on the scene I was fairly confident my victory had come, in spite of that Austrian, Gustave Mahler, who rather set my teeth on-edge. Even some of the early-twentieth-century British composers, including Elgar and Vaughan Williams, didn't make my task any easier. But with an ever-growing number of Continental and American composers coming over to my side, I was in no doubt about the final outcome. These days I scarcely need exert myself at all, since my initial efforts to pull composers away from God appear to have resulted in a veritable avalanche of hell-bound idiots falling in my direction, the few who most resist my influence usually being swept along by the rest.'

"It was apparent, with the termination of these terrible confessions, that the Devil had more or less had his say as far as the orchestral performance was concerned. For the film once more changed course and, much to my relief, presented me with the spectacle of assorted paintings passing in fairly swift succession before my well-nigh hypnotized eyes. Not possessing the most comprehensive knowledge of art, I nevertheless soon realized that the intention of this part of the film was to chronicle the rise and fall of Western art from approximately the fourteenth century to the present day. Beginning with religious works by artists such as Cimabue, Giotto, Pisaro, Tura, da Vinci, Bellini, and Mantegna, it progressed, via Dürer, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Veronese, Rubens, Rembrandt, and El Greco, to the more secular artists of the past three centuries, the most prominent of whom were Boucher, Fragonard, David, Delacroix, Ingres, Hogarth, Turner, Constable, Bourne-Jones, Manet, Renoir, Picasso, Beckmann, and Ernst. As happened in that part of the film dedicated to the contrasting musical styles, the Devil's face responded to the stimuli before it in an appropriately agonized or delighted manner, the great religious works, on the one hand, causing him such acute spiritual discomfort that he was obliged to sharply avert his gaze from them on a number of occasions, whereas the great and lesser secular paintings, on the other hand, enabled him to recover from his agony of spirit and achieve varying degrees of pleasure, depending on the content of the works in question. Although the progression on film from religious to secular paintings wasn't as clear-cut or continuous as one might have expected, the occasional secular painter of value, like Dürer, appearing among the predominantly religious ones and, conversely, the occasional religious painter of value, like Dali, appearing among the predominantly secular ones, it was sufficiently clear, as one progressed through the centuries, that a division of sorts did indeed exist, and that the movement away from God followed a time-pattern not unlike the one established by music, a time-pattern, however, the principal criterion of which hinged upon subject-matter rather than sound and the way in which this subject-matter was treated. Thus from religious paintings, at one end of the scale, with smooth, clear, bright, and harmonious techniques, one descended, at the other end of it, to secular paintings with rough, hazy, dull, and discordant techniques; from works praising and acknowledging God, one descended to works dedicated to man, and from man on down to the machine; from the countryside and nature in general to the city and its manifold concomitants in particular; from the concrete to the abstract, from art to anti-art, with all due gradations, such as Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Dada, Surrealism, etc., right down to the present day, coming in-between. Exceptions to the general tendency of artistic decline there undoubtedly were, but the general tendency was indisputable and made adequately manifest by this film. It was only, however, when it had arrived at a number of the most abstract contemporary paintings that the Devil, who had in the meantime lit himself a cigarette, next decided to speak.

"'Ah! what satisfaction it brings me to behold such wonderfully sterile and chaotic works,' he confessed, briefly turning in my direction, 'to witness the extent of my disruptive influence on contemporary art! How gratifying that a medium which once served my great adversary - and served Him in such style - should now be reduced to this, to grovelling before me! That the Most Evil should have come to supplant the Most Good in such unequivocal terms - truly, I've rarely felt so flattered! Just look at them, Professor, at all these works of so-called art which your society has been obliged to produce in such abundance, and see to what extent it is now in my grasp! Merciless hell, how long I've waited for this! How my eyes were tortured by all those Blessed Trinities and Madonnas and Crucifixions and Ascensions and Last Suppers and Benedictions and Conversions and Visitations and Immaculate Conceptions and God-knows-what-else the greatest artists, in serving God, contrived to inflict upon me! Even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were artists who, like William Blake and John Martin, fought against me with more courage and tenacity than I'd have expected from mere mortals. But even they were tarnished by my brush, even they were forced to give so many of their religious productions a rather satanic twist. The apocalyptic damnations of Blake and Martin - how paradoxically true! Such Biblical damnations were indeed befalling their own society, as they doubtless realized. Even while Gainsborough and Constable were painting their accursed landscapes, I was gaining the upper-hand and slowly forcing God out of the picture. By the turn-of-the-century there was very little of Him left in it; for whatever He had created was being transformed by the perverse brushstrokes of the Pre-Raphaelites, Impressionists, Expressionists, Symbolists, Decadents, and such-like into something more to my taste: an artificial world which set itself up against nature! Ah, my hateful disciples, my contemptible brethren in fin-de-siecle iniquity, how I curse you all! You couldn't please me enough, not even when you bent over backwards to do so! You were but a stage on the road to my current dominion, a stage of the infernal star, so to speak, which your successors have left severely in the lurch!'

