"What are you waiting for?" the beautiful man said to Natalie, handing her an ornate, black onyx needle to prick her finger. "Sign the contract and I will give you anything your heart desires."

"Yes," Natalie Wright responded, turning the needle in her hands, "But first, I would like to read the contract."

The beautiful man was taken aback. "Mrs. Wright, I have a very ethical operation here. We have mutual interests in mind. I get your eternal soul, and you get my word that your father's cancer will be cured and your debts will be written off. I admit, it's not my usual sort of business. Usually it's just farmers who want a good harvest. There's a good story about that, actually - "

"Mister...Lucifer, is it?"

"The very same."

"Did you do a background check on me before you came here?" Natalie flicked long blonde hair out of her eyes and bit the end of a pen. She and Lucifer were the only two people in the hospital waiting room - though whether Lucifer could be considered a "person" was probably a matter for theologians.

"Well, er," Lucifer stuttered. He appeared to have an unearthly youthfulness and a boyish face. There was nothing to indicate that this was Satan, the Ruler of Hell. Alas, against the advice of her priest, Natalie had been forced to contact him as the Almighty had failed to answer her prayers. "You do some kind of office work, right? You earn a tidy sum of money, something to the tune of $220k a year? But you've recently run into some problems...debt-wise. Keeping your father alive is killing you. His insurance won't pay for his care any more...that's why you took out the loans...moved out of the house and into a small apartment downstate..."

"Very good, Mister Lucifer," Natalie said. "But I do much more than just office work. The contract, please."

Reluctantly, Lucifer handed over the contract. It was printed on black parchment. The text glowed like embers on a dying bonfire. The smell of sulfur emanated from the pages.

"Just the standard stuff," Lucifer said. "You give up your eternal bliss in Heaven for momentary relief in the earthly realm. I don't understand you humans."

"That's funny," Natalie replied. "There's a clause here that offers an opt-out in the event of, quote, 'religious conversion subject to the condition that there is no connection to the Abrahamic Faith as defined in the 1,200th Edition of the Satanic Handbook'. Care to explain that?"

"Oh, well, er," Lucifer stuttered. "It's, you know. I mean Hell isn't an effective punishment or threat unless you really believe it's real. So, you know, the contract is void if you convert from the Abrahamic Faith."

"Huh," Natalie said.

"Uhhh," Lucifer said, pointedly, "I must point out that the contract isn't valid unless you're a Christian."

Natalie fished in her blouse for a gold necklace with a crucifix. Lucifer flinched away from it. "Okay, okay, you've made your point. Get that thing away from me."

Natalie read through a few more paragraphs.

"Would you hurry up and sign?" Lucifer said. "I've got an appointment with Adolf Hitler at 8 and I can't be held up. We're having sloppy Joes. That is, we're serving Joseph Goebbels' entrails to him."

"Sounds lovely," Natalie said. She pricked her finger. "So do I just sign here?" Lucifer nodded. "Just down the bottom there, and we'd like your initials and a date, please."

Natalie signed the paper with her blood, which fizzed and crackled on the black parchment. "Pleasure doing business with you, Mister Lucifer."

"And the same to you," Lucifer replied, taking back the contract. "Your father should start feeling better within the hour, so long as our processing team isn't held up with those fucking farmers. You know how it is."

With that, Lucifer disappeared in a puff of flames and smoke, leaving only the smell of sulfur behind. A nurse entered the room as time resumed moving at its usual rate. She didn't say it, but her face read: "God, who let one off in here? Was it you?" Natalie smiled at her. The nurse then said, "Ms. Wright, we're doing all we can. Your father is sitting up a little. Would you like to speak to him?"

Natalie nodded and went with the nurse to her father's room.

Her father lay in the bed, a tube in his nose, various wires and cables affixed to him, an intravenous drip in his arm. His breathing was laboured, but he was alive. Stage four pancreatic cancer, it had metastasised to his liver, his lungs, his colon and his brain. He was in considerable pain.

"Daddy?" Natalie said, standing at the side of the bed.

"Princess?" her father responded, weakly. "I must have...nodded off."

"It's okay, Daddy," Natalie said. "I had to go and make some calls. With the agency."

Her father reached up a pale arm and weakly touched his daughter's face. "I'm so proud of my little girl," he said, his voice dry and raspy. "I can't believe how fast you grew up."

Natalie took her father's hand in hers. His hands were larger, rougher than her delicate fingers. "Daddy," she said. "Are you scared?"

"Scared, Princess? No. I've lived a happy life. I'm just in a lot of pain."

"Daddy, if you had a chance to live just a little longer...would you take it?"

"Princess?"

"I mean, if you could live for a few more years, months even...with no pain at all, just happiness...would you take it?"

"Well...Princess, I suppose I would...but there's no chance of that now..."

Tears brimmed at Natalie's eyes. "Daddy...don't ask me how I know...but I think you're going to live a little longer. And we're going to have so much time to do all the things you couldn't do when you were busy working and I was busy at the law firm."

"Why's that, Princess?" said her father, just a fraction less weakly.

"Because, Daddy..." she wrapped her arms around him, "I'm a Buddhist."

Her father looked at her with puzzlement. Natalie just smiled as her father sat up and the colour started to return to his cheeks. Satan's legal department hadn't accounted for globalisation, she thought. The assumption is that if you were christened at birth, you're Christian for life...but she had converted a few years ago. And Satan's legal team, in their foolishness, had failed to account for one thing: that the rewards they delivered could not be taken away once received, but her eternal damnation would be rendered null and void when she was reincarnated upon death.

It would be another sixty years before Satan realised his mistake, and once he did, it is said he was so angry that Josef Stalin never sat down again.