Trying to remember which items he had just put on the floor, Nisroc began to pick up objects from the floor and place them on the shelves and end tables. When it seemed like there was too much stuff on the shelves, he would move a few items back to the floor. He realized, however, that he was subconsciously aiming for a more-or-less even distribution of items, which was a sort of order. What he wanted was complete chaos, but his angelic sense of order insisted on asserting itself, despite his worst intentions. Nisroc cursed to himself. Enough of this nonsense, he thought. Time to get to the main event.

He regarded Christine’s breakfast nook, which consisted of a small table and two chairs resting on low-nap tan carpet. Nisroc shook his head. Who puts carpet in a breakfast nook? He told himself he’d be doing the owner a favor by ruining the carpet. Probably even improving the resale value, not that anybody was buying condos in Glendale these days.

Right, ruining the carpet. How does one go about ruining carpet? A can of spray paint would come in handy, but Nisroc hadn’t thought to bring any. He meticulously ransacked the kitchen, looking for something capable of causing permanent damage to the carpet. In the fridge, behind a block of cheddar cheese and a Tupperware container of something blue and fuzzy, he found a ketchup bottle. Bingo.

He carried the ketchup bottle to the breakfast nook and popped open the lid. Time to do some serious damage, he thought. But there was only about half a bottle of ketchup, and he wanted to make it count. He didn’t want to just make random blotches of ketchup. It should be something meaningful, something offensive. Something that would make the owner really want to get rid of the carpet. A satanic symbol, he though. Yes, that’s it.

Unfortunately, Nisroc didn’t know any satanic symbols. That is, he knew the official logo that Lucifer’s marketing people had come up with – a vertical ellipse with horns protruding from it, encircled by a horizontal ellipse – but that logo never really took off and was rarely used any more because people tended to confuse it with the Toyota emblem.

As a result, demons working on earth who wanted to leave a Satanic calling card were left with the symbols that had been devised by humans, such as goat heads, hexagrams and the evil eye. As a new transfer, however, Nisroc hadn’t yet attended Lucifer’s seminar on Branding for the New Millennium, and was thus starting from scratch.

He had heard that an upside down cross was sometimes used, so he started with that, carefully drawing perpendicular ketchup lines on the carpet. He was rather satisfied with the result until he realized that he had drawn it upside down from the perspective of someone in the kitchen – when viewed from the front door, it was a normally oriented cross. Nisroc cursed again. He didn’t have much ketchup left. Now what?