"As I could tell by the succession of abstract paintings which were now passing before my hypnotized eyes, the extent to which late-nineteenth-century painters had been 'left severely in the lurch' was indeed staggering, revealing to my bewildered mind the incredible tenacity with which the Devil was working to bring art closer to his demonic ideal! Where the art of the next century would lead, I could scarcely imagine. For it seemed inconceivable that painting could sink any further and thus approximate more closely to the Devil's infernal ideal of chaotic sterility. Was this really the end of our long and glorious civilization, the death-rattle of a sickly dotard? I shuddered at the thought of it! Why hadn't I been born at a better or, at the very least, less bad time in the history of the arts? What had I done to deserve all this? And when, exactly, would the last Western painting be painted? Alas, despite my interest in art, I was unqualified to answer such vexing questions! I would have to make do with uncertainty.

"'Do you recall, Professor, that hateful essay by Leo Tolstoy entitled: What is Art?' the Devil was asking me, 'and the conclusions it reached about the necessity of art - art in the broadest sense - being both in the service of the cultural ideal and universal as opposed to exclusive, or upper class?'

"I nervously nodded my head.

"'Whether Tolstoy was fundamentally a late Christian or an early Communist is irrelevant to me,' the Devil continued disdainfully. 'But what is relevant is that his plea for adherence to the cultural ideal - the ideal of goodness and brotherhood as he defined it - has been systematically ignored by the majority of modern artists who, to my immense satisfaction, have taken art far beyond even the wildest anarchy of his contemporaries and, in the process, made it so exclusive ... that even I am sometimes at a loss to understand it. Not that there haven't been sporadic attempts at making it universal, which is to say, popular.'

"The Devil was sarcastically staring at a painting which depicted three different-sized squares, one atop the other, the largest of which was red, the smallest yellow, and the one in between orange. 'I doubt if there's a cretin on earth who wouldn't appreciate this,' he rasped, drawing my flagging attention to its utter simplicity. 'If, by universal, Tolstoy meant that art should be reduced to its lowest-common-apparent-denominator, then it would certainly seem that this painting admirably fulfils his simplistic requirements!'

"I felt strongly resentful towards the Devil's disrespectful attitude to Tolstoy's criteria of art and would have attempted to defend them, had not the Evil One suddenly turned his hideous countenance in my direction again and, with a penetrating stare, halted my resentment in its emotional tracks. Whether or not the Op, Pop, Kinetic, Post-Painterly Abstraction, and Concept Movements were indebted to Tolstoy, I would have to resign myself to a begrudging silence and allow one of the nineteenth-century's finest minds to be ridiculed at will. After all, could I really expect the Devil to show respect for a man who was so unequivocally on the side of God? I held my tongue and, desiring to escape my satanic host's fiery eyes, stared ruefully at what was to be the final painting of the series: a horizontally oblong canvas painted red.

For now, to my great relief, the film progressed to the next stage of its didactic mission, a stage providing one with glimpses of various writers, both literary and philosophical, and, subsequently, the titles of the books they had written ..."

At this point in the narrative I became conscious that Heather had yawned, so, not knowing whether through boredom or sleepiness, I asked her if she was still interested in hearing what I had to say.

"Yes, I am still interested," she replied, offering me a reassuring nod. "In fact, more so now than before."

