You wander in dismal corridors. To be true, you have lost your way. But you know by intuition that you just came a bit further down in the dark depths of the abyss.

Nothing that could scare you. Yet...
Absence inhabits this place and spreads its presence up to the grating of the doors you push open.

Here is an other corridor. One more. However, this one seems to lead to a wider opening. And your walk finishes under a rectangular cloister peristyle. Thin columns of stone ending in arches, decorated with vine leaves, softly slice up the space. Low openings induce you to penetrate the intimacy of monk cells. At the middle of the courtyard, a well sits, invaded by dry ivy.

The heat in this place takes your breath away. And a dreadful apprehension comes over you as you see a little reptile like being walking towards you.

" We've been expecting you", he says. Then : " The Master will see you now. Please follow me. "

Eager to know more you follow in his footsteps. Suddenly you spot his wader legs coming up out of his long pointed shoes.

The Big Mass is being prepared. In the room where the servant brought you, you can now watch a strange crowd bustling about. Meticulously, with an unmatchable precision in contrast with the apparent clumsiness of the movements, some creatures with shells, eagle beaks, bat ears and scaly lizard fingers arrange the items of a ritual that you will certainly witness.

On the floor, some candles design a satanic pentacle. On the walls, small wooden paintings relate the devil's way of glory ; whereas Jesus of Nazareth is brought to the worst of agony and humiliation, a greenish being with growing pustules and scabby extremities puts on the attributes of kingship and the powers that the first one gave up in his lifetime.

Suddenly the metallic roar of a door that is pushed open too violently freezes the little devils with terror. Thus they run and scatter.

A tonsured priest arrives silently at the altar. He is soon followed by a procession of women with black shawls and hairy arms. Some are frenzied and shaking with disturbing shivers ; others have this kind of wolfish beauty.

Holding a bible upside down, the priest recites quite a strange Latin. Then it is oblation time. A consecrated host is passed on among the attendance; everyone appends his share of sacrilege.

Sabbatical frenzy begins to spread among the witches who roll on the floor and bleed their breasts with their hard nails ; others rub their intimacy then grasp the host and soil it at the very same place.

What is all that mad commotion for ? And where is this "master" who invited you to watch that with him ?

But you soon understand : they are actually summoning this so-called Master...
Well really ? If the smallest appointment with Lucifer needs such a fuss, this chap must really be a lonely man !

And that's right, blame the invocation! It is an excuse for any abomination. Tongues mingle together, secretions abound ; and as a liturgy the priest shakes his nature and sprays the attendance.

You do not take account of these horrors anymore and that witch who is caressing her toad belly in a lecherous way and is rattling so high is no longer on the menu of what could make you spew.

Why not after all ?! If it works... A wrong thing may just as well serve an evil thing.

And that is what actually happens. In the fire rising from the profaned altar Mephistopheles appears putting on a mocking smile at the sight of the appalling show ending in front of him.

And he immediately goes towards you. In a friendly way he takes you by the arm off that dirty orgy.

" See how pathetic they are, he confesses. That silly profanation cost them a relentless as much as pointless effort whereas a simple finger snap is enough to call me. But they are such an enjoyment. I have so few opportunities to laugh down here ! "

" Their touching devotion starts me on the same roars of laughter that filled the absurd silence 1967 years ago as I was mocking the "King of the Jews" agonising on his pole.

As only God requests, in order to show himself, that one tears his own beard off and strikes big blows on his own chest with a heavy flint stone until he bleeds. "

While discoursing with irony upon the "Venerable", raising his hand with excitement at times and letting it fall with a graceful backhand, the devil takes you through corridors fitted with torches to a huge library. The range of incomparable works you find here fills you with wonder. And between the rows of books, there are some closed retables made of precious wood.

Suddenly a gloomy bellow strikes you with terror. Above your shoulder you smell a repellent camel breath.

A camel ! Here! In hell !

" Let me introduce you to my dear friend Amédé. You look shocked... But remember that it is a maxim formerly pronounced by the Son that sent him down here. "

Indeed you recall the metaphor. Yes, it is an evidence without appeal : if a camel can not even pass through the eye of a needle, how could he be elsewhere but in hell ?

You salute the camel who goes back to his seat beside a lectern and turns the pages of an illumination with his tongue.

You are rather intrigued by the closed retables. There is on one of them a fantasist illustration of Valachia.

" This one is my favorite. Made by one of Master Pavol's pupils... "

He helps you open the two side panels. It is horrifying ! Four paintings, worked with a glaring realism for sordid details, show the gruesome crimes of Vlad IV, prince of wild cruelty, the Carpates impaler.

That is enough ! What could have given such a licence to that psychopath ? How could he torture as such in broad daylight, without fearing any reprisals ?

Because he acted in the name of God and had free hand in order to push back the Ottoman invader. This way guilty conscience was evaded, all the more so for a person hardly inclined to conscience examination.

And so were the Crusades. The butcher Richard the Lion Heart could give free expression to his murderous madness...

" They say that Vlad IV made a pact with me or with Lucifer, the emperor. But would have it been really necessary ? He had support from the Most High. "

No, men do not need other backing for their actions than the ones they have made up. Suffering of the flesh is not the Devil's prerogative.

But then, in which refinements is it to be found ? Where are the devil's claws in our comfortable lives as sated westerners ? In such-and-such crapulous crime ? In the murderous fantasy of some serial killer ? In the manipulation of innocent minds ?
Maybe...
However psychology has in many respects mastered the demons of the past by identifying the source of the harm. For it is neither within some spells nor in possession that its roots can be found.
The recipe for evil is rather cooked up in everybody's psychological pot.

Stocked in the seclusion of the human brain the ingredients though, in limited number, can combine in infinite ways, balance or roar like a storm, so much so that in the end the refinements and subtleties of mind diseases are unlimited. And we just need conscience to add the last element to this mixture to get a chain reaction that would make the potion boil over. Psychosis, schizophrenia and paranoia are the new explanation for evil. The Devil has now little to do with it. Man is self-reliant regarding this matter; it is a shame but it is true ; and insanity comes from himself only.

But science leaves us without an answer to the fiery consistence of evil. By disenchanting the world it has laid all the responsibility for evil on men.

But according to your host, there is something quite different going on :

" In reality I haunt human spirit in a very different way from what anyone could imagine.

" Look at your fellowmen ! Nihilism has defeated all surge of heart. Not as a new ideology, mind you, but nearly as the fatal issue of prosperity.

" Inert in the sleeping water of his swamp, like the impenetrable shell saurian, insensitive, inaccessible to greatness and escape, he spares his movements to the strict necessity of his daily hunger.

" Voracious but thrifty, this is really the 'esprit bourgeois' that rules today. Worried only about his food, impervious to compassion and greatness, he is sort of crouching here with no other expectations... But try to approach him, to dislodge him from his sleep, then he will swoop down on you with all his predatory rage.
That is what I make of men."

Happy and proud of himself, Mephistopheles looks at you, obviously expecting your agreement on this wonderful masterpiece. He wants to share an expert opinion...

And indeed you have to admit that the trick is a complete success. The Devil's reign on earth takes all the appearances of roundness and banality.

What is that Hell all about ?! For every single step you make, it is the same appalling statement that it is only a metaphor of the world. Always the same tiddly-om-pom-pom, the same old tunes... You pat on the cat's head. You make a gluttony pal of him. And you let the world die around you...
Never mind !

What the hell is the demon hiding under his big red cape ? Slippers ? That is really Hell !