Sunday, the seventh day, the Sabbath day, is sheer hell when you're evil. So to speak. So little happens. Sunday is a day when any excitement you expect to have, you have to make for yourself. This particular Sunday, I sought little more than to spend the afternoon in quiet relaxation, wallowing in my own filth and decadence for a few hours. I had with me the day's New York Times and a root beer.

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Winston. My business is evil. Evil, and graphic design.

Few people appreciate the heartache and inconvenience the evil are subjected to in our society. Where are the evil supposed to go to kick back and relax amongst their fellows? Where can the evil go to meet other unwholesomely-minded individuals? Here, the forces of darkness had found a place to call their own, in a cobbled square downtown known as the Ped Mall. Here we reigned supreme. As it was a beautiful day, and the Ped Mall is amply furnished with benches, I shouldered my way through the clouds of pot smoke emanating from the punks around the Mall's edges, and settled down somewhere inviting to carry out my deprivations. I pulled out the Times and read, every now and again spying on my fellows covertly over the top of the page. Evil is many things, but above all it's entertaining.

Suddenly I was jolted out of my reverie. 'Have you heard the word of god today, mister?' The fools. They never stop trying. Poor little girl; I haven't the heart to be rude to her, after all she knows not what she does.

'Why yes, thank you for asking, I have! Good girl; run along now, there are sinners in need out there somewhere.' Poor little dupe; I return to my paper. Funny, though; I thought kerchiefs went out of style with the banjo.

'Timmy, don't talk to that man,' scolds a sagging matron in far too much makeup. Her wayward child, I half-see with my eyes still fixed on the newspaper, was wandering into my satanic aura of corruption. 'He's evil.'

'How can you tell, Mommy?'

'He's wearing a trenchcoat.' Amazing, isn't it, how deaf some people seem to think you are if you aren't actually staring at them?

'I happen to like trenchcoats, ma'am,' I say without looking.

'In July?'

'I've got a cold.' My flippancy is lost, as the pair of them have wandered off. I continue reading, when...

'Excuse me, mister, would you like to save your soul?' Another girl, I think, or was it the same one? They all look alike, the godly. Like they're all poured from the same mold. It betrays such a lack of character. That's when it finally registers: the kerchief. Worn with a plain, neat dress in the final days of the Twentieth Century, that could mean only one thing: Mennonites! My blood runs cold; I know they always travel in packs. Steady on, old man, I think. They can smell fear.

'No thanks, my soul is just fine where it is.' Obviously the time had come to take countermeasures. Today's front page news is not sufficently horrifying to drive them off. Fortunately, I'm always prepared for just such an occasion. I pull from my backpack the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom and make sure to keep the cover in plain sight in front of my face as I pick up where I left off. It gets a bit tedious in places, I must confess. One can only read about coprophilia so many times before it starts to get a bit samey...I can barely restrain a chuckle, thinking how they must be scattering from me in horror. Don't play games with evil, kids. We've got the big guns, metaphorically speaking. And literally speaking, if I ever get that giant deathbot working.

'Mister, would you like to know about Christ's love?' My eyebrow arches in surprise. The Marquis has never failed me before. I flourish the book a few times, in case she hasn't seen, but to no effect. Is it the same one again? I don't think so; this one's carrying a basket. I could never tell them apart. Despite their antipathy for modern science, I would sometimes swear they had to come from a cloning vat.

'Err, no thanks. That's okay.' My natural wit was somewhat spoilt by incipient panic. Clearly I'd underestimated my foes; the situation called for more severe measures. I had to call on a greater evil. Putting the Marquis aside, I drew from my backpack S.T.Joshi's marvellous tome, H.P.Lovecraft: A Life. Now, little ones, recoil in fear. Scarcely had I gotten past the death of Lovecraft's grandfather Whipple Van Buren Phillips in 1904 when I was set upon again, seemingly from nowhere.

'Would you like a Gospel, mister?'

'Eep!' I rise unsteadily to my feet; my lack of god, two of them this time! I have to make a strategic withdrawal, and regroup. 'Got two at home,' I mutter, darting between them and making for the safety of the evil coffee shop across the square. Only then did I realise the true measure of my peril; I look around me, expecting to see the comforting figures of punks, goths, Marxists, and media terrorists...

The square is swarming with white-kerchiefed blue shapes and their brethren in Sunday suits. This is no mere incursion; we are invaded. I make for the coffee shop, my last hope, like a man possessed. Mennonites close in all around me.

'Would you like a Gospel, mister?'

'I already ate,' I bellow, throwing myself through the door with the last of my strength. I collapse against it on the far side, safe at last. My fellow Ped Rats seem to have had the same idea I did; the room is filled with shellshocked pierced faces. I am the last; for our fellows left outside, there is no longer any hope. Proselytization awaits them all.

'What's that noise?' someone asks.

'Sounds like the screams of the damned.'

'Quickly, start chanting backwards in Latin; if that doesn't stop them nothing will.' Fortunately we all knew a good selection of backwards Latin drinking songs; this is a college town, after all.

'Tedra muem muluc mulucidir tse non
Xadnem sinammi silibed
Maitnediner aleac
Ero ni
Angam tnus ainmo
Acoffus!'

My last sight is of the front wall shattering under the blows of hundreds of tiny fists, clutching pamphlets, and the zombie-like eyes of their owners transfixing us as they climbed through the rubble.

'Hey, mister, you forgot your pamphlet!'

