"No, you cannot wish for three more wishes. No, you cannot wish for an infinite number of wishes. And no, I cannot give you the power to grant wishes."

Dear human, Akuma the demon has been trapped in a lamp for nearly 1,000 years. Now he's going to tell you HIS side of the story.

Written by: Jonathan Cohen

Narrated by: Trevor Schechter

A Faustian Nonsense production.

To read the full transcript of this episode, go to https://thelavendertavern.captivate.fm/episode/the-demons-tale

Transcript

The Demon’s Tale

No, you cannot wish for three more wishes.

No, you cannot wish for an infinite number of wishes.

No, I cannot give you the power to grant wishes.

And no, I cannot turn you or anyone else into one who can grant wishes.

Have you decided on your three wishes, then? No? You are struck silent? Then I shall speak instead.

Perhaps you wish for wealth – all the gold, silver, gems in the world. 

Or perhaps you wish for the land of a sultan, or the property held by your rival, or even the house where you were born. 

Or you wish for fame, and success, and popularity – for your name to be on the lips of the masses.

Or perhaps – and this I cannot grant – you wish for the particular love of a man or a woman who spurns you, or one who does not know you…or one who loves you, but not enough. 

Or perhaps you would wish for adventure…relief from pain…good health…friendship…or a world at peace. All of these wishes I have heard many, many times over the centuries.

But still you say nothing? Then let me tell you something. There is one wish that no human has made in the nine hundred and ninety-six years I have been trapped within this container. I shall make you a bargain. If you can guess what that wish is, then I will give you all of the wishes you could ever desire.

You would like a hint. A clue. Very well…I shall give you several, and I will not take away any of your three wishes for doing so. Am I generous? Perhaps. You see, since the last time I was released from this prison, seventy-four years have passed, and I do so long to speak to someone. Even if it is yet another human.

My name is Akuma, and I am a demon.

I cannot tell you how hard it was for me to say that at first. Now, I can say it without shame, but there is still a hesitation on my lips and in my heart, for habit dies slowly. At the start, though, being a demon brought me much shame.

At the start…we demons all start as angels. Fallen angels. There is an original sin inherent in our creation, and so we are damned without mercy from the very beginning. Or so they tell us, and so we believed.

I was one of seven demons. Their names are not important. My name was not important to me until much later.

We lived as a family, in an abandoned building down below. Here I speak of constructs that your mind may accept – ‘building’ and ‘down below’. Do not confuse ‘down below’ with your primitive visions of Hell or damnation. I have heard tell of how humans believe we live among flames and sulfur and rocks. None of this is true. Ours was a world of infinite dimensions, spaces without measure.

And yet we suffered. For we were damned.

We were a family, but we were not a family. How could you care for someone who was deemed evil? How could you care for yourself if you thought yourself evil?

No, we lived in shame, and although our building had rooms without number, we allowed them to decay into squalor. We lived in the shadows and corners, and did not want to be seen. We gathered as a group, but not as brothers or sisters.

And you hated us! Oh, how you hated us. From down below we could feel your hatred like an oppressive mass. Whenever you lost a relative to war, or fell ill, or stubbed a toe, you would curse us…as if we had started the war, carried disease to your lips, or tripped you as you walked.

We were rulers of our realm, and yet we lived as slaves. I was the least of our seven, the last-born and therefore the most wicked. Or so I was told. And so I believed. Perhaps I was hated most by the other six because I had most recently touched the heavens. I do not know.

The others left me to fend for myself, and I watched them from my own shadows, until one day I was sent to find food (for even demons must eat), and I found a visitor to our world.

A visitor! Such a thing was unheard of. The visitor was draped in clothes of fine brocade, and their skin was luminescent as pearls. I bowed down in front of them, but when they spoke it was not the booming lustrous voice of one from above.

No, the visitor’s voice was male, and scratchy and grating, as mine is to you. A fellow demon! But what demon could this be, one so well-dressed with a straight back and, dare I say it, smiling? What demon smiles? 

For one moment I wondered if he had somehow not fallen, not been cast out of the heavens. But such a thing was so beyond the realm of possibility that I dismissed it at once.

“I am Cythraul,” the shining demon said.

“I am Akuma,” I said in a hesitant voice, since I spoke little in those days and not well.

His smile grew greater, if such a thing were possible. “I have been looking for one like you,” he said, and spread his arms wide. I shrank back, but his illuminated finery had banished all nearby shadows.

“You are mistaken,” I said at last. “There is nothing special about me. I am only myself.”

At that, his smile faltered somewhat. “I want to invite you on a grand adventure,” he said, waving his hands in an approximation of said adventure.

“I am a demon,” I replied. “I cannot leave this place.” And then I dared to ask, “How can you leave? How can you smile?”

His smile returned at full force, and it was a beacon in the midst of the space where we stood. “If I told you the secret of how I am able to leave – how I am able to travel, and dress in finery, and smile…would you join me?”

I shook my head, and turned from the dazzling brightness of his clothes, his smile, his eyes. “I have been charged with procuring food for my family.”

From the corner of my eye I saw him lower his arms. “I would bid you come with me, Akuma the demon,” Cythraul said, “but I cannot compel you unless you accept of your own volition.”

He disappeared at that point, transubstantiated from the world I inhabited to some other place filled with light, I had no doubt. “Tell me!” I called after him. “Tell me the secret of your smile!”

But he said nothing, and presently he was gone, and the shadows had returned. And I was hungry and had to find food for the others.

They beat me for being late with their meal, and I sat under a table in the far end of our smallest room and watched them eat and gobble their food, until they left a few scraps for me which I, too, gobbled.

The days moved on from shadow to shadow, and yet…and yet, I saw our world somehow differently. I saw the tapestries fallen into dust and insect-eaten ruin. I saw the bent necks and drooping shoulders of my kin, and knew I too was stooped, as if to ward off a blow. I saw all this, and I cursed Cythraul for the light he had shone into my eyes that gave me this sight. But of course, I was the one who was cursed: myself, and all of the demons that inhabited this plane.

And then, one day, I could no longer bear it any further. It was as if a pressure that had been building up in my mind suddenly burst like a dam: I had to leave. I had to escape – from my family, from the demons, from the shadows.

A part of me said, but there is nothing else! I knew this not to be true, for there were the heavens, where I could never set foot again. And there was the realm of the humans, which touched ours at several points above. I might not be able to leave our demon land, but I could leave the beatings behind. 

And so I did.

I expected to be struck down by lightning when I left the family’s quarters. There was nothing but silence. A silence that grew as I began to wander our world, and then dissipated once I found the spots where your world meets ours.

They are numerous, these spots – like the skin of the elderly that has become paper thin and allows us to see the flesh and bones underneath. I should have known this: we could hear the thoughts of the humans condemning us, hating us. But I had to discover this for myself.

There is a story among the demons that the humans have seven weaknesses; it was a matter of some amusement that our family had seven demons, though there was no relation. As I moved from spot to spot, and observed the humans through the thin gauze that separated our worlds, I saw these weaknesses.

I witnessed a woman who coveted her neighbor’s husband, and begged him to leave his wife and run away with her. When he refused to, she took a jewelled dagger and slit his wife’s throat in the night as she lay next to him. And when he yet refused her, and called her a murderer, she cried out as if she had been the one whose throat had been slit…all this while being led to the gallows.

I witnessed a man who had an enormous kitchen built for him to cook within. He spent his days and nights planning his meals, and pots stewed with sweetmeats and oils and all manner of soups. The ovens burned with fires lashing cakes and pastries and breads. And his family sat mute and dead and skeletal at the dining table in the other room, for he had plotted and salivated and coo