"Good," I said and, feeling slightly relieved, duly proceeded with my narration. "As in the cases of music and art, it soon became apparent to me that literature and philosophy had also passed from the service of God to the service of His diabolic antagonist the closer one came to modern times, though not always consciously or with a clearly definable continuity. Of the earlier writers exhibited on film, the Devil's greatest displeasure appeared to be aroused by the faces of St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, Calvin, Erasmus, Dante, Sir Thomas More, Pascal, Bunyan, Spinoza, Milton, and Fielding, each of whom caused him to avert his horrified gaze a moment, while, of the later writers so exhibited, his greatest pleasure appeared to be aroused by the faces of Voltaire, Diderot, de Sade, Byron, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Huysmans, Alistair Crowley, James Joyce, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, and Denis Wheatley, each of whom, in varying degrees and with differing emphases, had evidently furthered his diabolical cause. Not that there weren't exceptions, once again, to the general trend. For I was made manifestly aware of these when the Devil, swallowing rather than smoking his cigarette, gnashed his hideous teeth together in overt disapproval of them and temporarily averted his fiery eyes from the film. Being the possessor of a fairly comprehensive knowledge of modern literature, however, I didn't have to pay too much attention to his evil countenance to know that the faces of writers like D.H. Lawrence, John Cowper Powys, Aldous Huxley, Hermann Hesse, and Malcolm Muggeridge would prove distasteful to him, particularly in light of his powerful influence on the twentieth century. It was indeed gratifying to know that pockets of resistance to his death-dealing advance could still be found, though not, alas, to any great extent! But, at this point, the series of faces, culminating in an elderly Henry Miller, came to an abrupt end, to be replaced by the spectacle of individual books upon some of which, dating from the earliest days of Western civilization, the Devil chose to comment.

"'Ugh, how I loathed Pilgrim's Progress!' he growled, as the title of Bunyan's masterpiece, following on behind a series of books which he could only bring himself to look at through his claw-like hands, duly appeared on the wall in front. 'How I laboured to have it burnt and banned as soon as I'd read it! You can't imagine the tormented state-of-mind I was in as a consequence of this accursed man's ability to taunt and humiliate me before the civilized world! If only Christian had fallen into my clutches instead of achieving his heavenly objective in the Celestial City - how I would have rejoiced! Even Milton and Goethe showed some mercy on me, much as I could have hoped for more!'

"From Paradise Lost and Faust respectively, the latter of which the Evil One confessed to a begrudging admiration, we passed to various works by Voltaire and the Philosophes, which my host found more to his liking, indeed contrived to praise more for their opposition to Rousseau, with his cult of the 'Noble Savage' and advocacy of a return to nature, than for any atheistic seeds sown by them. Not altogether surprisingly, it was of Diderot that the Devil spoke most warmly, considering that he was the most intelligent and outspoken of the Philosophes, the one most gifted in the art of undermining the Christian faith and thus of furthering, no matter how indirectly, his satanic majesty's abominable cause. However, not until we arrived at the nineteenth century, and particularly the second-half of it, did the Devil show signs of being really interested in the books that flashed before his infernal gaze. For it was now that such titles as Maldoror, Les Fleurs du Mal, Une Saison en Enfer, The Anti-Christ, Notes From Underground, Là Bas, and The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared on the wall, and it was at this juncture that he once again flashed his jagged teeth at me in order, presumably, to impress upon me the overwhelming evidence in favour of his mounting success.

"'If Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, it was left to Huysmans to proclaim the triumph of the Devil and to the twentieth century to prove it!' he at length resumed. 'And not merely through its books, Professor, but also and more unequivocally through the worst wars this planet has ever experienced, the expansion of the city and consequent desecration of nature, the tyranny of the machine, the mass-murder of millions of innocent people, the fragmentation of society and dehumanization of people, the sexual perversions of the masses, the dictatorship of money, the commercialization of the arts, the plethora of violent films, the growth of Jazz, the politics of Bolshevism ... oh, don't let me unduly torture you, Professor! I was quite forgetting that you're a mere mortal, unable to take evil in such strong doses as myself. Nevertheless, what I say is no exaggeration, as I'm sure you'll be aware. Even those who most hate me are powerless to conquer me, and neither can they entirely escape my influence. The likes of Tolstoy, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, John Cowper Powys, Hermann Hesse, et al., may have bravely battled against my growing dominion over Western civilization, but they were unable to check my advance or restore God to His former pre-eminence. Their words were no match for my acts. For the facts of modern life persisted, in spite of their efforts to fight or criticize or ignore them. Had they not spent so much of their lives in the country or provinces, they would probably have fallen under my spell to a much greater extent, and their works might have been more akin to those of my closest disciples, who almost invariably live in the biggest cities. As it was, their proximity to nature partly shielded them from the fate which befell a majority of their fellows. And so, I regret to add, did their comparatively high intelligence. But their influence on the West was negligible compared with mine, which continues to spread despite the obdurate attacks made upon it by the likes of them. If someone were to write a book like Pilgrim's Progress these days, he would be laughed at or ignored. But the fact that books regularly appear with titles like The Devil Rides Out, The Devil's Advocate, The Devil's Alternative, Satan in the Suburbs, The Satanic Verses, and Demonomania is taken for granted, and simply confirms the extent of my current power!'

