A Demonic Presence In My Kitchen!

© 2013 David Jasmin-Green

Oswald had finished washing up, which he was glad of because it was his least favourite chore. He was drying the last few items of cutlery and putting them away in the stainless steel cutlery rack in the kitchen drawer. At least it was supposed to be stainless steel, but obviously it wasn't - it was cheap mild steel with a poorly applied chrome finish, so when his wife or daughter washed up, which happened about as often as an honest politician was born, they piled wet, soapy cutlery in the rack, causing it to rust and leaving ugly, difficult to shift orange stains. “Cheap bloody tat,” Oswald grumbled. “That's something else I've got to fork out for, I've just replaced the shampoo racks and bog roll holder in the bathroom which were the same substandard crap from the same tuppeny ha'penny shop, but the cheating bastards will never have my custom again, you can count on that!”

There was an almighty bang from behind him and a puff of rank, sulphurous smoke filled the air, and Oswald put his hands over his ears and screamed. He guessed that his fool wife had 'accidentally' put aluminium foil in the microwave covering some scrumptious snack and turned the fucker on, like she did with the last one, which went to microwave heaven a day or two after its guarantee ran out. The noise caused him to drop a spoon in the knife section of the cutlery rack, an irregularity that he detested and he would do his damnest to make somebody pay for if or when he noticed the discrepancy.

Oswald told everyone daft enough to listen that his insistence on everything being shipshape and Bristol fashion stemmed from his tour of duty in 'nam. The trouble with telling such a huge porky, he mused, was that he had never been in the Boy Scouts, never mind the US army, and he was worried sick that sooner or later someone would find out about his slight warping of the truth. The nearest he had been to 'nam was the three occasions he had visited Bangkok as a sex tourist in his early twenties before he met Mavis, visits that she was blissfully unaware of, unless you count the six weeks he spent in a branch of McDonalds in Birmingnam when he was eighteen, before the manager caught him with his hand in the till and sacked him. When he realised that the blast hadn't blown off his skin or set his clothes on fire (and when he had finished daydreaming) Oswald took his hands off his ears and turned around.

“My manifestation on the Earthly plane made you squeal like a girly, didn't it, m'bitch?” the vile creature standing in the middle of the white tiled floor said.

“Who the hell are you?” Oswald replied, looking down at the short, foul being that had apparently appeared from nowhere. “Come to think of it, what are you, and what the fuck are you doing in my kitchen?”

The creature vaguely resembled a hairless midget gnu born into an African herd poisoned by chemicals dumped in the river they relied on for drinking water that Oswald had seen on a World Wildlife fund raising TV advert, only it was standing on its hind legs. Its front legs ended in stubby three fingered hands with vicious curved claws, one of which was holding a wicked looking trident. The creature's long tail waved ominously like a cat's tail waves when it's not entirely happy, only this one was red and jointed and it was tipped with what looked suspiciously like a scorpion sting. The monstrosity was bright red and scaly and its hide was a mass of boils and open sores, the nastiest of which dripped blood and puss and a dark, foul smelling fluid onto Oswald's nice clean kitchen floor. “Look what you've done to my frigging floor, you nauseating abomination!” Oswald cried. “I only mopped the sodding thing half an hour ago!”

“I'm sorry, sir, I didn't mean to soil your sparkling floor with my noxious bodily excretions,” the nauseating something said through a mouthful of rotting, misshapen teeth, the razor sharp tusks in its crooked, slightly undershot lower jaw moving comically up and down as it spoke. “If you have some newspaper I'd be happy to drip on that. Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Pyewacket, and I'm a demon from hell, pleased to meet you.”

“Oh no!” Oswald yelled, “a demonic presence has materialised in my formerly spick and span kitchen! Mavis, get your arse in here, you hulking five hundred pound behemoth, you've got to see this. Oh, I'm Oswald Crumble, by the way.”

“Don't waste your breath, Oswald, your wife can't hear you because I've frozen time so that we can chat in private for a little while.”

“Fuck off, you must think I've floated up the cut on a bubble.”

“No, it's true, and I can prove it to you. Look out of the window.”

