By Gail Fulkerson
His name was Frank. He’d chosen the name for himself after hearing it uttered during a conversation between two beings in Hell, about someone named Anne Frank. The Devil desperately desired to possess Anne’s soul.
Frank was assigned to watch the Frank sisters, Anne and Margo, as they suffered in the Nazi Concentration Camp in Bergen-Belsen. But as Anne was dying, Angelic Realms surrounded her and snatched up her soul. Frank watched over the sisters as his dad had decreed. Once they were dead, he thought, his job was done. Boy, was he wrong.
He’d been given exact instructions to procure Anne’s soul, but the day she died, Frank had been distracted watching the hanging of an old Jewish businessman and arrived too late to reap her soul. Thinking nothing of it (after all, girls die all the time) Frank shrugged and carried on with the rest of his daemonic day.
Later that night, when Frank was tucked into his bed and snoring like a banshee, he had an unscheduled visitor. Frank awoke in time to see the Devil materialize at the foot of his bed. He rose up from the floor as a black, swirling mist, then solidified into a terrifying form. His stature was impressive; his horns scraped the ceiling; his cloven hooves stamped the floor. He breathed clouds of fiery Sulphur into the bedroom. Frank wiped the sand from his eyes and sleepily greeted his father.
“Hey, Dad, what brings you here? I haven’t seen you in eons. How have you been keeping?” he asked.
The Devil greeted his boy, enveloped him in a warm, fatherly embrace, whispered in his ear how much he loved him, then bit off Frank’s arm. Frank screamed as the blood spurted, ran onto the bed and floor, and spattered the walls. In his heightened emotional state, Frank imagined he saw his severed arm slide down the Devil’s throat.
“The next time I tell you to reap a soul for me, don’t dawdle. Anne Frank’s soul was going to be the final ruby in my horns. I had plans to parade her around Hell, introduce her to Hitler, Goering, and all the rest of those pathetic little Nazi pukes, then observe her reactions. Then, after a time spent horrifying the goodness out of her, I was going to unleash her upon the peoples of Earth. But none of that matters now because you had to watch an old man get hanged.” The Devil was so incensed he started to sweat blood and his skin smoldered and burst into flames.
“I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t think it was that important to get her soul. I figured that once you reap one girl’s soul, you’ve reaped them all. I had no idea that Anne Frank’s soul was so valuable to you,” Frank said.
“That’s the problem with you, Frank. You don’t think. If I had gotten Anne Frank’s soul, I could have signed up for split hoof tap-dancing lessons, visited death row inmates to make sure they were still causing chaos and riots in the prisons, encouraged women to kill their husbands, create tsunamis, and make super volcanoes erupt. Instead, I have to keep dispatching daemons by the fricken’ boatload until Hell is nearly empty. I used to be able to sneak a daemon or two onto the boat on the River Styx, but the Watchers caught wind of my stunt and shut me down,” the Devil spat. His blood pressure was rising to dangerous levels.
Frank was beside himself. He’d seen what his father could do to someone who disobeyed him, and it wasn’t pretty. He watched his dad move toward him in slow and measured steps. Frank began to whimper, but the Devil ignored his son’s gibbering fear; his bulging red eyes were focused on his prey, a one-armed daemon named Frank.
In a voice dripping with evil, the Devil told his terrified son not to worry, that what he had planned for him would be over in a flash. Backing up against his bedroom wall,Frank realized there was nothing he could do to stop his dad from doing him in. He wished fervently that he could be anyone other than Frank, the one-armed daemon.
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