"I could hardly accuse my evil host of lying about that fact! Now that the procession of books on film was drawing closer to the present, it was sufficiently evident, by the huge number of crime, thriller, gangster, horror, war, occult, sci-fi, and other such literary publications on display, that the Devil held a virtual monopoly over the printed word, a monopoly which extended, I scarcely needed to remind myself, way beyond the confines of books! However, for every book which may have had tenuous connections with God, there were at least ten times as many boasting of strong connections with His arch-enemy. The monotony of it all was beyond belief! And, as before, one found oneself wondering how much worse books could possibly become over the coming decades, whether, in fact, it would be possible for the Devil to get a stronger grip on their production than at present or whether, satisfied that things had reached a diabolical climax there, he would exclusively dedicate himself to the more overtly barbarous medium of film instead, effectively abandoning the crooked cross for the straight star. But no sooner had a novel entitled Black Mass been flashed before my weary eyes ... than the film once again changed track and plunged me into an even more depressing scene, one in which a middle-aged man was vigorously masturbating over a magazine depicting, on the glossy pages in front of him, a model's body exposed in some of the most shamelessly erotic postures imaginable! From a vaginal close-up of the illusory model, one was obliged to witness a phallic close-up of the all-too-real masturbator as he endeavoured to bring himself to an orgasmic climax. And from a revolting shot of his lewd and sickly face, one was returned to the garishly erotic photographs in the magazine, no less revolting under the circumstances!

"'I trust you're aware of what's happening here, Professor,' croaked the personification of evil, briefly turning his gratified eyes in my direction and inflicting yet another burst of jagged teeth upon me. 'The subject of sex is one which greatly interests me, particularly when it's of a kind such as this and is therefore sufficiently perverse to attest to my influence on its practitioner. Never before have there been so many wankers in the world, never before has sexual perversion attained to such a grand scale! How wonderful to behold so much wasted and maltreated sperm, so much sexual anarchy! How delightful that men should be reduced to this! And not only to this, Professor, but to so many other, and grosser, forms of sexual perversion as well!'

"The film had passed from the disgusting masturbation clip to one in which prostitutes were at work offering their swollen vaginas to a series of clients, each of whom appeared to take the frightful impersonality and sexual aridity of his copulation for granted, merely content to dispose of his semen in the nearest sexual orifice to-hand, irrespective of the lack of any positive feeling. It was evident, from the spectacle in front of me, that sex meant no more to these men than a mechanical process which had to be regularly indulged in for the sake of some promiscuous excitement. Of real sexual gratification there was not the slightest hint, no matter how hard the prostitutes worked to simulate it. The criterion of mutual love, upon which any worthwhile copulation ultimately depends, was totally absent and, as such, no number of convulsions, gasps, sighs, or groans could overcome the fundamental obstacle its absence engendered, could transform or nourish their practitioners. Here one was brought face-to-face with the cold, impersonal 'fuck', the 'fuck' which Wilhelm Reich and D.H. Lawrence had dedicated so much of their literary careers to denouncing, and it required little intelligence to see, from the washed-out and deadened appearances of its chief perpetrators, just how right they were! Deprived of its raison d'être, sex was nothing less than a sin against the spirit, for which the latter paid dearly.

