Creature of the Night - Part One

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With apologies to the late Laura Brannigan

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For the night

is my world.

‍ ‍City nights,

painted swirl……

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And I,

I am a creature of the night.

I live, I live,

‍ among the creatures of the night.

But hey! Like all you Clubbers, Ravers, Dudes (and Dudettes) down there, who hit the scene at night, I’ve got a regular job too.

Me? What do I do? Well, I work in the Fourth Circle of Hell. That’s Greed if you’re not familiar. Yep, Fourth Circle is where you’ll usually find me, though sometimes we get moved between Five and Two, that’s Lust, Gluttony and Wrath. Our Boss, you know, the ‘Big Man’, likes to ensure we’re skilled in tormenting all types of souls: he believes it keeps us motivated. As managers go, he’s pretty fair.

So long as you obey the rules.

Now, I know you’re experiencing some scepticism right now, because you don’t believe that Hell and its Nine Circles exist, do you? You think that they’re just an invention of that poor lovelorn sap, Dante and his Inferno.

And no, by ‘Dante’s Inferno’ I don’t mean the ‘Immersive Action-Adventure Game’ that comes up first on Wikipedia when you Google it. (Frankly, I’m disappointed some of you are that uncultured - I was hoping for a more highbrow audience here). If you keep scrolling down, you’ll see it’s actually a mega poem about Dante and Virgil taking a lads’ road trip to us in the Underworld, some 700 years ago, to write a best seller about folks like me who put sinners through unimaginable and exquisite trials. Oh, and there’s a cold-hearted chick called Beatrice who won’t put out, and some sort of moral in it – can’t remember what though.

But I digress. Yes, you thought it was all one big literary fiction cum video game, did you? Well, you’re wrong, it’s real. I’m living proof. And if you still don’t believe me, all I can say is you’d better watch out because every now and then ‘He’ lets us out to do a bit of ‘harvesting’.

What do I mean by that? Well, naturally we get souls delivered to us all the time: great blubbery oligarchs who died eating one too many sour cream and caviar blinis, or some sinewy tin-pot dictator from a-country-you-have-never-heard-of who believed them when they said the glass was bullet proof.

And, don’t get me wrong, they’re decent specimens. But they’ve been processed. You see, by the time they’ve shuffled to the front of the queue at the Pearly Gates and then been told their name’s not on the list, they’re full of preservatives and a little bit stale to boot.

Fresh is best, we all know that, don’t we? And that there’s nothing better than going out onto the land for a bit of ‘pick your own’. I bet you’ve all been blackberrying or gone to some farm with a basket for some nice strawberries and raspberries. Taken along the kiddies and your Nan. Then you all said how much better it tastes than the stuff you get from the supermarkets.

Well, it’s the same for us. Nothing beats a fresh soul or two.

Best of all, just as you can travel between farm and field to forage, we can go back and forth through the ages. We’re not stuck on this linear treadmill of time like you – and jeez; you ought to see what the future is looking like for you guys………

The challenge, though, is finding the right, and for me, the greediest candidate or two, to take home and, as you probably know from your own picking, the most luscious fruits are often the hardest to reach. That’s the real test. Bring back indifferent quality and you don’t get released as much. And me? Yes, I’m good. Really good.

So, being who we are and having, as I mentioned before, a reasonably liberal boss, we can pretty much do what we like, with one condition:

don’t get involved.

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