Seven Demons Aidan Truhen (reading an ebook TXT) 📖

serious way, well, you may as well get your chicken out and fuck it right there on the Junkerngasse.

Eiger stops clapping and looks at us like he’s fixing this moment in his head forever.

He says: “Ja.”

Or he tries to.

But he can’t because a wide, fat metal blade has just gone into the space between two of the vertebrae in his neck and severed his spine.

Eiger folds downward, taking the oyster knife with him. Behind him in the silence Evil Hansel looks pale and tiny.

Doc says:

“Price, you total fuck.”

I say:

“The Demons have a new client Doc.”

The sound of the first gunshot is really loud.

—

In a very real sense Hans Eiger was killed in 1976 by a guy called Joe Johnston. His boss came and asked him to design the thing that ultimately did the job and gave him four weeks and he sweated blood and got it done and finally it just dropped in my lap and I sent it where it was meant to go. That is one way of looking at it.

The other is that once upon a time there was a little kid whose grandfather was secretly an evil wizard. The little kid was totally in love with his grandfather and he wanted to be an evil wizard too when he grew up. He spent his young life copying his grandfather in every way he possibly could and developing his evil wizard powers so that one day he would be able to just become that old guy. Completely become him.

But a bunch of things happened along the way as things will do. The first thing that happened was that the kid became enamored of a sort of a romantic idea in a movie that he saw and when he compared that movie with the real world he came to certain conclusions about who was cool and who was not and Nazis very specifically were not. Furthermore the old man taught him to be Swiss, and while Switzerland is a long way from perfect and the banking community didn’t one hundred percent or indeed really even fifty percent cover itself in glory in the twentieth century, in terms of right now this moment today there is very little that is less Swiss than a Nazi. Among many other flaws and failings such as being Nazis generally, Nazis are exactly the kinds of people who will fuck a chicken in public. And that is what Hans Eiger did when he started a gun fight in the capital of his own country for financial reasons. And when I called Evil Hansel a Nazi, the little psycho experienced what I guess is an epiphany or whatever that is one of those things kids go through.

Love turned to hate all at once and no one—no one—hates like a nine-year-old betrayed.

No one.

The second thing that happened was that Joe Johnstone and Ole Kirk Christiansen got together, at least spiritually. Joe was the designer on a popular movie you may have heard of named Star Wars and Ole was the guy who invented Lego, and in these great modern days it is possible to make a 1:1 model of the Millennium Falcon out of tiny plastic bricks. The schematic was created by a team of Danish enthusiasts who inevitably know Mr. Friday, and the model requires a total of thirteen million seven hundred and eighty-nine thousand eight hundred and twenty-one Lego pieces and costs a little over three million Swiss francs because there’s no bulk discount although delivery on orders over seventy-five francs is free so there’s that. There is a great deal of debate in the giant construction nerd community (which is global and very large) about the precise Pantone for the seat covers but by and large the end product is thought to be acceptable and the kid whom we have hereto known as Evil Hansel asked his grandfather for one and Hans Eiger said: Are you out of your tiny homicidal mind, and junior said no I am not this is a thing that I must do to become a man, and senior said work on your knife throwing and then we shall see, and then Hans Eiger went away and told all his man friends of this hilarious request and Evil Hansel was shamed.

People I tell you do not shame the pre-tween assassin you have made it is a bad plan because then when it turns out you fucked a chicken in a public place…Why then su Hansel mi Hansel, if you get my drift.

So a little while back I went to the arcade and we blew up the Death Star together I said to Evil Hansel given all that I had made him cry by calling him a Nazi and given his grandfather was right now up to his ballsack in French Nazis and that must be causing some nine-year-old cognitive dissonance and from that trap there is really only one way out: how about he would kill his grandfather in the back of the head with an oyster knife and he said:

“I cannot give you what you want.”

And I said that is fine because I do not want you to give it to me, I wish to pay for it or if you find that mercenary you will give it to me as a present and I will give you a present of equal scale just name your present.

And when I said present like that I saw it in his eyes.

So Evil Hansel named his price and I did not laugh because I am not a motherfucking snob I am a professional I said yes I will get you one of those and we will call that a down payment and then I will also put much money into an offshore account and all that shit. Evil Hansel said why? And I said because one day kid you’re gonna be doing my job that is fucking inevitable and I would very much like for that day to be a happy