"'Ah, if only I could force all men and women to indulge themselves like this,' the Devil continued, as the film persisted in highlighting scene after barren scene of mechanical copulation, 'my victory would be complete! Alas, there are still too many people who, partly under my enemies' influence and partly through good fortune, attain to something akin to the real God-given experience. But they're a dwindling number, Professor, and love is getting harder for them all the time. My influence is so ubiquitous, these days, that the word "love" has come to be ridiculed as a bourgeois affectation and maudlin indulgence unworthy of "enlightened" minds. It is "free love" which has supplanted love, Professor, whether in the decadence of extramarital infidelity or in the outright barbarism of multipartner promiscuity, and such "free love" owes nothing to love, as any God-fearing person would define it. On the contrary, it's only through freedom from love that such hate-filled promiscuity can flourish, so that my materialistic advance proceeds according to plan. Here and there an intelligent voice is raised against me, but, thanks be to evil, it's quickly smothered by the vast reality confronting it, the reality, I need scarcely remind you, of my hateful influence, which engenders either a conspiracy of silence or, more usually, one of mendacity and hypocrisy. Indeed, my propaganda machine is so powerful ... that a majority of would-be enemies lose heart and resign themselves to the status quo, as though they were deluded to suppose it was really as bad as they thought. Working through their fallen fellows, I attack their self-confidence on all fronts, pressing on until such time as it cracks and grants me an entry into their sexual integrity. And believe me, Professor, there's scarcely a man on earth who hasn't got at least a tiny crack in his self-confidence, who isn't partly in my grasp, even among my greatest opponents!'

"I felt distinctly uncomfortable at the mention of this, and pretended not to notice that the Evil One was staring at me through mocking eyes, perhaps searching my soul for one such crack that, once found, would brand my show of resistance to him as a mark of hypocrisy, if not a pretentious futility. By now, however, the film had progressed to a clip highlighting what at first sight looked like yet another species of sexual perversion, one in which, to judge by appearances, women were trying their utmost to look and think and act like men. Or were they? Dressed in trousers or jeans and doing work that had hitherto been confined to men, it was difficult to know exactly what to assume. For the scene seemed relatively innocuous and sufficiently commonplace to preclude any allegations of perversion. But the Devil had other opinions, as I now discovered, to my considerable dismay.

"'The position of women in the contemporary world is one that particularly gratifies me,' he remarked, intently staring at the film. 'For your society has become so male-dominated, since I first got a tight grip on it over a century ago, that women, poor things, have been coerced into emulating men to the extent they can, and at the expense, needless to say, of their innate femininity. From a society centred around intuition and faith, a naturalistic society which made the Virgin Mary a symbol of its essential femininity, the West changed, under pressure of its industrial and urban expansion, to one in which reason and technology prevailed, where masculinity was made the governing principle, and where it was therefore necessary for woman to adjust herself to this materialistic state-of-affairs as best she could. Contrary to superficial appearances, woman hasn't taken the law into her own hands, and thereupon declared her will to freedom, her desire for equal opportunity, democratic rights, social regard, etc., as so many simple-minded fools now suppose. Instead she has been obliged by environmental pressures, by a subtle species of behaviourism, to adopt a social position contrary to her own traditional interests, in order to serve those of man. Her much-vaunted liberty, about which so much fuss has been made on both sides of the gender divide, is essentially liberation from herself as woman, a desperate attempt at denouncing and negating her femininity in accordance with the artificial standards imposed upon her by a male-dominated society. It's nothing less than a betrayal of woman by woman, a betrayal which I initiated and encouraged with the growth of my power over the industrialized world and which, to judge by the scenes before you, has blossomed quite extensively. Given a few more years, women will be so much more like men that a majority of the younger ones will absolutely refuse to sacrifice their careers for children. In fact, they'll absolutely refuse to have any children in the first place, deeming it against their liberated interests. The birth-rate will continue to fall and the abortion rate to rise, while contraceptives, sterilization, and other deterrents to propagation will be in greater demand than ever before. Truly, I foresee a great future for myself, a future in which I shall continue to pull the wool over the eyes of countless women, who are convinced that they're best serving their own interests when most going against them! And I shall employ more men, moreover, in attacking the cruder aspects of behaviourism, so that its subtler aspects, those depending upon environmental changes rather than social conditioning, will be simultaneously undermined. Being by nature egotistical, a majority of people still refuse to accept the fact that they're being dictated to by external forces. They prefer to see their various liberation movements in terms of an ongoing cause which they've initiated, rather than as something brutally thrust upon them. But I've thrust these liberation movements upon them, Professor, and I shall continue to inflict a cruelty upon them which, in their blind optimism, they'll mistake for a self-imposed kindness. Whatever authors like J.B. Priestley may write about the importance of restoring woman to her proper place in society, and thereby establishing a balance between femininity and masculinity instead of allowing the present trend of male domination to continue, my influence on that society will persist, and no amount of counter-revolutionary preaching will do anything to eradicate it. The irony of it all is that while people like Priestley may know what needs to be done to check the growth of my influence, they're absolutely powerless to do anything, because the root cause of the problems they see - in other words, the nature of the environment which gives rise to such problems in the first place - persists in spite of them, and will doubtless continue to persist until such time as, desiring an intensification of my diabolical satisfactions, I decide to inflict a major catastrophe upon it in order to eradicate the problem once and for all! In the meantime, they'll have no option but to persevere with my dominion and continue to live in a predominantly masculine society, where woman must do what she can to approximate more closely to man. But there are some women, Professor, who, even in this day and age, are less under my influence than others, and who accordingly lead something approximating to a healthy feminine existence. I refer, in particular, to your wife.'