I awoke in darkness, the scent of dairy oppressing my lactose-intolerant nostrils. I staggered to my knees. A sudden rectangle of light blinded me; my captors, observing my return to consciousness, had come to me. What further indignities did they have in store?

'Name, rank, and serial number, that's all you pigdogs will get from me,' I growled as they took me by the shoulders. I was led out, blinking, into a featureless corridor and propelled onwards.

'You are a sinner and a heathen, and it is time for you to answer for the state of your soul before the Lord thy God!'

With that we emerged into a cavernous chamber, lit by sputtering flourescents. Great vats bubbled and heaved before us, embedded in a web of pipes. Noxious smoke billowed around strange machines poised to thrust their spouts and rotors into the vats in unnecessarily Freudian ways. At the centre of it all stood a silver throne a hundred feet high; I had to avert my eyes from the glowing figure seated majestically atop it. Somewhere trumpets blew a fanfare.

A tinny voice echoed down to me. 'I'm sorry,' I said, 'could you repeat that? I didn't quite catch it.' Mrph wrghle mrghle. 'Sorry, still not getting it. Perhaps if you weren't a hundred feet over my head?' I saw from the corner of my averted eye the glowing figure, grumbling, rise and begin its descent. The majesty of its slow, graceful levitation through midair was somewhat spoilt by the line it was quite clearly hanging from. After bumping against the throne several times to the sound of muffled swearing, the line gave way and it plunged the remaining few feet to the ground.

'So, um, God, what's up?' Think you could have done any better? It's very awkward, opening a conversation with a deity you don't personally believe in. What exactly was I supposed to say? Hey bro, way to smite them infidels? I settled for 'Nice place you've got here. It's very...cheesy.' For indeed God Almighty appeared to have based himself in a cheese factory. The scent was unmistakable. The scent, and the massive 'Kalona Cheese Factory' sign covering the far wall.

'Have you tried finding space at this time of year? It's absolute murder. I'm lucky I got this. I've been redecorating, you know, giving it a supreme being's touch; what do you think?' God pointed off to one side, where the chamber did indeed show signs of sprucing-up. A throw rug, an Ikea occasional table, some potted palms, and a shiny new Clone-o-Matic 2000 greeted my eye. Ah, the Clone-o-Matic; I still remember that debacle with the genetically perfect warrior race I tried to grow for Easter.

'How ironic. They really are cloned. Now, God--if I may call you God?' God nodded agreeably. 'God, that's certainly a fine-looking rope you were suspended from,' I gestured vaguely towards the dangling deus ex machina whose frayed end still fluttered a few feet overhead.

'Don't get sarcastic with me. I'm God, goddamit. What was I supposed to do, use a ladder?'

'You could've levitated down from your celestial throne in mystic splendor.'

'Are you kidding?' God snorted. 'That throne's thirty meters high. I'd break my divine neck.' My eyebrow arched in incomprehension; the Lord Jehovah staged a preemptive verbal strike before I could quip again. 'You think I can go around defying gravity to impress ephemeral fleshlings like you? I'm omniscient, dammit. I wouldn't have created the Law of Universal Gravitation without a good reason, and if I don't respect my own laws, who will?'

'Technically,' I raised a pedantic finger, recalling my brief flirtation with physics in college, 'the Law of Universal Gravitation is just an approximation to Einstein's equations of General Relativity...But let's not pick nits. What about the unearthly glow surrounding you?'

'I rubbed my body with squashed fireflies.'

'Err.'

'It gets very dull in Heaven sometimes.'

'Right. All part of your ineffable cosmic plan, no doubt, as must be your army of cloned Mennonite proselytizers, though I must confess I cannot quite fathom how they fit in.'

'Wouldn't you like to know.' God folded his arms smugly, a self-satisfied look on his pinched face.

'Yes.'

'Oh, very well. I have outfitted my forces with the most sophisticated Biblical tracts known to modern theology. Nothing can stop my faithful minions now,' God laughed diabolically. 'They will not rest until everyone in this city has been given,' he paused dramatically, 'a pamphlet!'

'A pamphlet. So then what?'

'Today the city, tomorrow the world!'

'Well, God, you've presented us with an interesting metaphysical conundrum which I think bears examining here. You, being Jehovah,' God nodded, 'demand of your followers faith, in yourself, your love, power, wisdom and promise of salvation for your flock, yes?'

'Yes,' God droned, humouring me.

'Then haven't you rather shot yourself in the foot by walking amongst men like this? Your followers will no longer have faith in you, not when they can simply look over and confirm empirically that you're there.'

God's face, such as I could make out through that incessant glow which was starting to give me a headache, fell. His brow crinkled in thought for a moment. 'Curse you and your infernal "logic",' he hissed when it had all filtered through, recoiling in disgust. His baleful look turned shifty, and, looking around to make sure all eyes were properly averted in reverence, he pulled out his wallet and counted through the tattered bills inside. 'I'll give you twenty dollars not to tell them about any of this,' nodding at his oblivious henchmen.

'Twenty?' I shot him a look of disdain.

'All right, all right, here's...twenty-three dollars, some chewing gum and some Viagra.'

'Sold,' I declaimed.

I was halfway home before I noticed the dollars were Canadian.

Now that's evil.

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©2000 Luke Gutzwiller. I really mean it. Violation may result in the unwanted collapse of your state vector. This is a work of fiction, and as such any resemblance to real deities, living or dead, is purely coincidental.