[AUTHOR'S NOTE: This story is not based on facts--any resemblence to actual persons or events is fucking unlikely.]

There was an evil quality to that day. The sky was leaden and troubled--like bad sour cream floating over dirty water. The air was still. There was no rustling of leaves or swaying of trees--no sounds of animals about their right and natural industry. There was only an uneasy silence--a sepulchral stillness completely devoid of peace. It was the repose that precedes the lion's strike.

There was a monster in the park that morning. Casual inspection would not have revealed the monster's nature--it lacked the talons and fangs by which evil is frequently discerned. The monster's name was Kerr--Ivan Kerr. He was a meek, bespectacled man, balding and spare. His tongue played lizard-like over thin lips and his eyes darted nervously. He rubbed his bony hands together unconsciously. His shoulders were stooped in an attitude of perpetual defeat. He was not terribly imposing as monsters go--people tended to overlook him completely, like a solitary shoe lying in the gutter, soiled and useless. Those who knew him best would have laughed aloud at the notion that he could be dangerous to anyone. But he was a monster nonetheless.

Ivan Kerr was a killer of children. Seventeen times he had snuffed out young lives--throttled the life out of them with those bony hands that women found so repulsive. There was no pleasure in it for him, nor in the foul uses to which he put their small, limp, and rapidly cooling bodies once he had silenced their screams forever and extinguished the light of terror in their eyes. His dark deeds were untainted by hunger or rage or impulse of any degree or description. He killed because it was his nature--he was compelled to seek out and slaughter his victims like the apple is compelled earthward by its very nature and relationship to the Earth. And like the apple he was utterly free of guilt or remorse.

Little Alice Springer was in the park that gloomy morning in search of wildflowers for her mother's table. Mother had been so sad since Father had gone to be with the angels--she rarely left the house anymore, and her red-rimmed eyes had taken on a tragic, sunken cast above her perpetually tear-stained cheeks. To little Alice--effervescent as she was with the resilience and optimism of youth--a bunch of wildflowers was just the talisman that she needed to drive away the darkness that had settled over her mother's heart like a shroud of nettles.

Little Alice Springer didn't see the monster until she was nearly upon him. "Oh! You startled me," she said.

The monster smiled a wan little smile. "Forgive me. I didn't mean to frighten you. What's your name darling?"

"Alice. But my friends call me Ali. Except Barb Dolittle--she calls me squirt."

"And what do you have there Ali?"

"Flowers...for my mommy. See..." She held the flowers--all fragrant and dewy- -out for the monster's inspection.

The monster reached for the flowers, but instead of taking them he closed his bony hand upon her small wrist and pulled her to him like a praying mantis seizing a butterfly.

"Ow! You're hurting me! Stop...!"

Her cries were silenced abruptly as his other hand closed about her throat. He lifted her easily--she was such a tiny little thing--and squeezed. He squeezed so hard that he felt the bone part and heard the snap as her neck broke. The monster lowered the little girl to the ground. She twitched and her heels drummed upon the earth, but he knew from her eyes--already vacant as a freshly dug grave--and from the unlikely angle at which her head lay, that she was already dead.

He felt nothing--neither joy nor sorrow. It had been easy. It was always so easy. It was without emotion--with eyes nearly as dead as hers--that the monster began to hike up her dress and remove her pink cotton panties. She still clutched the wildflowers in her tiny hand.

Imagine, if you can, the monster's surprise when he felt her small hand close on his wrist like a band of iron. His heart leapt within his breast--he felt almost alive. He tried to pry her hand from his wrist. He had seen too much of death to let its echo unnerve him, for he believed it to be no more than the prelude to rigor mortis.

Imagine the monster's surprise when her other hand released the flowers and clamped upon his other wrist. Her head lolled obscenely to one side as she raised herself to face him. Her eyes--so recently empty--were filled with a baleful fire of malice and fury.

The monster knew fear then. He tasted a morsel of the terror that he had inflicted upon his prey as he struggled to free himself. Her mouth opened and from it issued a mirthless laugh that fairly dripped venom.

"Going somewhere Ivan? Aren't you going to do me like you did the others? I thought you wanted me."

"Let go! What the Hell are you?"

"Funny you should mention Hell," the little girl said with a chuckle. "I am the Devil, and I have come for you at last."

The monster's eyes opened wide with terror and he swallowed convulsively. "That's impossible!"

"Oh, it's possible all right. I've been watching you for some time now. You're one evil, black-hearted little bastard, even by my standards. You've had your fun Ivan, and now I'm going to drag your worthless ass back to Hell and do you like you did those children. Even a sick little shit like you can't begin to imagine how you are going to suffer." To illustrate his point, the Devil broke both Ivan's wrists and then squeezed so that Ivan was forced to his knees in agony.

For a brief instant Ivan thought he was going to faint, but the mercy of oblivion eluded him. The Devil put his hand under Ivan's chin and raised it until they were eye- to-eye. Still smiling his little-girl smile, the Devil gouged out Ivan's left eye and popped it into his mouth. The Devil took the eyeball between his front teeth and chomped down so that the aqueous humor squirted into Ivan's face.

"My eye! My fucking eye!"

"Don't worry Ivan. Whatever I do to you today will have healed by tomorrow morning...so I can do it all over again. I promise you an eternity of suffering. It will take you forever to die." The Devil drove his little-girl fingers into Ivan's empty eye socket and deep into his skull. He ripped out a handful of bloody brains and slapped Ivan across the face with it.

Ivan moaned and then whimpered. "Why are you doing this?" he asked. "If you're really the Devil then you should be happy about what I've done."

"Happy? Do I look fucking happy?" Before Ivan could answer, the Devil ripped off his genitals and stuffed them into his mouth, which was open wide and screaming. "Let me tell you something asshole," the Devil began. "The reason that I'm not in Heaven right now is because God and I couldn't agree about what to do with people like you! He wanted to forgive you. I wanted to punish you for your crimes--to repay your malice in kind. We couldn't agree, so God sent me away. It was Man's evil that caused my fall from Grace, not the other way around, and if it weren't for people like you then my disagreement with God would be purely academic and I would be in Heaven right now. I hate you more than He ever could. You make me sick, and I'm going to make you suffer for it until it makes me feel better!" The Devil's voice had risen in volume as he spoke so that the final words were like the roaring of a great furnace. He reached into the hole in Ivan's body where his genitals used to be and drew out a loop of intestines which he used like a leash to drag the monster to Hell.

The bodies were found by an early morning jogger--the girl's with her neck broken and the man's slumped over hers in an apparent heart attack. The city was ambivalent--their relief that the monster was finally dead was tempered by sorrow for the death of another innocent and anger that the monster had apparently escaped justice. His neighbours expressed surprise when a search of Ivan's rooms revealed several gruesome trophies of the crimes he had fathered. They said that he had been a quiet man--a loner--and not at all the type of man you would expect to be a monster.