Oswald glanced out of the kitchen window, and sure enough a sparrow was frozen in mid flight just a few feet away from the bird table. Further down the garden Plum Pud, the family's portly ginger tomcat, was hanging in mid air a foot above the perfectly manicured lawn where he had jumped from the fence and never quite made it to the ground, and the familiar police helicopter that was always chasing the local hoodlums around the estate hovering far above was both motionless and silent. “Cor blimey, you're right!” Oswald said. “Hang about, if you're a demon from hell, what are you doing here? There are no sinners in this house that deserve to be dragged to your satanic majesty to roast for all eternity on the his sulphurous fucking barbecue.”

“Before I explain, kindly tell me something to satisfy my curiosity,” the demon said. “What do you mean by 'You must think I've floated up the cut on a bubble'? And when I sneakily read your selfish, rather hateful thoughts when you dropped that spoon in the knife drawer upon my arrival you were musing about telling a huge porky about being in the United States army. What exactly is a porky?”

“When someone says 'You must think I floated up the cut on a bubble' they're using a popular local phrase that means you must think I'm an idiot, I have no idea where it originated. The cut is local parlance for the canal, and the rest is self explanatory. And a porky is Cockney rhyming slang – pork pie, lie, get it?”

“I see,” Pyewacket said. “What's a pork pie?”

“It's a pie made of pork, and in case you don't know what pork is it's pig meat. A pork pie is a tasty snack that my fat fucking missus and my almost as fat daughter are overfond of, along with chips, cakes, endless sausage, egg, bacon and battered mushroom fry-ups, more chips and cakes, pizza, Scotch eggs, whole roast chickens, the greedy, lard-arsed bastards, chocolate, even more chips and cakes, buckets of boiled sweets and gallons of fizzy pop, Chinese takeaways, Indian takeaways, kebabs, an occasional roast Water buffalo with all the trimmings or, failing that, a nice plump postman followed by yet more chips and cakes, the thoroughly useless, morbidly obese lumps. Mavis and Floella cost me a bloody fortune and give appallingly little in return, which is why I'm in the kitchen after a hard day's work at the office cleaning up and doing the fucking cooking. Believe it or not my missus was a lithe, slim young thing when we first met, good looking too, and she went like the bloody clappers..... Such is life, mate, life's a bitch and then you die. I was joking about the Water buffalo and the postman, by the way, the huge, waddling apples of my eye have never scoffed either. Not that I know of, anyway, but I wouldn't put it past them.....”

“My grandmother was a pig, she was the loveliest demon you could hope to meet, and she never dragged anyone off to hell who didn't bloody well deserve it. That's that cleared up then, I hate misunderstanding what you humans mean, it really bugs me. Ooh, one more thing, two actually. What do you mean by 'nam', and where is Birmingnam? I've never heard of it, and I can't find it in my Demon's Multi-directional A to Z.”

“'nam is short for Vietnam where the Americans waged a war that lasted, if my memory serves me correctly, between the mid or late fifties and nineteen seventy five, and I have no idea what it was all about, so don't bother asking. Birmingnam doesn't exist, but Birmingham does, it's just a few miles away from here and there's another one in Alabama, but that Birmingham is named after the British one. Birmingham, Birmingnam, Vietnam, it's just a simple play on words.”

“Right..... Ooh, that's a nice cake, Oswald, it's almost as big as a dustbin lid and as thick as I don't know what, I don't know how I managed to miss it for so long. Did you bake and decorate it yourself? And, perchance, may I have a teensy-weensy slice?”

“Yes, I did bake and decorate it myself, no fucker else in this house would bother, and no, you bloody well can't have a slice, you unhygienic swine, not even a teensy-weensy one. Can't you read? That beautifully crafted iced chocolate and strawberry gateau is for my daughter's birthday, and I'm willing to bet she'll scoff the fucking lot as soon as she gets home from school. She probably won't bother removing the candles, in fact it'll probably disappear down her gullet before she blows the bastards out. To look on the bright side, though, at least it won't spoil her appetite..... I finished decorating the cake not half an hour ago. Magnificent, isn't it?”

“Happy Fourteenth Birthday Floella From Mum And Dad, followed by three monstrously large letter X's. What do the X's signify?”

“Are you stupid, or what?”

“No, far from it, in fact, I'm just not used to your strange, infinitely variable Earthly ways.”

“The X's signify three kisses, my missus and I are just wishing our lovely if rather large daughter a happy birthday and offering three metaphorical big sloppers.”

“Are you a fucking paedeophile?”