"A ghastly dread overcame me at the sight of you on film, Heather. For I suddenly remembered that I had allowed myself to be brought along to this room for the specific purpose of witnessing your alleged infidelity and, having forgotten all about the matter during the Devil's black and largely lying sermon, I realized that this was what I was now about to do."

I didn't have to pay Heather too much attention to see that her initial apprehension had returned, and with even greater intensity, if anything, than before. Could it be that she really was being unfaithful to me, I wondered? This was no time, however, to embark on an official inquiry. Nevertheless, her state of mind was somewhat odd ...

"So what happened?" she asked, showing visible signs of impatience.

"Well, no sooner had the film acquainted me with your presence in our bedroom than you must have heard someone knocking at the door," I responded. "For you immediately opened it to admit a man whom I was granted a brief glimpse of from behind but whom I couldn't recognize, at least not at that moment. Yet, as he bent over you to kiss you on the mouth, a vague recollection dawned on me that I had in fact seen him before, if only briefly. But where? If nothing further had happened and his head had remained perfectly still, I might have been able to figure it out. But, in the ensuing seconds, the sight of you being fondled and stripped by him gave me such an unpleasant shock ... that I could scarcely believe my eyes, let alone think. And when I saw him drag you to the bed and, having impatiently stripped off the remainder of your clothing, throw himself down upon you, I was virtually beside myself with outrage. 'Who-the-devil is this man?' I cried, breaking, in one frantic breath, the long intimidated silence that had been imposed upon me since the commencement of this singular film.

"'Don't panic, Professor,' the Devil answered, lighting himself another cigarette as though to savour the spectacle more complacently. 'Everything will be revealed to you in bad time.' And, as though these words were a cue for the enactment of his sordid revelation, the mysterious 'lover' suddenly disengaged his lips from yours and looked back over his shoulder at me with a mocking smile on his face.

"'Don't forget the £500, Professor Thomas,' he hissed in an equally mocking tone-of-voice.

"With a gasp of disbelief, I recognized the man who had earlier accosted me in the street and induced me to believe that you were being unfaithful. 'But that's impossible!' I cried, staring aghast at his lustful countenance. 'You told me ...' But before I could say anything else, a burst of sardonic laughter erupted from the vicinity of the film projector to my rear and, craning my neck around, I now beheld, to my utter astonishment, the very same man whom I had just seen on film! And it was at this point, Heather, that I screamed and woke up!'"

Once again a horrible shudder shot through me at the thought of it, of all I had experienced during the course of this harrowing nightmare. How could anyone actually dream all that? "Tell me, Heather, that n-none of it was true and that I w-was only imagining things," I stammered, in the throes of my distress.

But, contrary to my expectations, Heather simply put her arms about my neck and drew me closer to her chest, like a mother about to offer succour to her infant. "There, there!" she responded soothingly. "It was only a dream."