“No, I am not, you stinking monster! I don't mean passionate tonguey kisses, you diseased little prick, I mean chaste motherly and fatherly kisses on Floella's huge chuffy cheeks with the lips firmly closed to express maternal and paternal love towards one's bleeding offspring.”

“Hmmm..... If I can't have a slice of cake or something else yummy I'm afraid I'm going to have to deliver your morally imperfect soul to my infernal master in Hades to do with as he pleases.

Satan might roast you for all eternity in the fiery lake while he sits on the patio with a coffee and a cigar, gleefully observing your suffering; he might nail you to a spinning disc and hurl deep frozen Puffins with sharpened beaks at you while wearing a blindfold; he might slice you slowly to pieces tootsies first with a rusty bread knife and simultaneously grate your scrawny arse with a diamond encrusted cheese grater; he might hammer wedges in your thigh and shin bones, scoop out the marrow and eat it with Golden Syrup and Branston pickle, suck your brains out of your nostrils with a straw and staple a Portugese Man'o'war or maybe a really pissed off Stonefish to your testicles; he might fry you alive for ever and ever in a man sized frying pan with garlic, onion rings, button mushrooms and a dash of Jalapeno pepper and allow me to prod your sizzling tender bits with my trident. Or, if you've been really naughty, which I suspect you have, and even if you haven't I can convince Satan that you have, he might send you to a fucking Jedward concert.”

“But I haven't done anything to deserve such obnoxious treatment, you repellent tart!”

“Yes you have, you committed four insanities and crimes against the soul when you thought God wasn't looking.”

“You pinched that from a Stranglers song, you festering little shit.”

“Oh no I didn't.”

“Oh yes you did!”

“What is this, a frigging pantomime? I know you like dressing up as widow Twankey in your spare time, Oswald, but I'm not standing for that sort of behaviour now..... Look, if I can't have a slice of birthday cake can I have a few Jaffa cakes from that box at the back of the kitchen unit, the one hidden under the tea cosy?”

“No, you bloody well can't.”

“How about some chocolate digestives from your secret stash in the cleaning products cupboard under the sink and a nice cup of tea to dunk them in?”

“No flipping way!”

“You're as tight as a duck's arse, Oswald.”

“No, I am not.”

“Gimme one of your Fox's Glacier Mints, then.”

“No, there are only a few left, and I need them for when I sneak down the garden for a crafty smoke. Mavis doesn't like me smoking, you see, the super fit extreme sports calender model and marathon runner reckons it's unhealthy, so I pretended to give up ages ago, and the fresh minty aroma masks the smell of cigarettes on my breath when rumpy-pumpy time arrives.”

“Look, Oswald, you either give me something tasty or I'm taking you to hell, no kidding.”

“Shan't. I can't afford to give you anything to eat, you diseased, ready to squeeze pimple. Mavis and Floella are eating me out of house and home, and I'd have to fight for scraps in the dog's bowl if we had a dog. We did have one once, a German shepherd called Bill, but Mavis downloaded a Korean recipe for crispy fried dog stuffed with smaller crispy fried dogs and she and Floella dog-napped a dozen Yorkshire terriers and Poodles and gave it a try..... Anyway, I'm not frightened of burning in hell for all eternity, it can't be any worse than the shit I have to put up with here, so bring it on, baby, I'm ready to fry.”

“If you're not frightened of burning in hell for all eternity maybe I'll take your beloved wife!”

“Fucking take her, mate, you'd be doing the world and me in particular a ginormous favour.”

“If you're not frightened of burning in hell for all eternity and you actually want me to escort your dear wife to Old Horny's subterranean chamber of never-ending torment, which I think you seriously do, maybe I should consider taking your chuffy cheeked daughter.”

“Hoo-fucking-ray! I'll tell you what, why don't you take the pair of the fat fuckers?”

“Yeah, all right then, it's a deal,” Pyewacket said. “I never said that casually sacrificing your wife and daughter would save your pathetic hide though, Oswald - I'll be back for you at a later date, you venomous, snivelling toad,” and the demon vanished in a puff of smoke.

Stupid, thoughtless Oswald ran into the living room. The Jeremy Kyle Show was blaring away on TV, and there was a sizeable depression in the sofa where Mavis had been sitting and a half empty plate of sausage rolls and chocolate wrappers. “Oh fuck, the slimy little bastard wasn't kidding,” he muttered.